Almut Zieher, PhD

Almut Zieher, Ph.D. is an Associate Research Scientist at the Education Collaboratory at Yale within the Yale Child Study Center. She started researching at Yale in 2019 first as a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Consultation Center at Yale and then at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. Dr. Zieher received her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology, her M.A. in Special Education, and her B.A. in Elementary Education from the University of New Mexico.

Dr. Zieher’s experiences as a general and special education teacher lead her to study how teachers learn and engage in social and emotional behaviors to increase teacher well-being and pedagogical effectiveness. She uses social, emotional, and mindfulness theories and approaches to inform training and measure development. Previously she deployed a mindfulness training using the skills from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy with pre-service teachers. Currently, her work focuses on teacher measures, including developing the Social and Emotional Learning Observational Checklist (SELOC, IES R305A210262) to support elementary school teacher’s social and emotional teaching, a teacher self-report measure of emotion-focused SEL implementation, and the Objective Awareness and Mindfulness Measure (OAMM), an objective teacher self-report measure funded by a Mind and Life PEACE grant. She is creating these measures to better understand and improve social and emotional school programming, including programming for teachers, by better understanding how and which program components are beneficial to whom.