Carrie Symons, PhD

On August 15, 2025, I started my new job as a Special Instructor of Elementary Teacher Education in the Department of Teacher Education in the School of Education and Human Services at Oakland University in Rochester Hills, Michigan. In this position, my primary responsibility is to teach pre-service elementary teachers how to teach literacy.

From the New Faculty Orientation facilitated by Nivedita Mukherji, Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs, in partnership with the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning to the School of Education and Human Services’ pinning ceremony for undergraduate students just entering the teacher preparation program, the message is clear: Oakland University values teaching. Landing at an institution of higher ed that values teaching, I feel at home.

From Dean Jon Margerum-Leys’ meet-and-greet with my three fellow new hires where we had lunch with the six new hires from last year to our departmental faculty meeting of 16 around a large a conference table, I feel welcomed. I literally and figuratively have a seat at the table.

From my online, asynchronous, master’s level Disciplinary Literacy course where I am working with students who are aspiring/in-service teachers across grade levels and disciplines to my embedded literacy methods courses where I teach in elementary schools in Utica, Troy, and West Shelby Township, I feel a deep sense of alignment and purpose.

Upon graduating from CU Boulder’s Master’s Plus program in 2000 where I earned my master’s in curriculum and instruction and my State of Colorado elementary teaching license, my dear friend and colleague, Julie Cohen, gave me a book, Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer. Reading Parker Palmer’s words, I realized how I felt about teaching—it was way more than a job; it was a calling, a vocation. But for me, pursuing my vocation has not been a straightforward path; it’s been a dynamic process.

About 10 years ago, I began to ask myself if I was truly leading a value-drive life. Sometimes we have to fall out of alignment to find our way back into alignment. This interrogation required a hard, honest look—an embodied, sacred, intellectual, meditative inquiry—at what I cared most about and why. What emerged?

TEACHING, GRATITUDE, NONHARMING, TRUTH, INTEGRITY

So what did [does] this look like in practice? After years of navigating the pursuit of a value-driven life, I find myself in a mental, emotional, and physical space that truly centers itself around teaching and—the promise of and belief in—teachers.

The School of Education and Human Services at Oakland University is in Pawley Hall. As you enter the building on the third floor, you hear the voices of young children playing on the first floor in the Lowry Center for Early Childhood Education. Off to the left beyond the glass doors, you see the Educational Resources Laboratory with this month’s featured display of flags and picture books representing South American authors, tables for studying and collaborating, and shelves upon shelves of books and resources for K-12 students that faculty and students can use in their courses.

Students sit in the foyer, taking a break between classes, chatting with a friend. On my way to my new office on the fourth floor, the sun pours through the windows, illuminating the atrium. Engraved in the wall up high, in the center of it all, is a Mari Evans quote:

Education… A jewel, casting brilliances into the future. ~ Mari Evans

No wonder I finally feel at home.

Since my previous blog entry (February 28, 2025), a lot has changed and a lot of change is on the horizon. As such, I want to take this opportunity to share the news of a personal change that lies ahead for me as part of my professional advancement. At the conclusion of this academic year, I will be leaving Summers-Knoll School to step into my new job as a full-time faculty member of Elementary Teacher Education in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Oakland University in Rochester Hills, MI. I will be ever grateful for my time at Summers-Knoll, for all that I’ve learned, the rich learning experiences we created together, and the relationships built along the way. Although my departure coincides with the news of the SK-Greenhills evolution, my decision to move on from SK was not in response to the pending changes but rather the emergence of an ideal opportunity for me to step back into teacher education at the university-level.

As many of you know, prior to assuming my position as Executive Director of Teaching and Learning at Summers-Knoll in Fall 2022, I was an assistant professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University for seven years. At MSU, I taught literacy and language courses across the undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral programs. From 2016 to 2020, I was the Subject Area Leader (SAL) for Elementary Literacy in MSU’s Teacher Preparation Program. As the SAL, I led instructor teams to design and enact evidence-based, literacy methods curricula, including the development of rubrics and key assessments to gather data for ongoing program improvement and the Teacher Preparation Program’s accreditation.

In addition to my instructional and administrative responsibilities at MSU, as a community-engaged scholar, I partnered with the Refugee Development Center (RDC), a local nonprofit, grassroots organization whose mission is “to cultivate a welcoming, thriving community that collaborates with refugees and newcomers through education, engagement, and support.” My scholarship was published in journals such as Pedagogies: An International Journal, English Journal, Linguistics and Education, Journal of Research in Childhood Education, and Learning and Instruction and was featured in MSU’s Engaged Scholar E-Newsletter and MSU Today: Voices and Viewpoints. My research was funded by the American Educational Research Association, the International Literacy Association, Michigan State University’s Diversity Research Network, and the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities’ Network for Global Civic Engagement.

My commitment to social justice, teachers, and teacher education stem from a long legacy of educators on my father’s side of the family. My father (Jim Symons) was a beloved educator, scholar, and performing artist. He passed away just last month on Thursday, March 6, 2025 at the age of 87 after a valiant, four-month battle with pneumonia. His passing inspired an article in the Denver Gazette, James Symons: A Jacobean of All Trades, written by Denver theatre critic, John Moore, as well as an ode to a legendary library appreciator in the Boulder Public Library Foundation’s April Newsletter written by Chris Barge.

As the youngest of three daughters, I adored and admired my father. While earning my PhD at the University of Michigan, I called on him almost daily for support and advice. He was not just my father—he was my mentor, a trusted guide with precious insight and wisdom. But until his passing, I did not know the depth and breadth of the lives he touched. My sisters and I have been showered in notes and emails from former students, colleagues, and collaborators who deeply appreciated him. He made a profound impact on so many people’s lives, including mine.

As accomplished as my father was, his passion for learning and thirst for knowledge never ceased. In his and my mother’s (Judith Symons) honor, I carry forward an unwavering commitment to my own growth—personal and professional—as well as the growth of the students and teachers with whom I work along with the recognition that who we are, and how we treat one another, matters more than what we accomplish.

May we each continue to evolve into the people we need to be to create the kind of world we want to live in.

With its endlessly grey skies and mud-strewn banks of snow lining the edges of the streets, Michigan winter has proven itself once again. From an adult perspective, it’s a perennial force with which we reckon. Bundling from head to toe, we emerge from our dwellings. White-knuckled, we navigate the icy, ragged roads, noting the need for new windshield wipers.

But from a child’s perspective, February in Michigan brings a fantastical frozen tundra: freshly fallen snow and below freezing temperatures provide mounds for digging, hiding, and sliding. At recess time, bundled in snow gear, packs of wild snow cats fiercely guard their lairs; the soccer field becomes an ice hockey rink; and an old, plastic, decorative (headless) goose yard-ornament becomes a sled. As the snow melts, puddles abound, and mud becomes the new medium for play.

Despite the seemingly eternal winter, we need not look far for sources of hope. They are all around us and within us. As Camus said, “I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” For me, especially when the skies are persistently grey, consciously and deliberately invoking gratitude alters my perception. I was grateful when my colleague, a high school English teacher in Washington D.C., sent this Camus quote my way because it made me pause and take stock of simple things that contribute to my “invincible summer.”

This week, Summers-Knoll teachers and I were talking about the “why” that drives what we do. In Japanese, the word Ikigai is the reason we get out of bed in the morning.

As educators, making a positive difference in the lives of children is central to our life’s work. But we can dig even deeper and ask why, and each educator will have their own reasoning and story underpinning their “why.”

For me, children give me hope. And I feel accountable to being a source of hope for them. It’s a two-way street. So what do we do, as adults in children’s lives, to keep our hope alive?

As my friend in D.C. posed to me, I now pose this question to you: What is your invincible summer?

The Washtenaw Elementary Science Olympiad (WESO) is a huge, annual, parent-run event held in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The Science Olympiad is a national non-profit organization that was created in 1983 by Dr. Gerard K. Putz & Jack Cairns. It was established to increase kids’ interest in science. Olympiads actually started in Michigan & Delaware, and today, Olympiad has members in all 50 states with more than 13,500 active members in K-12 schools. As it turns out, Washtenaw County’s Elementary Science Olympiad (WESO) is the biggest in the world!

WESO emphasizes a wide variety of events designed to target 2nd through 5th graders’ different skill sets so that whomever wants to participate can do so. Participants learn science through an interactive, hands-on, small-group approach. An entirely parent/volunteer-run event, involvement in WESO provides opportunities for students to extend their learning beyond the school day; practices take place after school and on the weekends. Last year, Summers-Knoll (SK) had six coaches, six events, and six teams. Nine SK students participated alongside 33 Washtenaw County elementary schools.

This year, SK’s participation has expanded significantly: we have 9 coaches, 10 events, 15 teams, and 15 students in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grades! Huge shout out to all of the parent volunteers who make this possible!

The 2025 WESO Tournament will be held Sat, May 10th @ Pioneer High School. This day-long event offers something for everyone of all ages, even if your kids aren’t competing. There are all kinds of different hands-on activities – run by local community partners – that promote kids’ engagement, learning, and enthusiasm for science.

Mark your calendars and plan to drop in for a couple of hours or spend the day with your fellow SK Dragons!

Every day, I get to spend time in classrooms. I get to witness teachers teaching and students learning. Because this is my everyday existence, it would be easy to take the rigor I see for granted, but I don’t because I am constantly zooming out and reflecting upon what I am observing. I recently returned to a body of research on teaching for understanding, which affirms the power and promise of the rigorous, project-based learning in which we are engaged at Summers-Knoll school.

As David Perkins (co-principal investigator of the Teaching For Understanding initiative and author of Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can transform Education) writes, “Our real criterion for understanding has to be performance. People understand something when they can think and act flexibly with what they know about it, not just rehearse information and execute routine skills” (Perkins, 2009, p.49).

To help you see how SK teachers’ and students’ work reflects the principles of teaching for understanding, let me shine a light on some of the upper school students’ achievements over the past several weeks:

On January 31st, the upper school students put the final, polishing touches on their original short stories and submitted them to the Ann Arbor District Library annual, state-wide kid and teen writing contests. These annual contests, which SK has turned into a short story project, provides students with an authentic purpose and audience, outside of SK, for which to write. Since 2023, several SK students have placed among the top three in the state for their grade level.

In this short story project and for the contests, students begin writing their stories in November, and they iteratively work through the entire writing cycle (e.g., idea generation and selection, drafting, revising and editing) as they bring their pieces to a point where they are ready for submission. Along the way, they give and receive feedback from peers and teachers. They develop their identities, skills, and strategies as writers.

Concomitantly, the upper school students have been learning about the human body, cells, and systems. Starting with an analysis of how the various members of a soccer team work together (something the students know well from a nonacademic perspective), they applied this metaphor to an inquiry-based study of how the various parts of the human body enable its myriad functions. Now, in their final week of this project, each student is wrapping up their individual project presentation. With a choice of modality, each student has created a visual (re)presentation of a human activity (e.g., throwing a snow ball, playing a video game). Their representations reflect a depth of understanding about the content; high degrees of hand-drawing and graphic design skills; the attention to detail and care with which they’ve synthesized their learning – all of which reflects an incredibly high standard for quality.

Overlapping with the short story and human body projects, the upper school students selected characters for their next project, Place Out of Time (POOT), an annual collaboration with the University of Michigan. In this online simulation, students engage in a debate about current civic issues from the perspective of an historical figure. After conducting research on their chosen figure, they create a character profile and participate in online dialogues with other historical figures through the POOT platform.

Clearly, the upper school teacher, Ian, and his students have been busy, but as you can see, this is not “busy work” by any means. It’s all meaningful. It matters. It matters to the students because the projects connect to their lives, allow for their voice and choice, and require them to share what they have learned with an audience outside of SK. They are not merely turning in assignments for their teachers to grade, but rather, they are producing polished pieces of writing, preparing presentations, and conducting research on historical figures so that they can engage in high-level perspective-taking through critical conversations about current civic issues.

When teachers teach for understanding, students are doing something with what they are learning. They are synthesizing and transferring knowledge and then transforming it into something tangible. This is the SK way.

Classroom cultures are sustained through rituals and routines, created over time, by a teacher and their students. Every day, throughout a school year, rituals and routines are the thread that hold the pieces of the “learning” quilt together. The consistency of such practices implicitly communicates: This is how we care for one another and our space, value and push one another’s thinking, take risks to stretch our learning, listen to one another, concentrate, play, live, and work together as a community.

For example, every morning, in SK’s Young 5s/Kindergarten classroom, the teacher and her students engage in a predictable morning routine: the student director-of-the-day assists the teacher with the flipping of the calendar to today’s day of the week and date, reading the calendar, recording and counting (by tens and then by fives) which day of the school year we’re on. (We are almost at the 100th day of school!) As a class, they read the morning message, and the director-of-the-day assists with acting out the watering their class plant, a crocheted succulent named Cutie (pictured above, made by @lazydaisycreates).

Whereas habits are things we do without much thought, rituals and routines are thoughtful. They are imbued with intention and purpose. In the above example, the teacher and her class have a “morning routine,” and within that routine, there are rituals in which she and her students engage. The watering of the plant is one such ritual; it’s special and specific to that classroom community.

Children rely upon the rituals and routines we co-create with them for a sense of structure and predictability. Structure and predictability provide a sense of safety, and when learners feel safe, they can be spontaneous and take the risks necessary for growth.

Where might you need or want a new ritual or routine in your and/or your child’s life? How might such a routine help them take the next step in their personal growth journey?

Every week, on Friday mornings at Summers-Knoll school, we have a whole school assembly affectionately referred to as Dragon Time. As such, Friday mornings are always abuzz with the energy of children, faculty, staff, and parents, and it’s a celebratory way to end the week.

The purpose of Dragon Time is for teachers and classes to share what they’ve been working on. Sometimes students use Dragon Time as an opportunity to engage their peers and parents in what they’re in the midst of learning. At other times, classes are at the end of a project, and Dragon Time gives students an opportunity to share their final products with the broader school community.

But you might be wondering: Why is it called Dragon Time?

Karen Bayoneto, SK’s Director of Operations, has been at SK since 2006. And when I asked her about the history of the Dragon mascot, she shared the story of how it came to be:

“In the fall of 2012, Summers-Knoll moved into its new home on Platt Road. There was a lot of excitement about the school being in a beautiful new building and conversations spread throughout the halls about SK needing a mascot. The idea caught on with the kids and so the Head of School at the time, Joanna Hastings, took suggestions from the students and then put it to a vote. Dragons won and so the SK Dragons were born.

Soon after, one of our parents, Paula Novelli who was the mother of Pearl Lee, an SK student, went to Joanna and said she’d met an English artist, Martin Cheek, who did mosaic art. Paula offered to commission Martin Cheek to do a Dragon Mosaic for SK.  

It started with the students drawing what they thought the Dragon should look like. These renderings were mailed to Martin in England with a note from Joanna that the Dragon should not be too scary and not cartoonish. Martin created the design of the Dragon you see now on the atrium wall from those students’ pictures. He cut and fired each piece in England, and when he was done, he brought them to Ann Arbor, to SK, to install. He spent about a week at SK doing the Dragon installation, and when he was done, he worked with the students in the Art room teaching them how to do mosaic art. The students all made a dragon egg with Martin, which he placed around the building in all sorts of hiding places. We did not put the student’s names on them, on purpose, as they had to find their egg once they went up on the walls.  

This is how the dragon mascot idea was brought to life, and ever since then we have been known as the SK Dragons.”

Welcome back to school after the winter holidays! With the start of a new calendar year, January inspires a sense of both affirmation and possibility. As a midpoint to the school year, it’s a natural time to revisit goals and set new ones.

At Summers-Knoll, our mission is to “prepare children for the future through a challenging academic program that considers the whole child in a supportive, encouraging, and joyful environment.” We fulfill this mission through getting to know each child as an individual, cultivating a school-wide culture of care and belonging, engaging in rigorous project-based learning, and developing each child’s appreciation of—and skills in—art, music, Latin, and French.

We recognize that, for learning to be meaningful, students must see and make connections between the work they are doing in school and the “real” world.

For example, in the Preschool’s project Ready! Set! Go!, preschool students have been learning physics – yes, physics! They’ve been exploring the concepts of force and motion through building, experimenting, and moving through everyday endeavors such as putting on their winter gear before going outside!

In the Young 5/Kindergarteners’ storytelling project, students are learning how to retell stories. They learn through inquiry and exploration. They invite a published author in as a guest speaker and then go out into the community to see to a live theatre performance. They develop their skills as writers and storytellers through project-based learning.

In the 1st/2nd grade classroom, students have been taking a deep dive into human’s exploration of space with their project Earth in Space. To build their knowledge about space exploration, they’ve gone to a planetarium, hosted a virtual guest speaker scientist from NASA who is working on Mars exploration, and researched various spacecraft. Thinking like engineers, they are currently designing their own spacecraft inventions based upon the facts they’ve learned. If the goal is to design and build your own spacecraft, there’s a lot you need to learn while pursuing your mission!

In the third/fourth grade classroom, in their Out of Eden Neighborhood Mapping project, students launched the year with the driving question: How can we better understand and accept others’ perspectives? They mapped their own neighborhoods and got to know their local communities better. They corresponded online with students from other countries and learned about their lives and neighborhoods. They also applied their critical thinking skills to identify who, in their local community, they might not often get a chance to know (e.g., whose voices are not often heard) and asked themselves how to get to know those people better. They identified wanting to know more about the senior citizens in their community, so just this past week, the students visited with folks at Silver Maples Retirement Community and interviewed them about their lives. They will return to Silver Maples in a couple of weeks after writing Tanka poems based upon their interview data, and they’ll share their poems with their new grandfriends.

Meaningful projects take on a life of their own, and often continue well beyond their end date, overlapping with the next project—students get invested, and they’re eager to follow through with their commitments, especially when they experience the reciprocal benefits of connecting with community members who have become friends.

In their first project of the year, the Upper School students studied the concept of Intangible Cultural Heritage. They looked at cultures around the world, and then they turned their lens inward. They researched the history of Summers-Knoll and drew upon their own lived histories at SK to write and illustrate a Things SK book, which describes aspects of SK’s intangible cultural heritage. These books are now available for the SK community to peruse. Come check one out from our library!

With recognition of so much great work in which the students have been engaged, we move into 2025 with confidence and aspirations. We’ve learned a lot, and there’s always more to learn—onward ho!

Photograph above: Sunrise on The Flatirons in Boulder, CO (December, 2024)

As we turn our gaze toward the end of 2024, from school days buzzing with anticipation to winter holiday celebrations, I am filled with gratitude for our SK community. Students, parents, faculty, staff, volunteers, fellow members of the admin team, and community partners—every day, together, we create the kind of world we want to live in. As an educational community—through our intentions, words, and actions—we bring our whole selves to the collective endeavors of teaching and learning.

Personal, academic, social, and emotional growth occurs within—and as a result of—sociocultural contexts and communities of practice where we can stretch our minds, take intellectual risks, explore our creative potential, give and receive constructive feedback, trust and depend upon one another, and work autonomously and collaboratively toward individual as well as shared goals. Diversity of thought, orientations, perspectives, backgrounds, abilities, languages, and beliefs is essential to our ever-deepening understanding of ourselves and our world.

While this work of becoming and evolving is a deeply personal process, it is not a solo journey. Who we are is shaped by the circles of people surrounding us in our families and communities—the word ubuntu captures this idea.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for all you give and do to make SK a place where we can learn and grow together. May this holiday season be a reminder of our greatest gift: each other.

In the field of education, and in particular teacher education, there’s a pervasive myth that deserves repeated debunking. Myth: Some people are just born to teach; teaching ability is innate, not something that can be learned or developed. Truth: Through dedication and high quality instruction, people can become highly effective teachers. Like other human-centered professions (e.g., medicine or law), teaching requires a tremendous amount of skill. But what, exactly, distinguishes a teacher from someone who’s very knowledgeable about their line of work (i.e., a content-area expert)?

“The work of teaching is not something that’s very well understood by the public…” Dr. Deborah Loewenberg Ball says in her 2014 presentation to the Legislature’s joint House and Senate Education Committees.

In her presentation to the Committees, Dr. Ball takes 6 minutes to illustrate what distinguishes a teacher from o​ther professionals. She uses an example of a multi-digit multiplication problem that was solved by three different students who arrived at three different (wrong) answers. She invites the committee members to briefly examine the students’ work, and then she asks them to “ascertain what it is that the student did wrong to produce these answers.”

After viewing the students’ work for a few moments, the committee members are silent. Her question seems to have stumped them. She waits a bit longer and then asks:

“Is there any one of you who believes right now that you understand the steps that produced the errors in all three cases?”

No one responds.

“For two of the three?” No one responds.

“For one?”

Dr. Ball then proceeds to use this humbling experience as an opportunity to illustrate what distinguishes an elementary school teacher from people who are well-educated and/or content-area experts, even mathematicians. One of the central distinguishing features of a teacher is their ability to recognize the logic underpinning students’ problem solving processes. Whether it’s an actual problem in math or an interpersonal conflict with a peer or a student’s phonetic spelling, “errors” are windows into students’ thinking.

As a teacher, I have tremendous trust in my students. I trust that, as individuals with unique backgrounds and minds, they each approach learning in highly individualized ways. This is not to say that there aren’t trends and patterns in how we, as humans, operate and learn. Decades of research has helped us see that there are, in fact, fundamental—albeit complex—principles of how people learn.

But a major part of our job as educators is to trust that there is a logic informing every student’s meaning-making—it may not be our logic, but that’s precisely the work of a teacher: to analyze and understand how each of our students makes sense of what they are learning. And there’s a term for this, coined by educational psychologist, Lee Shulman: pedagogical content knowledge.

“Teaching must properly be understood to be more than the enhancement of understanding; but if it is not even that, then questions regarding performance of its other functions remain moot. The next step is to outline the categories of knowledge that underlie the teacher understanding needed to promote comprehension among students” (Shulman, 1987, p. 8):

Shulman, L. (1987). Knowledge and teaching: Foundations of the new reform. Harvard educational review, 57(1), 1-23.

Teaching requires not only knowing the content; it requires specialized knowledge that enables someone to teach that content and make that content accessible and engaging for an array of diverse learners. Teaching requires deep knowledge of individual children and children, in general, at various ages, developmental stages, and phases of growth. And it requires creating the conditions in which learners can safely explore, take risks, fail, experiment, succeed, develop, learn, grow, and imagine.

Dr. Deborah Loewenberg Ball was one of my teachers. When I was earning my PhD at the University of Michigan, she was the Dean of the School of Education, and I had the great fortune of taking one of her classes. She made a profound impact on me, not because of what she taught (the content)—although that was important as well—but who she was (and is) as a person and teacher and how she taught. Dr. Ball began her career as a teacher of children, and she became a teacher educator and a teacher of other teacher educators. Throughout, she has remained a lifelong learner who is deeply connected to the work of teaching in the elementary classroom. Through her research and teaching, she continues to impact teachers’ and children’s lives around the world.