Jessica Lander teaches history and civics to recent immigrant students in an urban Massachusetts public high school and has won several teaching awards, including being named a Top 50 Finalist for the Global Teacher Prize in 2021, a 2023 MA Teacher of the Year Finalist, and the 2023 Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year. Previously she has taught students in middle school, high school, and university in the U.S., Thailand, and Cambodia.

She is the author of Making Americans, a comprehensive look at immigrant education as told through key historical moments and court decisions, current experiments to improve immigrant education, and profiles of immigrant youth and schools across the country (Beacon Press, 2022). She is a coauthor of Powerful Partnerships: A Teacher’s Guide to Engaging Families for Student Success (Scholastic, 2017) and author of Driving Backwards (TidePool Press, 2014).

Jessica writes frequently about education policy and teaching. Her work has been published in print and online including in The Boston Globe, Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Ed Magazine and Usable Knowledge blog, Education Week, Educational Leadership Magazine, The Boston Globe Magazine, The Washington Post’s Answer Sheet Blog, The National Council for the Social Studies, The 74, and Huffington Post.