Heather Staker

Heather Staker, one of the world’s foremost experts on K-12 blended learning, is the founder and president of Ready to Blend, a research initiative focused on helping educators and families use blended learning to improve the achievement and well-being of K-12 children. Staker is an adjunct researcher for the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, a nonprofit think tank that promotes disruptive innovation in education and health care. In 2014, Heather published "Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools", a groundbreaking book that will serve as a field guide and eye-opener for the builders and influencers of the next generation of K-12 learning environments.

Named by Scholastic as one of the Five People to Watch in Education in 2012, Staker is well known for her work defining blended learning and naming the four most common models of blended learning in practice across America. In 2012, she co-authored Classifying K-12 blended learning, which identifies the main models of blended learning and explains how they differ. Her 2013 paper, Is K-12 blended learning disruptive?, makes provocative predictions about the future of America’s classrooms. Staker is also the co-founder of Brain Chase, a 5-week online-learning adventure disguised as a worldwide treasure hunt for students in grades 1-8 during summer break.

Staker appears regularly throughout the country on radio and television as a keynote speaker, legislative expert, and conference panelist who educates the masses on blended learning, competency-based learning, and student-centered design. Her favorite assignment is training education leaders on how to develop high-impact technology investments centered on high-quality blended learning.

Prior to the Christensen Institute, Staker worked as a strategy consultant for McKinsey & Company, served as a member of the California State Board of Education during Governor Pete Wilson’s administration, taught U.S. history as a teaching fellow at Harvard University, started a co-op preschool, and marketed Oil of Olay for Proctor & Gamble. She holds a BA in government from Harvard University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.