Staff Profiles
Dr Elizabeth Kleinhenz
Senior Research Fellow
BA Melbourne, BEd Melbourne, MEdStudies Monash, EdD Monash
Dr Elizabeth Kleinhenz is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research in the Teaching Learning and Leadership research program.
Dr Kleinhenz, with Dr Lawrence Ingvarson, provided reports, papers and consultancy to various education stakeholders– including Teaching Australia, the Victorian Institute of Teaching, the Catholic Education Commission of Victoria, and the New South Wales Institute of Teachers– in the areas of teaching standards, pre-service teacher education, teacher professional development and teacher evaluation.
Dr Kleinhenz has also managed a number of evaluation projects, including two major reports on teacher workload for the New Zealand Ministry of Education, an evaluation of the Getting it Right literacy and numeracy initiative in Western Australia, and of the Victorian Middle Years Reform and Access to Excellence programs.
Prior to joining ACER in 2001, Dr Kleinhenz worked for many years as a teacher, administrator, and regional curriculum consultant in the Victorian state education system.
From 1992 to 1996 Dr Kleinhenz worked as assistant principal in charge of curriculum and teacher professional development at the Victorian School of Languages (VSL), a statewide institution that provides out of school hours languages instruction to more than 10,000 students in over 40 languages from Year 1 to VCE. In this position Dr Kleinhenz developed comprehensive programs and processes for the professional development and performance of over 600 casual and 40 permanent languages teaching staff, including teachers involved in delivering languages in the Distance Education mode.
She also initiated and led several projects to develop LOTE curriculum and language-specific courses for the many languages taught at the school. These included major projects to develop new languages distance education courses that are still in use today. These courses broke new ground in the use of electronic and Computer Assisted Learning for languages.
As a regional curriculum consultant from 1996-1999, Dr Kleinhenz managed the Southern Regional Information Network for LOTE, a network that brought together teachers, administrators, policy makers and LOTE educators from many settings. In this capacity she represented the Southern Region of the Department of Education on the Statewide LOTE policy committee, the major policy decision making body for LOTE education in Victoria.