KaiLonnie Dunsmore

Director of Partner Development

Dr. KaiLonnie Dunsmore serves to build and lead partnerships with school systems that involve multi-faceted areas of support to improve student achievement. She leads the state-funded Literacy Leader Network (LLN) in Michigan to improve K-3 achievement in schools statewide that involves systematic professional learning to principals and building and district leadership teams; alignment of MTSS and coaching support services and internal processes to build and monitor shared agreements related to effective teaching and learning. In Illinois, she oversees the design and implementation of school reform projects in high-poverty, low-performing systems to ensure coherent and aligned support for our CEC partners. 

KaiLonnie brings expertise in both literacy and leadership practices and has significant experience nationally working with public school systems to improve early literacy through an asset based approach that builds system coherence and capacity.  Her current literacy improvement work is based upon a $4.6 million federal Innovative Approach to Literacy grant she conducted when a fellow at the National Council of Teachers of English and a Principal Research Scientist at NORC at the University of Chicago.  This work is designed to help buildings and districts, in collaboration with regional agencies and communities, build shared agreements about instruction and assessment tied to a strong curriculum framework and observation rubrics; build coherence and alignment between multiple initiatives; and build principal’s expertise to serve as instructional leaders and effectively support the work of building and district coaching and continuous improvement processes.   

While KaiLonnie has served in several roles (foundation director, university professor and researcher, non-profit educational consultant), as well as worked with schools nationally and engaged in large-scale research, her passion remains the teaching and learning of elementary students. She recently spent three years in the classroom of her local school as a primary grade teacher and uses her lived experience as a teacher as a foundation for the coaching and consulting work she does with schools and districts to improve early literacy through attention to system capacity.