Pamela Spycher partners with state and local education agencies and institutions of higher education to prioritize culturally and linguistically sustaining education and develop equity-focused educational policies. Her goal is for every child and youth to experience affirming, inclusive, engaging, intellectually rich, creative, and joyful teaching and learning.
For the past decade, Spycher has collaborated with the California Department of Education (CDE) to create, disseminate, and implement key policies, guidance documents, and resources. She was a lead author of CDE’s ELD Standards (2012), ELA/ELD Framework (2015), and Practitioners’ Guide for Educating English Learners With Disabilities (2019), and she led the development of the CDE publication Improving Education for Multilingual and English Learner Students: Research to Practice (2020).
Spycher leads applied research projects, including the current U.S. Department of Education–funded Preparing Middle School Teachers to Address the Needs of English Learners Through the Expository Reading and Writing Curriculum With English Language Development (2021–2025). Her research has been published widely through national webinars, practitioner publications, and peer-reviewed journals.