Misty Sato

Mistilina Sato is Professor of Education in the School of Teacher Education at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. She researches educational policy, teacher recruitment and training, leadership and performance assessment. She was part of a team who won the US National Staff Development Council's Best Research Award for a three-year project on the impacts of teacher certification. She has published on the educational policies and systems in China.

Academic career

Sato began her career as a middle-school science teacher. She holds a Bachelor's degree in geological sciences from Princeton University, and in 2002 completed a PhD in education at Stanford University with a thesis titled Practical leadership, supervised by J. Myron Atkin. Sato joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota, where she was the inaugural Carmen Starkson Campbell Chair for Innovation in Teacher Development. In 2018 she moved to the University of Canterbury, where she was promoted to full professor in 2022.

Sato's research covers teacher education, evaluation and performance assessment of teachers, educational leadership, and policies that affect teachers and education.

Sato's book Empowered educators in China was published by Jossey-Bass in 2017, as part of a series on high-performing education systems around the world. The book describes the education policies and systems in China, with a focus on the particularly successful educational system in Shanghai.

Awards While at the University of Minnesota, Sato received the National Staff Development Council's 2009 Best Research Award alongside her collaborators Linda Darling-Hammond and Ruth Chung Wei. Their three-year research project showed that the process of certification can improve teachers' use of student learning assessments.

Selected works