Dale Ripley

Dale Ripley

Dr. Ripley is currently teaching in the departments of elementary and secondary education at the University of Alberta and has over 35 years of teaching experience at the elementary, junior high/middle school, high school, college, and university levels. Additionally, he has served as a principal at the elementary and secondary levels, as superintendent of a small rural school district, and subsequently as superintendent of a large urban school district.

While Dr. Ripley has worked in schools located in high-performing areas, his first love has always been working in schools where many of the students are considered at risk. Dr. Ripley therefore chose to spend most of his teaching career working in inner-city or so-called high-needs schools. In 2009, Dr. Ripley was asked to establish a high school on a First Nations reserve, where he then taught for six years, taking high school graduation rates to an unprecedented level of 91 percent and seeing many of his students go on to attain postsecondary degrees.

In 2018, Dr. Ripley wrote a book entitled The Successful Teacher’s Survival Kit: 83 Simple Things That Successful Teachers Do to Thrive in the Classroom. He wrote this book in response to the myriad questions that his preservice teacher-education students posed in regard to how to deal with the day-to-day practical issues faced by teachers.

In 2021, Dr. Ripley published his next book, The Tactical Teacher: Proven Strategies to Positively Influence Student Learning and Classroom Behavior. This book describes the many strategies that Dr. Ripley used so successfully over decades of teaching challenging students.

Dr. Ripley received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Alberta and later returned to attain his PhD in curriculum design and educational leadership.