Kyle is a mixed methods researcher. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he studied organizational psychology with eminent professor Ellen Langer, the first woman ever to be tenured in the psychology department at Harvard. While working with Dr. Langer, Kyle conducted research into the effect of propinquity on dyadic relationships. (In other words, he studied whether absence truly made the heart grow fonder or whether closeness did.)
As a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education, Kyle has added qualitative research to his methodology. This has enabled him to leverage a mixed methodology (both quantitative and qualitative research) to study the effects of frequent task-switching on technological devices on the learning and recall of high school students. His dissertation on this topic is forthcoming.
Kyle is an avid fan of practitioner research, pioneered by Susan Lytle at the Penn Graduate School of Education. Kyle is currently collaborating with Susan Lytle, her husband James Lytle, Michael Johanek, and fellow alumni and current students on a book that details the application of practitioner research to leadership. Practitioner research is the notion that one can — and should be — a researcher within one's own area of practice. Kyle has transformed his staff at The Hill School into practitioner researchers. The team leveraged a quantitative instrument to collect feedback on their performance as a department, and they then utilized that feedback to improve their own operations. This work receive national notoriety for improving the customer service of the department, which Kyle detailed in a webinar delivered to The Association of Boarding Schools (TABS) as part of their TABS 3D professional development series. You can read about and listen to the webinar here.
Kyle believes strongly in the continous application of an inquiry stance to drive educational improvement through practitioners researching their own institutions leveraging both quantitative and qualitative methods.
