2020

In the face of uncertainty and the COVID-19 pandemic, Penn GSE is at the forefront of transitioning the community to online learning and teaching. Ongoing online resources are made available to the public, including two funded resources on mental health and leadership to best equip schools and K–12 educators and leaders, benefitting more than 14 million students and 100,000 educators nationally.

Dean Grossman also cares deeply about the community inside the School. Fostering a supportive and inclusive culture at Penn GSE has been a cornerstone of her tenure.

“After 2020, post-George Floyd protests, she really put effort into rebuilding community and addressing issues of racial justice, and she put resources into that,” said Associate Professor Amalia Daché. “She led us in making affinity groups across the GSE. And that takes vision.”

“She did a lot of community-building work,” said Deputy Dean, Professor, and Board of Advisors Chair of Education Matt Hartley. “She brought us together, had conversations about what was important to us, who do we want to be as a community? What difference do we want to make in the world? And I think that’s been one of Pam’s most important contributions to the School—engaging the whole community, faculty, staff, and students, in these conversations around purpose.”

One way she professionalized this work was by creating roles to manage it.

“Under Dean Grossman’s leadership, there were two new and important positions that were introduced to Penn GSE: the [assistant dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion] and the chief people officer,” said Miriam Harris, financial administrator and member of the Committee on Race, Equity, and Inclusion. “Prior to Dean Grossman, there was no dedicated HR executive to address the needs of the staff. Now, Penn GSE has staff career development and training devoted to [building this culture]. . . and improved collegial relationships.”

“Pam’s lasting impact will be the positive work culture she has helped create and sustain,” said Emma Grigore, LPS’16, ML’20, Penn GSE’s inaugural chief people officer. “Her commitment to peoplecentric policies and procedures has paved the way for continued growth and engagement at the School.”

Dean Grossman instituted regular staff meetings, and many faculty members noted that she transformed how they met, collaborated, and connected.

“The way she structured the faculty meetings, the faculty retreats, different committees—she’s really tried to make community and connection central,” said Associate Professor Sharon Wolf, C’06. “It has really shifted the atmosphere. I definitely enjoy faculty meetings more because I just think they’re more productive, less contentious than they used to be.”

“I think Pam really puts us in positions to work together to try to work across groups, to try to work across disciplines and to work together as a larger faculty,” said Watts. “That's not easy.”

She also sought to create community among students, many of whom are at Penn GSE for a short time or may feel siloed in their programs. She supported the creation of—and later co-taught—a new course for first-year doctoral students because she noticed a lack of a shared cohort experience.

“For a lot of us, our departmental PhD cohort is one to two people each year, so meeting other first-year [doctoral students] from across GSE was critical to finding community here,” said Elizabeth Dunens, GR’23. “With the pandemic beginning the following semester [after I had the class], having this core group of friend-colleagues was a big part of getting through this very challenging time for me, as I had just moved to Philly. This community wouldn't have existed without this course.”

Certainly, when Dean Grossman decided to lead Penn GSE, she could not have foreseen the global pandemic that would shut down in-person instruction for over a year. She, along with her senior leadership team, had to make decisions and communicate clearly in the face of overwhelming uncertainty and fear. Many students and faculty said that she was a model of leadership in that precarious time.

“I have gotten to observe and learn from Dean Grossman’s leadership of GSE during the pandemic,” said Dunens, who studies higher education leadership, governance, and decision-making. “COVID-19 was the kind of crisis that no one had a playbook for, with very limited and rapidly changing information, especially in spring 2020. Although leaders often were in a holding pattern with decisions . . . it meant a lot to hear regularly from the dean, and with messaging that was clear a lot of care went into.”

Penn GSE found hotel rooms for students who couldn’t go home—either because borders had closed or for personal reasons—and paid for them. The School offered pass-fail options that first spring and let students know about Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund grants for those with exceptional financial need. At every turn, communication was prioritized.

“As a student, adjunct, and partner of GSE over Pam's tenure, I saw Pam's leadership impact GSE’s responsiveness to community need in a humanistic approach that centered people first before attending to the underlying issue,” said Farrell. “I saw this on a large scale during dramatic shifts in response to COVID and the approach to handling one-off situations. Her teacher-at-heart mentality was always present in her leadership.”

Her teacher-at-heart mentality was always present in her leadership.

—Michael Farrell chief learning officer the school district of philadelphia

Not only did Dean Grossman have to figure out a way to keep her students, staff, and faculty safe while still delivering the promised excellent education and inclusive community, but as the leader of a top graduate school of education, educators were looking to her for guidance on how to transition to online learning. Penn GSE made ongoing online resources available to the public—including two on mental health and leadership—which benefitted more than 14 million students and 100,000 educators nationally.

Her compassionate response to a public health crisis is just one way that Dean Grossman’s people-centered approach has benefited the Penn GSE community. Colleagues repeatedly described her as a listener who leads by consensus, a connector who brings people together, a high achiever with lofty expectations for everyone (including herself), and a teacher above all else.

Doris Juarez, GED’23, a first-generation student with dreams of becoming a college president, was surprised by the time that Dean Grossman dedicated to discussing the School’s higher education program with her when she was considering Penn GSE’s offer of admission. So, she was doubly surprised when she arrived on campus and was personally greeted by the dean with a hug and a request to take a selfie. Since then, the dean has introduced Juarez to alumni who are higher education leaders and helped her network to help make her dream a reality.

“I’m just very grateful that, even though she’s not my professor and I've never taken a class with her, she’s been putting my name into different situations that allow for my professional development,” said Juarez. “It’s also really cool to have someone that says, ‘OK, I see your vision right here … and I’m going to try to help.’”

Timeline includes photography from the following sources: Joe Mac Creative, Jay Gorodetzer, Penn GSE Communications, Lora Reehling Photography, Ryan Collerd, Brooke Slezak Photography, Krista Patton Photography, Eric Sucar for University Communications, Steve Belkowitz

Tamir Harper met Dean Grossman when he was a high school student at nearby Science Leadership Academy and told her his dream was to earn a PhD from Penn GSE. She offered him words of encouragement that continue to fuel him to this day. Since then, Harper earned his BA from American University, kept in touch with the dean, and returned to his hometown to join the Urban Teaching Apprenticeship Program at Penn GSE, where he is working towards his master’s while teaching at Henry C. Lea School.

“Why do I do this work? Why do I come to school every day? Why do I put my best self forward in front of my [classroom] every day?” Harper said. “Because Dean Grossman took time out of her day to say that one day I can become a Penn graduate, and she believed in me. So, my students deserve that same respect, opportunity, and encouragement that she gave me as a young student.”

She sees the faculty and staff of Penn GSE as whole people, not just as their job descriptions, and she encourages them to have rich lives and families outside of Penn and to bring their authentic selves to their work.

“I speak Spanish, so sometimes my emails will be kind of in Spanish and English,” said Daché. “And I know she’ll respond in Spanish . . . It’s nice because it allows me to bring my culture and my language into a professional context, and I know that Pam appreciates that and supports that.”

“She is so supportive of family life,” said Wolf. “She always talks about how she had children in graduate school and how she navigated that and encourages students to build their personal lives alongside their professional lives—and that’s not the advice everybody gets in academia.”

Numerous professors mentioned the lasagnas and baked goods that showed up on their doorsteps handmade by their boss after they had a child or experienced another significant life event. (And those baked goods are excellent. “She’s a really good baker,” confided Professor Sigal Ben-Porath. “She has the most amazing cardamom cake recipe.”)

All that Dean Grossman has managed to achieve for and with Penn GSE during her tenure—the growth and the partnerships and the funds raised and the new building—has all been in service of its people. And it is those people and that community that she said she is going to miss the most.

“I think Pam’s legacy is going to be that she really brought us together as an academic community and that she really was able to achieve that ‘One GSE’ vision,” said Hartley. “It’s manifested physically in the building, but I think, more importantly, it’s manifested in how we all work together now, the ways that we talk about problems as an academic community, and the ways that we try and move forward—not always agreeing, but at least being committed to a process where everyone can weigh in and everyone can speak their mind.”

“The fact that she led us through some really challenging years while also managing to expand and develop GSE in a number of ways is very impressive to me,” said Dunens. “To do that kind of crisis management while also making progress on longer-term strategic goals for a school is really remarkable.”

As the dean looks to the future, which will be filled with time with family, work on her next book, and a research project in Thailand, she is proud of her contributions to the School and excited for its outlook.

The former English teacher often themed her School-wide communications around a favorite poem, and the one that comes to mind as she thinks about her hopes for Penn GSE going forward is Marge Piercy’s “To Be of Use.” “I hope [Penn GSE] continues to build the future of education, where we continue to be the thought leaders, but also the do-ers,” she said. “One thing I really love about Penn GSE is that people are passionate about their work. As Marge Piercy [writes]: I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest, and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters, but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out That’s Penn GSE.”

And that’s also Dean Pam Grossman. ■

“Dean Grossman has been invested in thinking carefully about issues of culture, community, and climate at GSE. I believe that that will continue to be important for the School and its next dean as they build upon Grossman's efforts”

John L. Jackson Jr. Dean, Annenberg School of Communications Incoming University Provost

“Pam really helped to nurture the environment where I was able to discover my life's work.”

Wendy McCulley, WG’91, GED’16 Alumni Leadership Board Member

“Pam is a giant in her field. She's not only a dean of a graduate school of education, she's also, hands down, one of the leading scholars of teacher education in not just the United States but the world. … It's probably not an accident that her research has informed her leadership. We are all people who are preparing and supporting educators, and she is leading us in figuring out how we are going to do that work. And she knows a lot about it because it is actually the center of her research.”

Associate Professor Sarah Schneider Kavanagh

“Working with Pam has been one of the most enriching experiences of my career, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have had her as a mentor and thought partner. Her leadership and vision have transformed the culture at GSE, and she has created a workplace where staff feel valued, heard, and respected. Her emphasis on valuing people and their experiences has inspired me, and I have incorporated this approach into my work.”

Emma Grigore, LPS’16, ML’20

First Chief People Officer of Penn GSE