As a nation, we are deeply concerned about the declining NAEP scores—a troubling indicator that calls for attention. But beyond the numbers lies a deeper conversation about what education should truly offer.
In our pursuit of solutions, we must ask: what defines high-quality education for all? Too often, the response is to double down on skill drills and test prep, while students with the most resources experience learning that is rich in creativity, curiosity, and joy. This widening divide only furthers the opportunity gap. In a society striving to thrive—economically, socially, democratically, culturally, and environmentally—our focus must be on education that inspires, empowers, and uplifts every learner.
This issue of Marsal Educator is the first of three on the theme of learning for meaning, learning for joy, and learning for life.
This year, Marsal Education will lead the university’s theme year of “High-quality Education for All” as part of the Look to Michigan campaign. Through this campaign, the university is communicating Marsal’s unique ability to take on society’s biggest challenges through education and to work toward solutions that will make the world a better place.
Among our many contributions is the expertise we bring to the research and practice of literacy teaching and learning. Literacy is one of the most important skills people learn. This aspect of education has garnered significant attention in the media, through the
tracking and reporting of test scores, and in policy (such as third grade retention laws). In this issue of our magazine, we bring you inside our teacher education program and show you how our students learn to apply the full science of reading in their classrooms. As the central focus of my own research, I am passionate about the rich and often underestimated interplay between theory and practice involved in developing skilled readers of all ages.
Elementary science education often takes a backseat to subjects like reading and math due to standardized testing pressures, but a team of faculty researchers from Marsal Education is working on the policies and practices required to bring early science education in line with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)—a set of expectations for what students should know and be able to do. Since its introduction, NGSS has shifted science instruction toward more authentic learning experiences. The research team has identified promising practices and developed a practical framework that informs district practices, contributes to new research proposals, and influences teacher preparation programs. Their work highlights the need for integrated policy and instructional support to elevate elementary science learning.
The first cohort of students in our undergraduate program Learning, Equity, and Problem Solving for the Public Good (LEAPS) is working with and learning from Detroit-based organizations. Communityengaged learning is threaded throughout the four-year
LEAPS curriculum, paired with coursework about how social structures, history, politics, and identity shape the environments where we live, work, and learn. We invite you to learn more about our students and some of our early community partners in this issue.
in this issue of our magazine, we bring you inside our teacher education program and show you how our students learn to apply the full science of reading in their classrooms. As the central focus of my own research, i am passionate about the rich and often underestimated interplay between theory and practice involved in developing skilled readers of all ages.
We are proud to share the inspiring work of three Marsal Education alumni who were honored with the 2025 Alumni Awards. Dr. Barbara Eason-Watkins (ABEd ’73, TeachCert ’73), Dr. Odis Johnson Jr. (PhD ’03), and Luke Wilcox (BSEd ’01, TeachCert ’01) have dedicated their careers to ensuring students have access to the resources they need to thrive academically. They each have carried out this work in different ways that intersect with research, policy, school leadership, teaching, and community engagement. It is critical that we address—as our alumni award winners have—the widely varying needs of learners and make every effort to meet those needs.
As we head into the fall, leading the university in a campaign theme year focused on education, I ask all of us to see with clarity the great challenges that lie ahead but also the tremendous promise that education holds. Education is a lifelong journey filled with joy and curiosity, where each lesson opens a new window to the world. It sparks the imagination, encouraging questions and discoveries that fuel a love of learning. From the thrill of mastering a new skill to the wonder of uncovering how things work, education inspires a sense of adventure. Please join me this year—and always—in assuring that all people can be on this adventure together. ■
Front cover: At the Spark Festival of Learning, a specialist from the Shapiro Design Lab taught participants how to make mix tapes.
Unpacking the Full Science of Reading
How the marsal Family school of education prepares teachers of early literacy
Dean
Elizabeth Birr Moje
Editor Danielle Dimcheff
Associate Editor & Lead Writer
Jeanne Hodesh
Contributing Writer
Emily Halnon
Design
Savitski Design, Ann Arbor
Hammond Design, Ann Arbor
We invite you to join the conversation by submitting ideas for future issues, letters to the editor, and class notes. marsal.umich.edu/magazine
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Building a Bridge Between School Reform and Classroom Instruction
a team of marsal school researchers investigates implementation of the next generation science standards
For LEAPS Students, “Engagement” Means Partnership
From a family shelter to a youth-led tech incubator, meet some of the organizations leaps partners with across the city of detroit
Meet the 2024-25 Alumni Award Recipients
distinguished education practitioner, distinguished education researcher, and lifetime achievement alumni awards recognize marsal school alumni who exemplify the school’s mission in the work they do every day
Happenings champions for education class notes
LEAps students Angela Zhou and samantha McDole organizing a space for donated items at COTs in Detroit, p. 18.
and preceding page
right Professor Jamaal Matthews spoke about developmental trends in school belonging research conducted with racially marginalized student populations at the Ford School’s Education Policy Initiative Speaker Series. The title of his talk was, “Everyone is talking about ‘belonging’ but what do they really mean? A critical race and optimal distinctiveness analysis of school belonging research.”
Above
In January, the Marsal School welcomed young members of the community to the annual MLK Children and Youth Program. Participants gathered to learn, engage, and celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. through fun and educational activities including storytelling, guided discussions, and musical performances.
Above Dr. Randy Bennett delivered the 2025 Frank B. Womer Lecture, which focused on personalized assessment within the measurement community.
Above Mayor of Detroit Mike Duggan came to the Marygrove campus to meet and speak with the inaugural cohort of LEAPS students who spent their first year at U-M living and learning in Detroit.
Above Soon-to-be graduating undergraduate and graduate secondary teaching interns practiced job interview skills with local K-12 administrators.
Above At the annual Donor Scholar Breakfast, scholarship donors had the opportunity to meet many scholarship recipients and hear from a panel of students about their experiences at Marsal and the difference that scholarships make.
Above The Marsal School’s Eileen Lappin Weiser Center for the Learning Sciences hosted the inaugural Spark Festival of Learning, an all-ages event designed to inspire curiosity and kindle a spark for learning that encourages flourishing and connection. Led by community members, festival activities included making shadow puppets, bike repair, beading, hair braiding, and virtual reality experiences.
The CREATE Center hosted its third annual Youth-Engaged Research Symposium, bringing together youth, community members, U-M faculty, and graduate students to showcase and emphasize youth-engaged research and collaborations happening throughout Michigan and the country.
Left and below The James A. Kelly Learning Lever competition is designed to challenge University of Michigan students to invent tools with the potential to significantly improve student learning. The program culminates in a pitch fest wherein teams introduce the products they have developed to a panel of judges and compete to win $10,000 in funding.
This year’s winning project was OrchestrateXR, which aims to fill the gap in teacher-led XR learning management, making immersive learning more accessible and effective in K-12 education.
Above At the Teach Blue Fellows Symposium, the first cohort of fellows discussed the problems of practice they took up over the year of their fellowships, the solution plans they designed, how those plans played out during the school year, and what they discovered about learning along the way.
Above Students and their families gathered for the Secondary Teacher Education Induction Ceremony, a celebration officially welcoming students who have been studying to become secondary teachers to the profession.
Above In February, Dean Moje represented the university as the featured speaker at the Alumni Association of the University of Michigan Club of London. There, Moje engaged with London-based alumni by sharing the vision and goals of U-M as well as those of the Marsal School.
Unpacking the Full sc ience of re ading
How the Marsal Family School of Education prepares teachers of early literacy
What happens in your brain when you read a sentence?
What happens in your heart and mind? How do you know what the sentence means? How do you understand where to begin on a page, where to pause, and what you are to take away when you’re finished?
Many of us learned to read so long ago, it feels like second nature. Yet, at some point or other, we were taught this essential skill.
When Marsal School Professor Tanya Wright tells people she started her career as a kindergarten teacher, they often say, “You must have been really patient.” This always surprises her. Maybe patience plays a part, but she argues that to be successful in such a role, one needs to know a lot. “It’s a profession just like others. You have to learn how to teach kids to read.”
Although it might not seem scientific at the outset, guiding young learners through the process of understanding what the words on a page mean requires a considerable amount of technical knowledge, and practice applying that knowledge. Who would expect an aerospace engineer to successfully design a rocket fit for space exploration without professional training? Expecting a teacher to teach a child—let
alone an entire classroom of children—to read is no different. In fact, it might be more difficult.
“Teaching children is the hardest science of all,” says Professor Gina Cervetti. “They’re so complicated and extraordinary and joyful. It’s a wonderful thing to do—but it’s complex.”
So, why is literacy so hard to teach?
“I think a huge challenge is that there’s a lot of very specific, technical knowledge that you need that people wouldn’t just have
At the Marsal school, students learn how to teach literacy to young learners and earn their teaching certification in the state of Michigan in either the Elementary Undergraduate program (ELUg) or in the Elementary Master’s program (ELMAC). in both programs, students take a four-part series of courses on early literacy.
from everyday life. And then teachers need to apply that knowledge in real time with young children,” explains Professor Nell Duke. “When you’re teaching young children, you don’t have a lot of wait time where you’re sitting there trying to think of what to say next or how to respond to the child—you have to act very quickly. Teachers have to access their technical knowledge and access the knowledge that they need about how to actually teach that knowledge. It becomes really challenging to do all of that. When you’re a beginning teacher, you haven’t had as much practice being able to integrate all of this knowledge and think on the fly.”
Another challenge Duke has identified for new teachers is figuring out how to address the many different aspects of literacy development. “There are so many different components you have to develop in children: concept and content knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, their ability to make inferences and comprehend what they’re doing, their ability to write—everything from their handwriting, all the way to sophisticated rhetorical moves—plus all of the phonemic awareness and phonics and spelling that they need. It’s a lot to cover.”
Add to that the incredible diversity of students in any given classroom, and the unique
base of knowledge each brings with them to school. “The kinds of skills and knowledge that students need in order to ultimately use literacy for personally meaningful and academic purposes are vast and kind of unconstrained,” says Cervetti. “Within a classroom, you have a huge array of different individuals who have different needs and different strengths and different preferences. Trying to think about orchestrating all of these skills and all of this knowledge, and then also trying to think about both the collective of your classroom and each of the individual learners is a Herculean task.”
at the Marsal School, students learn how to teach literacy to young learners and earn their teaching certification in the state of Michigan in either the Elementary Undergraduate program (ELUG) or in the Elementary Master’s program (ELMAC). In both programs, students take a four-part series of courses on early literacy.
“Our professors and field instructors do important work across the full science of reading,” says Dean Elizabeth Birr Moje (who is herself a literacy researcher), referring to the body of research consisting of evidence-based practices that inform literacy instruction. The science of reading is a term that refers to all that we know from scientific research on reading, including how reading develops, how specific instructional practices affect reading, specific difficulties learners can have with reading, and more. Reading instruction needs to address many areas, including phonemic
awareness (learning to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds—phonemes— in spoken words), phonics (decoding, or sounding words out), fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and language development. These components, explains Moje, are inextricably intertwined. “Our approach is to teach all of these skill areas in each literacy course. Individual components are highlighted, but they are always taught in the context of the full science of reading.”
The topic of children’s literacy, and how best to teach it, has spurred debate for decades. Lately, it has entered the cultural zeitgeist once more. But whether the current attention is fueled by sitting in on Zoom classrooms during the pandemic, consuming podcasts and media coverage that dive into the development of various literacy curricula, or alarm over recently declining NAEP scores, one thing remains clear: teaching children to read—to not only pronounce the words but to understand them—is hard. Amidst the many arguments for and against different methodologies for teaching literacy—phonics, balanced literacy, the whole language approach—various instructional foci based on the science of reading are prized and others are overlooked.
“A common model right now is the simple view of reading, which treats reading comprehension as the product of decoding skills and language comprehension,” says Cervetti. “The idea is that the decoding skill is hard and complicated for lots of children for a whole range of reasons, so we have to teach that, but the language part of reading is natural. So if we just teach kids to decode the words, they will be able to map that magically onto their oral language, and everything will be fine.” This, Cervetti argues, is a huge misconception. Yes, decoding can be complicated for kids to learn, but once they get the hang of it, the majority of children can read words pretty quickly, she says. It is in learning the language component of literacy that students become meaning makers of texts by gaining word knowledge, world knowledge, and syntactic knowledge. “If we ignore the language piece, we end up with students who are really good at calling out words, but who aren’t necessarily skilled at making meaning of either individual words or stretches of words.”
The science of reading is a term that refers to all that we know from scientific research on reading, including how reading develops, how specific instructional practices affect reading, specific difficulties learners can have with reading, and more. reading instruction needs to address many areas, including phonemic awareness (learning to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds— phonemes—in spoken words), phonics (decoding, or sounding words out), fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and language development.
duke notes that there is more debate in the larger community about how best to teach reading than she has observed in the research community. “There’s actually a lot of overlap among scholars as to how to teach reading because we look at what has been proved to be effective in the research.”
“Everywhere I go, people claim that teacher education programs do not teach phonics,” says Moje. “That is patently untrue in our program. However, just because one learns how to teach phonics doesn’t mean it’s easy to do in a classroom of 30 children with everything happening all at once. It’s really hard.”
Which is why practice is key.
“The cognitive load of teaching young children literacy is really high,” says Duke. “As with anything where there’s a heavy cognitive load, the more practice you get, the better you get at doing it.” At the Marsal School, interns learn by working with students at field placements in local elementary schools beginning in the first semester and continuing throughout the program. As their training progresses, they move from working with individual students, to working with small groups, to eventually leading an entire class.
“As part of every class session, I have the interns work one on one with a child to apply what they’ve recently learned,” says Duke. “For example, if they have learned an instructional technique like word ladders, they would do a word ladder with a child. Or if we’ve been teaching them the interactive writing technique, they would actually practice it one on one with a child. The opportunity to apply what they’re learning is really valuable in addition to the theoretical knowledge they’re also getting in class.”
In both the ELUG and ELMAC programs, students’ preparation begins with Literacy 1: Foundational Skills (EDUC 401), which addresses questions about how literacy develops in young children and what teachers can do to foster that development. This course addresses several major constructs in early literacy development—oral language development, concepts of print, phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, phonics, spelling, word recognition, and reading fluency from pre-kindergarten (pre-K) through sixth grade.
In the fall 2024 semester, ELUG students took Literacy 1 with Wright as an embedded course in a local elementary school. The school served as the students’ first field placement, where they worked with first graders and a mentor teacher two mornings a week. One afternoon a week, Wright taught the Literacy 1 course in a classroom at the elementary school. After learning a concept in her class, Wright’s students would plan a
“One of the important things you need to learn as an early elementary or preschool teacher is what make good alphabet key words and what don’t make good alphabet key words. We’re teaching the letter’s short sound initially, because that’s the most important one for children to learn first.” Nell Duke
lesson to teach that concept to the first graders, get her feedback on the plan, and then implement it with the young learners.
“We learned ideas about how to teach kids to read, then we would all go down to the cafeteria and each pair of students would sit with a pair of first graders and try some of the instructional methods that we were learning about.” All the while, Wright was nearby, circulating throughout the cafeteria and observing, close at hand if help was needed. “I could hear and see what was going on. I was there if they needed support, because it’s new for them,” says Wright.
Over the course of this first semester, teaching interns learn about early literacy and foundational skills. “The interns learn that the words we say can be broken down into sounds and that those sounds can be mapped to letters. How we teach kids about those sound-letter relationships and how we then teach them to take those sound-letter
relationships and figure out what a word says is phonics instruction,” explains Wright. “All of that may sound simple, but it’s actually very, very technical. Teachers need to know a lot about language and how it works, the different types of sound-letter relationships, and the sequence of how to teach those relationships to kids.” On top of that, they need to make it fun. Teaching interns learn different instructional practices that they can do with their students to make learning phonics engaging and playful. “That’s what we want it to feel like for kids,” says Wright. “Making these lessons fun is how to get kids started on being readers and writers.”
In two-on-two pairs, Wright had her teaching interns read aloud with kids, explaining texts and showing how texts work. “For example, they might show that in English, we read from left to right and from the top to the bottom of the page. They might be teaching what a period or an exclamation point is. They’re also doing games and activities to help kids hear sounds and understand that there are sounds in words.” In addition to reading, interns worked on developing early writing skills with their students by having kids write as many sounds in a word as they could figure out, and by having them draw pictures to share their ideas.
When she’s taught Literacy 1 in the past, Duke has had her students dress up as letters of the alphabet for Halloween. Each pre-service teacher selects a letter to represent and then does presentations about their letter to different groups of kids. The kids fill out activity sheets about the letters to complete a scavenger hunt. There are even animal crackers in the shape of letters to snack on, making a celebration out of the lesson. The kids love it, but it is equally impactful for the interns.
“One of the important things you need to learn as an early elementary or preschool teacher is what make good alphabet key words and what don’t make good alphabet key words. For example, you’ll see a lot of alphabet charts that say things like ‘A is for airplane,’ but airplane is not a good alphabet keyword because it doesn’t start with the short “a” sound, it starts with what’s called an r-controlled vowel. We’re teaching the
letter’s short sound initially, because that’s the most important one for children to learn first.” Understanding this importance and the reasoning behind the learning sequence is exactly what Duke means when she says there is a heavy load of technical knowledge her students need to acquire in preparation for teaching their own classrooms of children.
“There’s all of this knowledge that needs to go into selecting alphabet keywords,” says Duke. “And so when the pre-service teachers dress up as the letter, they have to carefully choose the objects or pictures that they are going to feature on their costume to make sure that they’re good alphabet keywords. It’s a fun way for me to teach something that they really need to know.”
Another component of the introductory literacy course is learning how to assess students’ literacy development. “In a kindergarten classroom, you have kids who can read a chapter book, kids who are just starting to learn about letters and sounds, and everybody in between,” says Wright. “Part of what we’re teaching interns to do is figure out where students are in their thinking and in their literacy learning. We use that information to target a lesson to meet kids’ instructional needs.”
After doing an assessment to find out where a child is in phonics and spelling development, Duke has often had pre-service teachers create a book wherein the vast majority of the words would be decodable based on what the child knew at that point in time. Because Duke’s students do this one on one with children in their field classrooms, each gets to really think about the child they are working with.
“If they knew that the child was really into animals, they would try to write a decodable text that was based on an animal that the child was interested in,” says Duke. “Or sometimes they would actually make the child a character in the book. It is really fun for kids
to have a custom book made about them. Kids also really enjoy books that they can read themselves. Having the books be largely decodable means that the children are likely to experience success with them if they’re using decoding strategies, which is what we want children to do. And it’s fun for the interns to be a little bit creative, to think about how they’re going to illustrate the book, and what the content of the book is going to be. It’s also very educational for the interns. They need to understand the scope and sequence of phonics and spelling instruction. They need to understand the individual child’s knowledge around phonics and spelling. And then they need to reflect that in the words that they choose. All of that takes real expertise.”
the second course in the literacy series, Literacy 2: Comprehension & Motivation preK-6 (EDUC 403), addresses effective teaching of reading comprehension across preK-6. The focus in this course is on the skills, strategies, knowledges, and motivations that support the development of reading comprehension, how to assess comprehension, and how to design and enact a range of instructional strategies and routines to support students in becoming skillful and engaged readers across subject areas.
For this course, interns have field placements in upper elementary classrooms in the third, fourth, and fifth grades. Now they are working with students on more advanced literacy skills, like reading fluency with more complex texts—reading words not only accurately but smoothly and with good expression.
“Just because kids can look at the symbols and say the words doesn’t mean that they understand what the text means,” says Wright. “It takes us a whole course for interns to learn the many things that go into a student understanding a text—everything from how a text is structured, the genre
of the text, and the features of the text, to developing strategies to figure out what’s happening if they misunderstand the text. They learn how to support kids in having background knowledge and vocabulary associated with the text as well as how to support them in having discussions about text—all of which are important to help their comprehension.”
Fluent reading, says Wright, takes practice. To make practicing reading fun, she teaches interns a range of instructional methods to support reading fluency and comprehension, like “reader’s theater,” where interns create scripts for their students based on a picture book. The children get practice reading by going over the script and they have fun acting out the script for their classmates.
“There’s so much more that goes into this whole process than simply reading word by word. If all you’re doing is reading word by word, you’re not going to make sense of the text in the same way,” says Moje. She also emphasizes that, as readers move beyond the elementary grades, literacy learning continues.
“As you progress throughout the grades, print becomes less and less accessible,” says Moje. “When you start reading about mitochondria or atoms or democracy, those are words representing complex concepts. So now where are you drawing from, and how do you make sense of these texts? The more knowledge you have, the more you’re going to be able to read advanced texts.”
“When
you start reading about mitochondria or atoms or democracy, those are words representing complex concepts. so now where are you drawing from, and how do you make sense of these texts?” Elizabeth Birr Moje
The third course, Literacy 3: Language & Composition (EDUC 405), addresses the design and enactment of engaging literacy instruction that advances the literacy learning of children in grades preK-6. This course focuses, in particular, on building students’
speaking, listening, language, and composition skills and knowledge. In Literacy 3, says Cervetti, interns learn how to develop students’ language skills and learn how to teach writing.
“We have a few different ways that we think about the trajectory of interns’ learning,” says Cervetti. “One of them is across a set of aspects of literacy development, another is working in increasingly complex educational contexts. This is the first course in which they teach a whole class lesson, and it’s a wholeclass writing lesson. We collect students’ writing from their field classroom. We analyze that writing, we look at the standards, we figure out what’s the right next step for these students. The interns develop a lesson and then go out and they teach the lesson. They record themselves in the classroom, and then reflect on their teaching. It’s a semester-long project where they’re learning an assessment, instruction, and reflection cycle.”
When Cervetti teaches the course, she actively models certain skills and strate-
gies for teaching literacy for her graduate students. The students then practice these methods with each other. “We can’t practice everything in the field in this highly guided way, so we practice some things together,” she explains. “We watch videos of expert teachers enacting these practices with children. We analyze students’ writing. We engage in centers—a common activity they’ll see in elementary classrooms. We also explore different kinds of resources for teaching, like digital resources.”
the final course in the literacy series, Literacy 4: Teaching Language, Literacy, and Academic Content to Diverse Learners (EDUC 407), revisits core literacy teaching content in prior courses to deepen and hone literacy teaching practices. The focus is on teaching children how to learn academic language and content while they are developing academic English-language proficiency with an emphasis on teaching multilingual learners. During this term, their final semester in either the ELUG or ELMAC program, teaching interns work full-time in an elementary school for their student teaching placement.
“When we’re training elementary school teachers, it is very important to make sure that all of them leave understanding how important literacy is and to leave with the technical knowledge they need to teach literacy well, but also to leave with a level of enthusiasm about literacy that they can con-
“We
can’t practice everything in the field in this highly guided way, so we practice some things together. We watch videos of expert teachers enacting these practices with children. We analyze students’ writing. We engage in centers—a common activity they’ll see in elementary classrooms.”
Gina Cervetti
vey to children,” says Duke. “For example, making sure that they get exposed to highquality children’s books is important as part of developing their enthusiasm for literacy and their knowledge of literacy instruction.” After all, inspiring their students will be crucial to teachers’ careers in the classroom.
Through the combination of taking the sequence of literacy courses and spending four terms working with children in schools, Marsal School-educated teachers enter the classroom as professionals prepared to manage the challenges of teaching literacy. By then they know that just like their own journey to becoming a teacher, learning to read takes a lot of instruction and a lot of practice.
“Working on literacy instruction with kindergarteners, first graders, and fourth graders as a teaching intern this year has helped me understand how literacy knowledge and skills are built over time,” says Leilani Wetterau, a current undergraduate teaching intern. “All students are at different places in their literacy journey, but I got to see the progress from kindergarteners who were learning that letters have sounds to fourth graders who were learning how to create summaries of what they were reading. It was a joy to get real experience assessing and building upon students’ literacy strengths and needs, and I feel very prepared to start my year of student teaching and launch my own classroom soon after that!” ■
Building a Bridge Between sc hool reform and Classroom i n struction
A team of Marsal School researchers investigates implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards
elementary science tends to be put on the back burner,” says Marsal School Professor Betsy Davis. She attributes this imbalance to the societal emphasis that is placed on reading and math test scores. “Science, for better or worse, doesn’t have that level of scrutiny in the elementary grades. So it’s easy to push aside.” The introduction of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) had Davis puzzling over how to bridge from standards to instruction in elementary science. Marsal School Professor Donald Peurach and Northwestern University Professor James P. Spillane shared an interest in that same puzzle. Longtime collaborators in studying instructional improvement in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics, Peurach and Spillane began to wonder if what they had been learning about building instructionally focused education systems might provide clues to improving elementary science instruction to meet the aspirations of the NGSS.
iimprove science instruction at the primary school level. Their findings have resulted in tangible recommendations for school districts, and have served as a catalyst for a number of subsequent research proposals.
Assembled and advanced outside of government by national organizations, the NGSS were introduced in 2013. They reflect a shift in science teaching and learning ideals from learning about science content to discerning explanations for scientific phenomena by having students engage in science practices integrated with science content and concepts across scientific disciplines. The NGSS were established by a coalition of national-level research and professional associations, in collaboration with 26 lead state partners. Individual states can choose when and whether to adopt them. Michigan, for instance, adopted them a few years after the reform had been introduced; Pennsylvania has taken up NGSS much more recently.
“It’s not like a switch flipped in 2013, and everyone was supposed to use these standards. They are still considered to be relatively new,” says Davis.
NGSS were developed with the understanding that they could guide state-level policy initiatives aimed at improving K-12 science instruction by putting forth high expectations for students’ learning content, and therefore high expectations for those who would teach that content. The NGSS outline three dimensions of science learning: science and engineering practices (making predictions, engaging in investigation, developing or using scientific models); disciplinary core ideas (the way photosynthesis works, or the way the carbon cycle works); and crosscutting concepts. “Cross-cutting concepts are
big ideas that go across science and engineering disciplines,” explains Davis. For example, the idea of size and scale, which is important in biology, physics, and earth science, as well as in engineering practices.
“The idea behind NGSS is to really support teachers so that they can support kids in engaging in three-dimensional learning,” says Davis. “In other words, not learning about photosynthesis by reading a textbook about photosynthesis, but instead engaging in the science practices and being able to more authentically come to an understanding of photosynthesis.”
Davis acknowledges that making the shift from fact-based or conceptually based under-
standings to a teaching practice that reflects three-dimensional learning is a heavy lift for teachers who already have a lot to manage, particularly at the elementary level where they are required to provide instruction across a range of subjects. Questioning the bridge between ambitious policy and ambitious classroom practice is what spurred the team to investigate how the NGSS reform was actually being taken up on the ground in states, schools and school districts, and classrooms.
“We were interested in what educational systems were doing to support moving in the direction of implementing NGSS. There had been quite a bit of research on how educational systems were moving forward with
“We
ended up being in four states, 13 districts in total, and in different types of school systems—public schools, charter schools, urban districts, and suburban districts as well.” Angela Lyle
“You can build teacher professional learning communities. You can bring in a textbook series, and say let’s do this and learn how to do it well. Another way to organize, manage, and improve instruction is to build what we call systems.”
Donald Peurach
reforms in teaching ELA and mathematics, but we knew less about that work within this base of science,” says Davis.
The research team brought diverse expertise to the project. Davis is a science educator, teacher educator, and learning scientist. Peurach studies educational policy, leadership, and innovation, with a focus on developing and coordinating capabilities in schools, district offices, and policy contexts to support high-quality instruction. Angela Lyle served as a research fellow on the grant, and Anna Foster and Emily Seeber served as graduate student research assistants. Together with Spillane and his colleagues at Northwestern, the team set out to develop a practical theory of designing and building the educational systems that are essential to improving elementary science instruction. They also aimed to provide guidance and frameworks for educational leaders and professionals to construct high-quality science learning environments.
Peurach notes that there are different ways to organize, manage, and improve instruction. “You can build teacher professional learning communities. You can bring in a textbook series, and say let’s do this and learn how to do it well. Another way to organize, manage, and improve instruction is to build what we call systems. That is, organizations and their leaders and their staff who work in relationship with each other to understand students’ experiences in classrooms, teachers’ experiences in classrooms, how they’re working and not working, and how they might create conditions that support teachers and students working more productively in their day-to-day work in classrooms.”
For much of the history of U.S. public education, says Peurach, “the work of organizing, managing, and improving instruction was located primarily in individual classrooms.” However, there was no accountability for what was happening in those classrooms. This began to change in the 1980s, and continued through the ’90s and ’00s, with the introduction of standards and transparency in educational performance. “The incentives changed for districts and school leaders to work with teachers to help improve and coordinate their day-to-day work. And that activity played out initially in ELA and mathematics because that’s where the accountability incentives were the strongest.” It wasn’t until the introduction of the NGSS in 2013 that district leaders, school leaders, and teachers were incentivized to prioritize science instruction with the same level of attention as ELA and math.
tions and conduct interviews than schools moved from in-person learning to virtual learning because of the pandemic. This, says Davis, actually made it easier to do observations. A member of the team could more seamlessly observe a school or district meeting by joining in via Zoom.
“We ended up being in four states, 13 districts in total, and in different types of school systems—public schools, charter schools, urban districts, and suburban districts as well,” says Lyle, who notes that such variation is a unique feature of this particular study.
“Homing in on different levels of the education system, looking at the state level, then the district level, school, and classroom, gave us a much broader look at this work than had previously been done by others.”
“We interviewed people who work with science as their main responsibility, and
“We wanted to be on the scene as schools and districts really started to prioritize science instruction,” says Peurach.
As the team began to gather data, they identified a set of states they wanted to work in, and from there, districts in which they wanted to work. “We were trying to look for districts where something interesting was happening. We weren’t trying to say more about the typical state of affairs with elementary science. We were looking for bright spots we could shine a light on,” says Davis.
The grant began in 2019. No sooner had the research team begun to make connec-
“We interviewed union representatives, special ed leadership, superintendents, and other instructional coaches and staff at the district level. Where possible, we tried to observe routines in the district—professional development that a district offered, or meetings among different science leaders at the district level. And then we replicated that moving downward. We looked for whoever was the science leader at the school level. We interviewed principals and then teachers the principal identified as being really active in science, and tried to observe routines around science at the school. In the final stage of data collection, we did classroom observations.”
The project ran for six years. in total, the team conducted 168 interviews, did 61 observations of classrooms and professional development sessions, and collected and analyzed over 300 documents from different districts.
The project ran for six years. In total, the team conducted 168 interviews, did 61 observations of classrooms and professional development sessions, and collected and analyzed over 300 documents from different districts.
In trying to address the puzzle of coordinating national and state academic standards with classroom instruction, the team produced a practical framework to support researchers and practitioners in examining, comparing, and improving educational systems for elementary science instruction. The framework consists of five core domains of work that are central to system building: building educational infrastructure; supporting the use of educational infrastructure in practice; managing performance and practice; managing environmental relationships; and developing and distributing instructional leadership.
Yet, developing these capabilities in school districts proved to be difficult, particularly with regard to science teaching and learning at the elementary level. The team found that districts’ primary
way of addressing reform measures was the procurement of educational resources— namely curriculum materials—with relatively little attention paid to the other four domains of work.
Davis found it interesting to observe the emphasis science education practitioners and district leaders put on curriculum materials.
As a science educator herself, she was familiar with this emphasis. However, Peurach, who came to the project through the lens of
systems organization, called this a “resource forward perspective” that is inattentive to the complexities of instructional practice.
“It was through working with colleagues who have a really different intellectual background, namely thinking about educational systems as organizations, that I realized it didn’t have to be that way, and that there are other ways of thinking about how we could improve teaching and learning,” says Davis.
With Christa Haverly, a colleague working on the project at Northwestern University, Davis also looked at the ways in which different districts were scheduling science in the school day. How was it being represented on daily and weekly schedules for teachers?
“Science was completely invisible in some cases, even though these districts were places that we had identified as being best-case scenarios. We would get documents from them where we asked for their weekly instructional schedule across the school, and science wouldn’t show up.” ELA, math, and music would show up on the schedule, but science would not.
Between interviews with teachers and principals and analyzing artifacts, in the places where science did show up, the team could see how schools were ensuring that students had the opportunity to learn science.
“One of the common characteristics of these best-case scenarios was that they had some dedicated time for interventions,” says Davis, referring to the time in a daily schedule when students who need particular support with ELA or math can receive
that dedicated instruction. By contrast, in other settings, science may be scheduled for the rest of the class during the intervention period, meaning that the students who need particular support miss out on the opportunity to learn about science. “That’s an equity problem,” notes Davis.
“We turned up a whole bunch of other ways that science was getting short shrift in terms of time or attention elsewhere, like teachers not getting time for professional learning in science as compared to in ELA or math, or teachers not getting any common prep time to work with colleagues on how they were going to teach the science unit.” For Davis, it was helpful to be able to identify that the problem was not just about a lack of instructional time, but about many different decisions that were being made.
the team’s work had immediate impacts on the districts and schools with whom they partnered to conduct the research. They developed and distributed research reports to their partner districts and schools that included key findings and practical tools for developing system and school learning environments to support elementary science reform. In addition, they shared their findings and tools at practitioner-focused conferences and workshops to build capacity for state and local leaders to support science reform in their networks.
Findings from this project contributed to an open-access course series that Peurach designed, Transforming Education in an Interconnected World, which consists of four courses aimed at cultivating a community of educators, parents, and community stakeholders around educational improvement. Lyle and Haverly, her counterpart at Northwestern, are PIs on a follow-up proposal, a core grant for which they are seeking additional sources of funding. Their project seeks to extend the NGSS work into a comparative study of systems building in elementary science and math. “We thought that extending this into a different content area—math—and having a comparative aspect would be important. Our goals are to construct different models that can capture different system configurations and the impact of those different models on classroom instruction,” says Lyle.
Another NSF proposal, this one focused on research-practice partnerships, would work with school districts in building their educational system to mobilize improvement in elementary science. A grant from the Spencer Foundation builds directly off the data recorded in the NGSS study, and focuses on the classroom level to try to understand how teachers make sense of and use districtand school-level supports in their instruction.
Their work had immediate impacts on the districts and schools with whom they partnered to conduct the research. They developed and distributed research reports to their partner districts and schools that included key findings and practical tools for developing system and school learning environments to support elementary science reform.
Foster, who earned her PhD from the Marsal School in the fall of 2024, realized (through working on the grant and through dissertat-
ing) that she would like to be involved in the school system going forward. “I want to figure out ways to support districts in manifesting policies that policymakers make, but also in supporting policymakers in making better policies that are attentive to the realities of districts, and that include provisions for how to make those policies a reality,” she says.
Davis says one of her greatest takeaways from the project is the impact it has had on her own teaching. “I do a lot of teaching in our elementary teacher education program, so that gives me something I can work on with my pre-service teachers. How can you advocate for yourself to be able to have time for teaching science? How can you advocate for yourself to be able to get professional learning opportunities in science teaching if you want them? It gives me a way to help them to be better positioned to prioritize science and to do a better job of teaching science.” ■
For LEAPS Students, “Engagement” Means Partnership
From
a family shelter to a youth-led tech incubator,
meet some of the organizations LEAPS partners with across the city of Detroit
Djennin Casab is a professional matchmaker. As the Community-Engaged Learning Coordinator for the Learning, Equity, and Problem Solving for the Public Good (LEAPS) undergraduate program, Casab is responsible for pairing students with Detroit-based organizations for communityengaged internships.
“My main role is to create, develop, and nurture external partnerships so that our students can be matched according to community-defined needs and student interests,” says Casab, who draws on years of experience working in Detroit in the higher education field with a focus on community-engaged learning. She emphasizes that each relationship with an organization is a partnership.
“Community partners are fulfilling a function of need in the city—whether it’s tackling homelessness, food deserts, or education—anything that is a societal need. Our students have different interests. My role is to match them with organizations and supervise the relationships to make sure that they are mutually beneficial.”
According to Program Chair Barry Fishman, community-engaged learning is the heart of the LEAPS program. “One of the most effective ways to learn is through application. LEAPS students are actively building connections between their classroom-based learning and their communityengaged learning. This creates both more engagement and more meaningful learning.”
In the winter semester of their freshman year, the first cohort of LEAPS students engaged with partner organizations across the city of Detroit, including the Coalition on Temporary Shelter (COTS) and Google Code Next.
COTS was founded in 1982 when a group of local churches and local leaders observed a rise in homelessness among single men. “Initially, we partnered with a church to provide shelter and basic needs for men who were experiencing homelessness,” says Aisha MorrellFerguson, COTS’s chief development officer. “The following year, we purchased the Old Imperial Hotel here in Detroit. It underwent a million-
dollar renovation and became an expanded place to be able to serve those needs.” Instead of a traditional shelter that provided shared space in a large, open room, the renovated hotel building afforded privacy and dignity for those who were experiencing housing instability. The model was so successful, it became an inspiration for other organizations that were starting up around the country. The hotel building also had the capacity to serve more than just emergency shelter needs. In time, COTS added transitional housing, and eventually long-term supportive housing, for those with long-term needs based on disability and addiction.
“We went from serving only single men and single women to eventually serving families,” says Morrell-Ferguson. At that point, the organization observed another facet of support their clients needed. “You can’t take your children with you to a job interview, and it’s not always easy to take them with you when you’re searching for housing, either.” So in 2006, COTS opened a childcare center, Bright Beginnings, to support families as they were working to reestablish stability.
In 2015, COTS saw a rise in family homelessness. “Here in Detroit, there’s a bunch of agencies that partner and work together. Many of them were able to meet the needs of single men and single women, but not many of them were able to meet the needs of families and help families stay together,” says Morrell-Ferguson, again observing the needs of the community. “Because of our history and unique positioning to support families, we decided to reach out to those partners and say, ‘Look, if you continue to work with single men, single women, even unaccompanied youth, we’ll continue to work with families and preserve our shelter services for families only.’” The change in service meant that those seeking shelter at COTS had to be accompanied by a minor. At the same time, the organization adopted a coaching program called Passport to Self-Sufficiency, a framework that brings together partners in service to support families in five key domains: housing and family stability, health and well-being,
“LEAPS students are actively building connections between their classroombased learning and their community-engaged learning. This creates both more engagement and more meaningful learning.” Barry Fishman
economic mobility and empowerment, education and job training, and employment and career development. Working with a mobility coach, the head of the household works to establish objectives across the five domains. These objectives are entirely participant-driven, fostering a sense of ownership and empowerment. To facilitate progress, individuals receive both individualized and group coaching, gain access to resources from community partners, and are motivated by incentives, all aimed at nurturing economic self-sufficiency and creating stable living environments that yield a lasting, multigenerational impact.
“We know that things don’t happen overnight,” says Morrell-Ferguson. “A family experiencing homelessness often has a very big hill to climb. This support is necessary for a period of time to help them maintain that stability and then to be able to launch and change the future for their children. We believe in two-generation impact: that it’s not enough just to support the parents and their needs, but we have to support the children and their needs just the same, and help them in aiding one another to build momentum toward success.”
Bringing together partners through the five domains of the Passport to Self-Sufficiency framework helps COTS ensure that all the needs of the families it serves are being met. “In addition,” says Morrell-Ferguson, “it gives people who have not experienced the crisis of poverty or homelessness an opportunity to engage with and work alongside those who have. It enables them to advocate for changes, to be able to collaborate on policy initiatives, to be able to create new
solutions. It invites everybody to the table instead of keeping people away and trying to create solutions for them.”
This spring, LEAPS students Angela Zhou and Samantha McDole began their community-engaged placements at COTS with the same approach: as partners, they wanted to learn what COTS and the families it serves were in need of.
“They walked through our shelter to see how things are working right now. They learned what has worked well, and they also learned the challenges of what has not worked so well,” says Morrell-Ferguson.
COTS receives many donated items, but there hasn’t always been a space or a system to receive and process them. Over time, the donations have piled up. “It’s hard to maneuver and assess what we have, what we need, and what we don’t need,” says Morrell-Ferguson. As part of their placement, Zhou and McDole began to sort donations and organize the space for donated items so they can be distributed in a manner that upholds the dignity of those
who have need of them. What items COTS didn’t need would be shared with partner organizations who would be better able to make use of them.
“One of the things that influenced how I went about approaching the spaces we were given was something Aisha told Angela and me early on in the partnership,” says McDole. “She told us to always question why something was being done the way it was, instead of just accepting it. And if it wasn’t relevant anymore, to change how things were being done.”
Although their placement was originally scheduled just for Friday afternoons, the LEAPS students soon began coming to the shelter on other days as well, to spend more time working on the donation room. COTS’s shelter is located on Wyoming Avenue, right next to the Marygrove campus, making it convenient to come over after class. By mid-semester, the new relationship between LEAPS and COTS was deepening—what had begun as a placement had transformed into an ongoing project. In the future, Casab hopes that the donation room can be managed by LEAPS students. “Right now, we’re just starting to clean it up, but it’s something we as a program want to take responsibility for going forward. Every semester, managing the donation room will be a first-year project for LEAPS students.”
For their internship with Google Code Next, LEAPS students Junho Lee, Zahraa Teli, and Kyra Han met with high school students who participate in the free, computer science education program that provides skills and inspiration—plus college preparation—for long and rewarding careers in computer science-related fields.
“I am interested in educational inequity and how policy can be used to effectively bridge those gaps,” says Teli. “Partnering with Code Next gave me an opportunity to explore those ideas in practice by working directly in a community I’ve grown deeply connected to through both living in Detroit and studying its history.”
Code Next serves Black, Latine, and Indigenous youth who live in the vicinity of its labs which, in addition to Detroit, are located in Oakland and Inglewood,
California, and Chelsea, New York. Since 2015, Code Next has welcomed more than 10,000 students into the program nationwide. Over 90 percent of its graduates are pursuing higher education, and more than 88 percent are majoring in a STEM field.
The Detroit Code Next Lab was the first tenant in Michigan Central Station, the modern incarnation of Detroit’s iconic former train station and the centerpiece of the 30-acre Michigan Central innovation campus. The campus, which also includes the Newlab at Michigan Central building neighboring The Station, has grown to include a diverse ecosystem of more than 100 companies and startups since its
have access to coaches, state-of-the-art technical equipment, and content ranging from Javascript programming to user experience (UX) design. They can also choose to participate in various Code Next clubs relevant to their interests including iOS development, game design, entrepreneurship, and engineering.
“I am interested in educational technology, so partnering with Code Next gave me an opportunity to understand the importance of providing the right resources for youth to thrive,” says Lee.
Felten sees Google Code Next as an incubator for the tech hub in Detroit. “We have built a model for how industry, educa-
“A lot of the time, students in Detroit are just users of technology or consumers of their own culture. We’re trying to figure out how to make them creators of their technology and of their culture.” Nando Felton
opening last year. Startups in Newlab come from all over Michigan, across the country, and around the world. They are dedicated to shaping the future of mobility and are working to reestablish Detroit as a global leader in innovation.
“We’re teaching students how to become technology leaders,” says Nando Felten, Community Manager for Code Next Detroit. “Students are learning how to start their own companies and we’re partnering with local companies that are right next door to us in Newlab to bring their ideas to life.”
The Code Next Detroit Lab started in 2022 and currently serves over 100 students who participate in after-school and weekend programming, which is offered year-round. When they arrive, students are welcomed with a hot meal, followed by a community circle. At the lab, participants
tion, and the community can collaborate to drive real impact,” he says. “Having student voices heard, and having students be able to create and design places and spaces means a lot. A lot of the time, students in Detroit are just users of technology or consumers of their own culture. We’re trying to figure out how to make them creators of their technology and of their culture. Through Code Next, students see that that potential does exist.”
Felten, who grew up just down the street from Michigan Central, played football in high school. He remembers the intensity of training—he went to practices before and after school, and in the off-season his coach encouraged him to play other sports and to stay active. The conditioning and layers of accountability helped Felten excel. Drawing on that experience, Felten and Code Next aim to inspire the same focus and atten-
tion to preparing for a future in computer science. “We’ve incorporated a new curriculum that hopefully gives students the opportunity to practice and put the time and effort in to be excellent in computer science in the same way that our system in this country is already set up for sports.”
Felten attended U-M as an undergraduate before earning his master’s degree from the Marsal Family School of Education. As a graduate student, he served on the team helmed by professors Barry Fishman and Leslie Rupert Herrenkohl to develop the LEAPS program. It was a full-circle moment for Felten to have members of the first cohort of LEAPS students intern with him at Code Next. As interns, Lee, Teli, and Han helped the high school students prepare to present at the second annual Detroit Youth Mobility Summit, a launchpad for youthled mobility solutions and collaborations with peers and policy and industry experts. Code Next partnered with YouthTank Detroit, a youth-led nonprofit focused on entrepreneurship, to participate in the summit, which took place at Newlab.
“The Mobility Summit allows students to grab the wheel and be the drivers of their own destinies around mobility, not just in the sense of transportation—which is really needed in Detroit—but also social mobility, the ways of getting ideas and information conveyed,” says Felten. “Often when decisions are being made, there is no seat at the table for the youth voice. So we’re giving students the opportunity to let Detroit—and the world—know what they have to offer.”
“Working with Code Next exposed me to ways in which Detroit youth are readily prepared to cultivate the agency to innovate and create solutions for their community,” says Han. “I saw how youth directed event planning efforts for the 2025 Detroit Youth Mobility Summit through active leadership and creative thinking.”
Although LEAPS participants are firstyear college students, they are near peers of the Code Next high school students. As they helped with preparations for the Youth Mobility Summit, they were also given the opportunity to reflect on what it meant to participate in a program like Code Next as
a high school student. “The LEAPS students are seeing high schoolers think very proactively, very consciously, about how they’re helping to shape their community. And it gives LEAPS students a chance to ask what they might have done in their own communities if they’d been given a chance like this in high school.”
In turn, the reciprocal nature of the partnership between Code Next and LEAPS gave the high school students a connection to the University of Michigan, where many of them hope to attend college. “It gives them a visualization, this realization that ‘I can be there, too,’” says Felten.
Beyond the first-year placements, community-engaged learning is threaded throughout the four-year LEAPS curriculum. Guided reflection is a key component of these high-impact practices, helping students make meaning of their experiences. Opportunities for journaling are built into courses, and dialogue and discussion take place in Forum, the homeroom-like class where students draw connections across their different areas of learning.
“They think about what they’ve experienced as students, and then they think about themselves,” says Casab. “They think about where they come from, analyzing their own lives and the intersectionality of their assumptions, privilege, and oppression.”
Without the guided reflection component of community-engaged work, she adds, there is potential to do harm. “If you don’t understand the context, the culture, the history of the community you are collaborating with, you can perpetuate stereotypes and negative assumptions.” However, if the experience is curated in a way that allows for meaningmaking and critical reflection—as it is in LEAPS—the high-impact work “makes you a more empathetic person,” says Casab. “It makes you a more compassionate and nonjudgmental person, and someone who really wants to be a good citizen.”
As LEAPS relationships with partner organizations continue to develop, the program looks forward to bringing them together in the LEAPS Community Partner Network.
“We follow the philosophy of asking our partners what they need, and what they want this network space to be,” says Casab. Perhaps the meetings will be social, she explains, or maybe they will be a place to discuss wellness or professional development. “The first meeting is being called by LEAPS, but it’s going to be unstructured. We’ll ask ‘What would you like this space to be?’ so that we can all participate in the creation of whatever the network is going to look like.”
First LEAPS Partner Organizations
• YouthTank Detroit/Google Code Next
• COTS Detroit
• Marygrove Community Association
• Life After Care
• Palmer Park Prep Academy
• Project Inspire
• Racquet Up Detroit
• The School at Marygrove
• Umoja Village/Umoja Debate/
Howard Family Bookstore
• Urban Neighborhoods Initiative
Casab, who was born in Mexico, considers herself an “adopted daughter” of Detroit. She approaches the cultivation of partnerships with humility and curiosity. “I want to know about the culture and I want to know how the communities are tackling the problems that they have. If you’re not humble, the doors are not going to open. The great thing about LEAPS is having students who also have that curiosity, and who also want to know how they can become learning leaders and how they can apply their skills for the public good.” ■
Announcing the 2024–25 Alumni Award Recipients
Distinguished Education Practitioner Alumni Award
Luke Wilcox
About 10 years ago, Luke Wilcox (BSEd ’01, Teach Cert ’01) started noticing that his mathematics lessons weren’t reaching all his students. He wondered whether he could find a more effective way to teach.
Wilcox had been using the same approach he’d seen when he was in high school himself. He would stand in front of the classroom and deliver a lecture while students listened and took notes from neat rows of desks. They would then try a few practice problems and get assessed based on whether they could memorize the information and reproduce it on a test.
“This model works well for some students, but it definitely does not work for all students,” he says, adding that it best serves upper middle class, largely white students who have more academic support at home and “understand the rules of school.” And it disadvantages other students, especially those from low-income, minority backgrounds.
“Over the course of my career, I realized that the lecture model is an inequitable way to teach mathematics.”
This was a problem for Wilcox, especially because he teaches at East Kentwood High School in Kentwood, Michigan, which is the most diverse school in the state of Michigan—and one of the most diverse schools in the nation. East Kentwood has students from over 70 different countries, and has over 70 different languages represented in the student body.
Wilcox started to explore whether there was a more equitable and effective way to teach math. He wanted to shift away from acting like the teacher was the owner of all the knowledge and the one who got to decide how to transfer it to students and then assess them on their learnings.
“The teacher lecturing at the front of the room creates a power hierarchy that disempowers students, which disproportionately has a negative effect on low-income and non-white students,” he says.
He collaborated with colleagues at East Kentwood to develop a new approach to teaching math, which centered student engagement and discussion over lectures. In this model, the class starts with students working collaboratively in small groups to discuss different ideas and reach their own understanding of a new concept before the teacher helps the students to learn the formal definitions, theorems, or formulas.
“We realized that getting students talking to each other and doing more of the thinking and reasoning up front, rather than having the teacher always doing all of the work, could be way more effective for the wider variety of types of students that we serve in Kentwood,” Wilcox says.
“This creates a student-centered classroom that puts students at the top and gives them ownership of their learning, which drives motivation and excitement for discussing mathematics.”
The math colleagues turned their findings into a replicable teaching model called, “Experience First, Formalize Later” (EFFL). And they founded Math Medic, a math curriculum company that helps other teachers implement the same approach in their own classrooms.
Through Math Medic, Wilcox and his colleagues develop and share free downloadable lesson plans that apply EFFL principles across all high school mathematics subjects. Over 1 million lesson plans have been downloaded and used by more than 100,000 teachers across the United States. Wilcox and his colleague, Lindsey Gallas, also founded the nonprofit Math Medic Foundation that provides financial support to help students, teachers, and schools access educational opportunities and math resources.
“I have found that a much higher percentage of my students find success in math through the Experience First, Formalize Later model,” says Wilcox. “They feel a much greater sense of belonging in the math classroom and they realize and believe they have valuable ideas to contribute, rather than thinking the teacher knows everything.”
The EFFL model also challenges the traditional approach of asking students to memorize information and then reproduce it on a standardized test, which Wilcox says is not the most inspiring way to learn about math.
Each year, the Marsal Family School of Education Alumni Awards recognize the incredible accomplishments of our alumni. Selected by a committee of Marsal School faculty, staff, alumni, and current students, the awards are given to alumni who have made significant contributions to their profession, and whose qualities of leadership, innovation, and passion have advanced the field of education.
“That’s not about the beauty of mathematics or exciting ways to learn, it’s about how to score well on a test, which doesn’t send the best message to students,” he says. “The Experience First, Formalize Later model is trying to shift away from only using test scores to evaluate how well students are able to understand math, work through different concepts, and communicate their learnings.”
At East Kentwood High School, there’s convincing evidence that the EFFL approach is making a difference.
Wilcox remembers that he only had 16 students in AP statistics the first time he taught the class. Now, there are usually over 100 students enrolled each year, with a much more diverse makeup. East Kentwood High School had several years where it was credited with the highest number of minority students passing the AP statistics exam in the state of Michigan.
“We want our AP classes to mirror the hallways,” he says. “We’re not quite there, but we’re moving in the right direction.”
Wilcox has been recognized for his teaching and contributions to education through the 2013 Presidential Award for Excellence in Math Teaching (for which he was honored with a trip to the White House to meet then-president Barack Obama) and the 2018 Michigan Teacher of the Year Award.
Through Math Medic, Wilcox and his colleagues develop and share free downloadable lesson plans that apply EFFL principles across all high school mathematics subjects.
“I couldn’t believe that the first Black president in the history of the United States was giving me an award for teaching mathematics,” says Wilcox. “I never thought teaching would land me in the White House, never mind shaking hands with the president after he talked about the value of education.”
It’s fitting that Wilcox’s teaching origin story begins with a desire to make a difference. He originally enrolled in Michigan’s College of Engineering and was tutoring high school geometry students to make a little money on the side. As word spread about his tutoring skills, he found himself working with eight to 10 students every week, and soon switched to the Marsal School because he loved the work he was doing.
“I realized the impact that I could have on human beings and I decided that teaching was what I wanted to do,” he says.
Distinguished Education Researcher Alumni Award
Odis Johnson Jr.
When Odis Johnson Jr. (PhD ’03) arrived at the University of Michigan to pursue his doctoral degree, he had many questions he wanted to explore across disciplines, especially through the lens of a Person of Color from a disadvantaged background. He didn’t want to stay in one academic lane—and when Michigan helped him appreciate that he didn’t need to, it was a transformative experience that set the stage for the rest of his career.
“A great thing about Michigan was that the institution allowed me to be somewhat undefined,” he said. “I was interested in education, but I was also very interested in housing, policing, the sociology of race, along with data methodologies—and how they told the story of people like myself.
“Through my doctoral program, I gained the tools and perspective I needed to explore questions that expanded beyond a single discipline,” he added. “Michigan was a really defining experience for my career trajectory.”
Johnson hasn’t stopped working across disciplines since he completed his doctoral degree at the Marsal Family School of Education in 2003, and that has empowered him to conduct innovative research that’s driving social change across many pressing issues.
Johnson is now a distinguished transdisciplinary scholar who focuses on social policy, race, and data science and how they structure opportunities for the least advantaged, including African American populations and lower-income households. The depth and range of his professional accomplishments speak to just how expansive his career and research have been.
He’s currently the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Social Policy and STEM Equity at Johns Hopkins University and has faculty appointments in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, at the School of Education as Executive Director of the Center for Safe and Healthy Schools, and in the Department of Sociology.
Johnson’s scholarship has been published in leading academic journals across 12 scientific disciplines, and he has become a frequently am-
plified voice on race and equity in the media. He was editor-in-chief of the Sociology of Education, a journal of the American Sociological Association, and his work has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health, Joyce Foundation, William T. Grant Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. He has also served on scientific advisory boards for the NSF Directorate for STEM Education, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development HCV Demonstration, and the U.S. Department of Education, and directs the NSF Institute in Critical Quantitative, Computational, and Mixed Methodologies.
Johnson’s work may touch on many different academic realms, but there are common threads across his research, especially with his commitment to advancing educational equity and social justice.
He is currently spearheading multiple projects that aim to promote a more just approach to education, housing, and policing. One of his current projects is looking at how to ensure that teacher instruction is not overly reliant on the forms of discipline that can exacerbate racial and ethnic disparities, like suspensions and expulsions. He’s working with 11 schools in Maryland and Missouri to provide culturally responsive professional development training that will help teachers learn a more just approach to maintaining order in their classrooms that focuses more on instruction than social control. He received the Spencer Vision Award for research to conduct this work.
“We are trying to decarcerate instruction to reduce discipline disparities and make instruction less authoritarian,” he explained. “We want teachers to use the carrot instead of the stick to keep students interested in learning and get more kids curious about things like science.”
This project grew out of his extensive work on school surveillance and security, which has been heavily cited in major media outlets. His ideas about social change garner hundreds of media mentions every year, including 881 in 2023, alone. Many of these were related to school shootings and the surveillance measures implemented to respond to them, including security cameras, resource officers, and metal detectors.
“Communities sometimes have knee-jerk responses to these shootings that hinge on increasing surveillance, which we believe misses the mark,” he said. “Rates of injury and death have continued
to rise year-over-year for the last eight years, so clearly, something we’re doing is not working.”
Johnson’s research has found that increased surveillance and detection measures don’t make schools safer. Instead, they lead to poorer academic outcomes for students, including higher rates of in-school suspensions, lower math scores, and less likelihood of attending college.
“Schools with the harshest suspension policies and highest reliance on surveillance tend to have the lowest levels of mathematics achievements
The future of AI and how it intersects with social justice will remain a focus of his work moving forward.
“We’ve got to understand how the use of AIpowered technologies affects opportunities and equity in housing, policing, and education,” he said.
Another important pillar of his work is ensuring equity across data collection and research methodologies. In this realm, he’s helped numerous federal agencies improve data collection for research that addresses public housing, STEM
“I was interested in education, but I was also very interested in housing, policing, the sociology of race, along with data methodologies—and how they told the story of people like myself.” Odis Johnson
and college entry rates,” he said. “This is important because African Americans are four times more likely to be in the schools with the highest reliance on suspension and surveillance.”
Students at these schools are also disproportionately likely to come from low-income and single-parent homes, he added. Johnson stresses that a more successful model is to address mental health and equity, which includes ensuring that kids feel respected, connected, and a sense of belonging at school.
He’s also advised the Federal Trade Commission on their ongoing investigations into companies that sell surveillance technology to schools, including AI-powered surveillance systems that are marketed for school safety—and often overpromise what they can deliver, he says.
“Our work has been questioning whether those technologies actually keep schools safe,” he said. “We’re constantly engaging with the nation’s thought leadership and public discourse around how to keep schools safe and whether AI-powered technology is the answer.”
education, and public schools, and he’s interrogated issues like racial inequities in the use of police force. He created the nation’s first probability sample of fatal interactions with police to investigate whether there are disparities in police homicides and probe the predictors of fatal force by police.
He’s also interested in how research methods can be expanded or broadened to be more equitable for researchers themselves—so other marginalized researchers can thrive in every academic discipline.
“Unfortunately, there’s a lot of inequity within methodology, where certain methods are assumed to be only practiced by certain populations, and other methods are for other populations,” he said. “I want to help ensure that methodological opportunities are available for everyone so that they apply them to conversations in whatever field they choose.”
Johnson with his former professor Carla O’Connor, and classmates
Eddie Fergus Arcia (AM ’00, PhD ’02) and Lorelei Vargas, (MPP ’96, AM ’00).
Lifetime Achievement Alumni Award Barbara Eason-Watkins
Barbara Eason-Watkins (ABEd ’73, TeachCert ’73) didn’t intend to work for 50 years before finally retiring from her job as a superintendent in 2024. But it was hard for her to walk away from her decades-long career—and her unwavering commitment to improving public education.
“I loved what I was doing,” she said. “I had a real passion for trying to make a difference, especially for students who may not have had the best opportunities from home. I always wanted to make the educational system a place in which all students could thrive.”
Eason-Watkins spent the majority of her 50year career in administration—as a nationally recognized principal, chief education officer for Chicago Public Schools, and longtime superintendent—but she never got very far away from the classroom. She was known for her relentless support for teachers and had a reputation for being “in the weeds” with students.
“I always wanted to stay in touch with what was happening on the ground and make sure everyone felt supported in their work,” she said. “At the same time, I wanted to make sure teachers felt empowered to be leaders and have agency over their classroom decisions.”
It was a lack of agency that led her to first seek an administrative position. She was teaching in a first-grade classroom in Chicago. She’d found a musician to visit her class and engage with her young students, many of whom hadn’t had much exposure to music or various instruments. When the principal of the school found out about her plan, she told Eason-Watkins she couldn’t have a musician visit her classroom because she hadn’t asked her for permission first.
“I saw how you really have to have some level of control and power in order to make the greatest difference,” she said.
Eason-Watkins went on to pursue her first principal position in 1985, and quickly made building relationships a core part of her approach to leadership.
For example: when she was hired as the superintendent for Michigan City Area Schools in Michigan City, Indiana in 2010 after decades in
Chicago, people kept asking her, “What are your priorities for the district?”
“And I said, well, I need to find out,” she remembers. “It was critically important to listen first to find out what teachers, schools, and students needed.”
Eason-Watkins proceeded to spend her first 100 days visiting all 13 schools in the district and speaking with teachers, students, and community organizations. Over the course of her tenure in Michigan City, she led strategic planning for the district and collected 3,000 responses to a survey, which included students from third to 12th grade. She also added students to the planning committee because she knew that students felt like their voices had historically gone unheard.
“It wasn’t for me to come in and say, ‘you need x, y, z,’” she says. “I wanted to hear from the key stakeholders as to what they are they really consider to be the priorities.”
It was a value she prioritized in Chicago as well, noting that she’d seen too many examples of administrators charging into an educational setting with an established agenda, before ever getting input from teachers or other people in the community about local needs.
She jokes that her husband, Irvin, never wanted to go to the grocery store with her in Indiana, because he knew “they’d never get out of the grocery store,” as she’d spend so much time chatting with people she ran into. However, he was her greatest cheerleader and supporter, and that enabled her long career.
Eason-Watkins also nurtured her relationships with teachers and empowered them to be leaders, who wouldn’t feel as powerless as she did back in her first-grade classroom. She practiced a distributed leadership model, where responsibility and decision-making were shared, before it was even a named concept.
“There was no language for what I was trying to do,” she said. “But I understood that you have to have strong engagement, support, and buy-in from teachers.”
When teachers were striking in Chicago, she brought them donuts on the picket line. And she constantly worked alongside the leadership of the teachers’ unions in her districts.
“It was always of utmost importance to treat people with respect and reassure them that I had their back,” she said.
In Chicago, Eason-Watkins was the lead curriculum and instruction strategist for the district,
“I always wanted to stay in touch with what was happening on the ground and make sure everyone felt supported in their work. At the same time, I wanted to make sure teachers felt empowered to be leaders and have agency over their classroom decisions.” Barbara Eason-Watkins
which was the third largest in the nation. When she spearheaded efforts to address the lingering achievement gap in the district’s schools, she went to every meeting about the curricular changes and policy reforms so she could learn alongside the teachers and ensure they were set up for success.
She was also deeply invested in the success of students. She launched initiatives that helped prepare students for college, especially first-generation students who lacked the family support they needed to pursue a postsecondary education. And she expanded technical education and career-readiness initiatives, and collaborated with local community groups and unions to offer students apprenticeships and training opportunities in such fields as construction, manufacturing, and culinary arts.
“In many cases, students have capacity, but they don’t have the critical support they need to succeed,” she said.
She also established new magnet schools in the arts and STEM, and implemented new programs for gifted and talented elementary students.
Eason-Watkins has been recognized for her commitment to education many times throughout her career. She has earned numerous awards for her work, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Northwest Indiana Society of Innovators and the Sagamore of the Wabash, which is the highest honor awarded by the governor of Indiana.
Education was, surprisingly, not her original career plan. She was on a pre-med trajectory when she first enrolled at the University of Michigan. One summer, she tutored incarcerated adolescents to earn money for her rent, and met Michigan professor Gwendolyn Calvert Baker through the center where she was working. She
couldn’t believe how deprived the students had been of educational opportunities; she was also moved by the work of Calvert Baker, whose focus was on race and multicultural education and who was working on a project looking at representation in reading materials.
“By the end of the summer, I said, ‘I may be taking a huge risk, but I want to go into education,’” she says.
Eason-Watkins stayed committed to representation and equity through her entire career. She remembers hearing stories about how her mother wasn’t allowed to go to the local school in Alabama when she was young. And how her grandfather, a local minister, opened up the church on weekends so African American students had a place to learn.
She wrote her own children’s book and worked with an illustrator to center Children of Color in it, so more students could see themselves in the pages. And she knew it was important for her to set an example of what underrepresented students could do. She remembers getting turned away from one of the first jobs she applied to when she showed up for the interview because the district said it wasn’t ready for “someone who looks like you.”
One of the moments that will always stand out from her 50-year career is when she first started working in Michigan City and a student ran after her as she was leaving the building.
“He said, ‘I’m just so happy you’re here. I’ve never seen a superintendent who looks like you,’” she said. “It’s always been incredibly important for me to help make sure students see themselves represented.” ■
new g ifts, Endowments, and Bequests
Donald and Mary Johnson met as young teachers on the faculty at Niles High School in Skokie, Illinois, where he was a mathematics teacher and she taught Spanish. Every day, they played cards together at lunch. In the decades that followed, they earned advanced degrees from Indiana University (Don obtained a doctorate in school administration and Mary earned a master’s), got married, raised three children, and traveled the world together.
Recently, their son Mark D. Johnson (BS ’89, MS ’91, PhD ’94) and daughter-in-law Kelly W. Johnson (BS ’89, MArch ’91) established the Donald V. and Mary A. Johnson Scholarship Fund in memory of Mark’s parents.
“Donald had a passion for education, and his commitment to teaching and leading was evident throughout his career,” says Mark. After teaching mathematics, Donald went on to serve as principal at Wheaton North High School in Wheaton, Illinois and then at Princeton High School in Cincinnati. For 19 years, he was assistant superintendent at Leyden High Schools in Franklin Park, Illinois, until he retired in 1993.
In thinking about how to honor Donald and Mary’s legacies as educators, the younger Johnsons turned to their own connection to the University of Michigan, where they met just three weeks into their freshman year. The Donald V. and Mary A. Johnson Scholarship Fund will support teacher education students at the Marsal School who intend to teach STEM, an area the family is passionate about.
“One of Don’s biggest jobs was to find talent,” says Kelly, “and teachers who wanted to stay. We were looking for a way to help a teaching intern come out of their educational training without debt that would keep them from being able to work as a teacher.”
“It’s also fun to think about how, if you help an educator get their degree and then they go on to teach many other people, the impact of the gift spreads out over the years,” says Mark.
Kelly adds, “We both certainly remember teachers who left a profound impression. You can’t remember who won the Super Bowl, but you always remember a teacher who had a huge impact on your life.”
Donald and Mary Johnson on one of their many trips abroad
Although Jon Keller (BGS ’72, MD ’77, MPH ’96) graduated from University High School in 1967, he has remained a “U High Cub” for life. The University School was an elementary and secondary “laboratory school”—one of the first of its kind in the country—that existed within the School of Education from 1924 to 1968. In addition to providing education to young learners, it also served as a site to conduct research and implement new educational theory.
Last July, Keller and nearly 200 fellow U-High alumni gathered to celebrate their alma mater’s centennial. Spanning two days of activities that included a tour of what is now the Marsal Family School of Education and a banquet at the Michigan League, the reunion offered many opportunities to reminisce about the unique educational experience U High had afforded them on the U-M campus. In honor of the milestone anniversary, Keller banded together with several of his former classmates to establish The University School Centennial Scholarship Fund, and invited their fellow alumni to join them in giving back to the school that had given them so much.
“We were all the beneficiaries of the talent, dedication, and dignity of our teachers, the administrators, and staff,” wrote Keller in the U High newsletter when the scholarship was announced. “We made deep friendships that have lasted decades, and that helped form us as young women and men. The school’s location on the U-M campus gave us a unique window into the larger world and helped set our course in life. In honor of our teachers and the phenomenal educational experiences they provided us, a special University School endowed scholarship fund has been created to provide meaningful financial assistance to a new generation of educators who will carry on in this great tradition.”
The University School Centennial Scholarship Fund aims to provide need-based scholarship support to undergraduate students at U-M who are enrolled in Marsal’s teacher education program or who have otherwise demonstrated interest in pursuing a degree or certificate in teacher education.
Dean Elizabeth Birr Moje, who participated in the centennial celebration, thanked the Cubs for their dedication to current students. “It was wonderful to see so many Cubs in July at the centennial celebration. It was an honor to be part of the event
Ch A MPIO n S for E D UCATIO n
and experience the energy and camaraderie of the University Schools community. The University Elementary and High Schools hold a special place in the history of education in the U.S. for being among the first ‘laboratory schools’—a model developed by John Dewey. As the site of trailblazing research and the foundation for the robust K-12 partnerships that are still central to our mission, the U Schools legacy is still alive and well in the Marsal Family School of Education. The relationship between the University Schools and the Marsal School is further fortified by the many Cubs who have supported our future teachers through generous scholarships in recognition of the faculty you appreciated and admired. My heartfelt thanks to each of you for your support.”
When Caryn Mamrack Hsu (AB ’95, TeachCert ’95) graduated from the University of Michigan with a major in performing arts and a teaching certificate, she had hoped to take her passion for theater into the classrooms of Detroit. For four years, she taught English and speech, but the schools she worked in often lacked the resources to support the arts. And then, while teaching at Cooley High School, a U-M class called Theatre for Social Change, taught by Buzz Alexander, partnered with her school. The class brought together U-M students and high schoolers, using improv techniques to explore and unpack social issues.
“Together, they would write a play to explore issues that the kids were facing at the time. It gave them a chance to address different topics and talk through them. It was an amazing program,” recalls Hsu. Although she left her work in the classroom to pursue a career in film and television in Los Angeles, her time in the Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) remained important to her. Recently, she and her husband Matthew H. Hsu established the Mamrack Teaching Scholarship Fund to provide support to undergraduate and master’s teacher education students in the Marsal School, with a preference for students who complete their training at The School at Marygrove or another DPSCD school.
Last fall, Hsu toured The School at Marygrove with Dean Elizabeth Birr Moje. “It was such a treat to tour the Marygrove campus and hear about the ambitious
and groundbreaking work being done by U-M in Detroit,” she says. “It is very exciting to see programs set in motion that are based on theories and ideals that I remember discussing in my own education courses 30 years ago.”
Just as her gift will have an impact on Marsal School teaching interns and their students for years to come, Hsu’s own experience in the classroom continues to inspire her writing and film projects.
The University high School centennial celebration at the Michigan League
hsu in 1995 during her student teaching term at henry Ford high School in Roberta herter’s classroom
Ch A MPIO n S for E D UCATIO
growing up in Saginaw, Michigan, both of Lyn McHie’s (ABEd ’68, TeachCert ’68) parents were educators. Her mother, Ilah Parker Huyghe, taught primary grades for 28 years. Her father, Oscar Huyghe (AMEd ’54), served in the profession for a total of 40 years. Starting as band director, he became dean of students, assistant principal, and eventually high school principal. As a young child, tagging along to various activities that were part of her parents’ jobs as educators, McHie came to see that teaching was a way of life. She remembers climbing the creaky stairs with her sister up to their father’s directors’ loft to listen to him play with the band during rehearsal. They also joined in alongside the student musicians to march in their town’s Fourth of July parade.
“It was always a part of who I was, so I just decided teaching was the perfect thing for me to do. Plus, I love kids,” says McHie. She proudly followed in her father’s footsteps, attending the School of Education at the University of Michigan where she graduated with distinction. She then went on to teach fifth grade for 24 years. Over that time, lessons McHie learned as a student at U-M stayed with her, including those on topics like geology and linguistics that served her in unexpected ways as a classroom teacher. The example her parents set—that teaching was a way of life—also continued to guide her.
One year, when she expressed concern to her students about safety due to the increased school bus traffic at their school, the class decided to write letters to their congressional representative. She told her students that the congressman was a busy person, and not to set their hopes too high on receiving a response. But the power of 35 young voices not only yielded a reply—their school got a traffic light!
“My dad was so proud to be a University of Michigan person. That was a delight to him. It was just part of who we were,” says McHie. In turn, McHie’s own commitment to the profession and affinity for the university inspired her daughter, Jessica McHie (BS ’97, TeachCert ’98), to carry on the family tradition for a third generation and attain her degree in teaching from U-M. She hopes that the establishment of the Lyn Mchie Education Scholarship Fund, which provides scholarship support to teacher education students in the Marsal School, will help generations of teachers to come.
“My parents were proud of their profession and what they accomplished, as am I and as is my daughter. I am honored and excited to encourage future educators by giving back.”
michael Speigl (AB ’03) fondly remembers the many teachers who had a positive influence on him when he was growing up on the west side of Michigan, in the Coopersville Area Public Schools district. There were those who were nurturing, as well as those who held him accountable.
They were members of the community—they showed up at football and basketball games, their kids attended school with Speigl, and they helped prepare him for his eventual acceptance at the University of Michigan.
“The teachers that I had were incredibly impactful to me as a young adult and now as an adult,” he says.
Speigl went on to found PrepandMe, a nonprofit that provides resources and preparation for hard-working students from disadvantaged backgrounds to access higher education. He also married a teacher. Education is a shared value for Michael and Ashley Speigl, who are now raising five children of their own.
“Teachers are interacting every day with the loves of our lives. They have the biggest influence on our kids, and that’s the same for every household in the country,” says Speigl. “So whatever we can do to support teachers in getting excellent training to prepare them to teach the next generation is critically important to us.”
Their establishment of the The Michael and Ashley Speigl Education Scholarship Fund will provide support to undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in the Marsal School’s teacher education program. ■
Michael and Ashley Speigl with their family
Lyn Mchai with her daughter Jessica at the Big house
To submit class notes, update your contact information, communicate with the editor, or connect with the Marsal Family School of Education, please visit marsal.umich.edu/magazine.
Dr. Monica Bhatt (PhD ’17), Senior Research Director of the Personalized Learning Initiative, led by the University of Chicago Education Lab and MDRC, published a report on data from a large-scale randomized controlled trial of almost 20,000 students across the country showing that in-school, consistent “high-dosage” tutoring can be scaled and can work to improve student learning in significant ways—even when delivered in the aftermath of the pandemic and in diverse academic settings. These results provide hints that high-dosage tutoring delivered in school can be scaled successfully, though there is considerable variability by student characteristic, program feature, and educational setting.
Megan Riley Kelynack (AM ’14) published an article for the Association for Talent Development titled “A Cooperative and Collaborative Way to Brainstorm: Combine design thinking with Experiential Learning to inspire innovative solutions from a team.” Infusing design thinking principles into everyday problem-solving at school and work ensures that a team develops a solution that everyone un-
derstands and appreciates. The article addresses ways to engage learners in a team-based, hypothetical problem exercise using experiential learning, fostering outside-the-box, fluid idea formation and implementation as a result of collective brainstorming.
Dr. Kati Lebioda (AB ’10, PhD ’24) won the 2025 ACPA-College Student Educators International Marylu McEwen Dissertation of the Year Award for BlossomingTogether: Imagining Humanizing Relationships between Racially/Ethnically Minoritized Students and Postsecondary Institutions through Digital Storytelling She received the award at the ACPA Annual Convention in February in Long Beach, California, with her advisor, Dr. Rosemary Perez, in attendance. The award recognizes a completed dissertation that demonstrates scholarly excellence and makes a substantial contribution to knowledge in the general field of student affairs/student services. It is named in honor of Dr. Marylu McEwen, Professor Emerita in the Student Affairs concentration with the Department of Counseling, Higher Education, and Special Education, at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Dr. tamarie macon (MS ’12, PhD ’15) officially launched her consulting business in November of 2023, real eyes consulting with tamarie. tamarie currently provides writing and editing services, as well as personal styling services. Check it out at realeyesconsulting.com!
Wells Fargo Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership at East Carolina University Matthew Militello (BEd ’92, TeachCert ’92) published his seventh book, Leading and LearningTogether: Cultivating School Change fromWithin (Teachers College Press). The book focuses on how school leaders leverage the assets in their school communities to engage in meaningful improvement efforts.
In June 2024, Dr. Judy Schabel (PhD ’20) started as Assistant Dean for Professional Development & Mentorship, a newly created position at the U-M School of Information. In August 2024, Schabel also reached 35 years of service at the University of Michigan.
University of Michigan Regents
Michael J. Behm, Grand Blanc
Mark J. Bernstein, Ann Arbor
Paul W. Brown, Ann Arbor
Sarah Hubbard, Okemos
Denise Ilitch, Bingham Farms
Carl J. Meyers, Dearborn
Katherine E. White, Ann Arbor
Domenico Grasso (ex officio)
The University of Michigan, as an equal opportunity employer, complies with all applicable federal and state laws regarding nondiscrimination. The University of Michigan is committed to a policy of equal opportunity for all persons and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, marital status, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, disability, religion, height, weight or veteran status in employment, educational programs and activities and admissions. Inquiries or complaints may be addressed to the Equity, Civil Rights and Title IX Office (ECRT), 2072 Administrative Services Building, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1432, 734-763-0235, TTY 734-647-1388.
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