Leigh McLean is an Assistant Research Professor Center for Research in Educational and Social Policy and is PI of the Teachers’ Emotions, Characteristics, and Health (TECH) Lab. Dr. McLean investigates how teachers’ emotions and emotion-related experiences including well-being impact their effectiveness. She is particularly interested in how teachers’ emotions impact their instructional practices, and the role that early-career teachers’ emotions play as they transition into the career. She holds expertise in quantitative, mixed-methods, and longitudinal study design and implementation, multileveled data analysis, and classroom observation.

She is currently leading two federally funded projects: one from the Institute of Education Science exploring how elementary teachers’ feelings and beliefs impact their effectiveness in the content areas they teach, and one from the National Science Foundation exploring how the mentored teaching experience impacts elementary mathematics teachers’ effectiveness during the early career stage.