Dean Strunk Looks Ahead
atharine Strunk joined Penn GSE as dean last year because she wanted to have an impact. As a researcher, she had spent her career pursuing community-engaged scholarship in partnership with school districts and state departments of education, providing them with evidence to inform their policies. As a leader, she aimed to continue that kind of consequential work on a larger scale. Penn GSE, she reasoned, was the best place for it.
“Penn is a place where you do work that is intended to be applied,” she said. “We have some of the most brilliant scholars in the world housed here, but the difference is that we are not doing this research just to add more knowledge for knowledge’s sake. We are actually thinking about how we use that knowledge to improve the lives of learners and educators throughout the world. Everything we do here is intended to feed back into our communities—whether they’re here in Philadelphia, across the country, or across the globe.”
To that end, Dean Strunk spent her first year at Penn GSE in conversation with faculty, staff, students, and alumni to seek input for a plan for the School’s future that they could all work towards together. The result is a strategic vision for the next decade, Together for Good: A Vision for Transformational Impact, that expands the work Penn GSE is already doing, responds to urgent needs in the field of education, and inspires lasting change.
“This strategic vision is intended to build on GSE’s existing strengths and think about how we push them forward into the future,” she said. “We asked, from the very beginning of this whole strategic-visioning process, not just where do we want GSE to be in 10 years, but where do we want education to be in 10 years? And then, how do we not just meet that moment, but how do we make that moment?”
“Our strategic vision is aspirational, but it’s also achievable,” she said. “But it’s going to take hard work. It’s going to take focus. It’s going to take everybody rowing in the same direction.”
Dean Strunk is ready to help steer that ship. She sees the role of the dean as empowering the School’s faculty and staff to “do the work that they do best,” while providing them with the resources they need to do the most significant research, support the most students, impact the most communities, and—in short—spur the most positive change.
“In 10 years, my hope is that we have changed the world,” she said. “I know that that sounds grandiose and unlikely, but I don’t think it is. We have the potential at GSE to do the work that reduces inequity and ensures more people can learn and succeed in a just and thriving society. . . . It’s time for real change, and I think that Penn GSE is poised to do it.”
PRIORITY ONE
BUILD
“We have the best programs in the country already,” said Dean Strunk. “But we have a role to play in making sure that we continue to strengthen the educator workforce. Not just for teachers—who are, of course, critically important—but also for leaders and school counselors. We train everybody within the education workforce here at GSE, and we have a responsibility as a top school of education to do it as best as we can and as accessibly as we can for the most people.”
Penn GSE has long been a pioneer in educator preparation, with cutting-edge programs that emphasize hands-on training, research-based practices, and—with the School’s own Philadelphia neighbors in mind—a deep commitment to urban education. Those programs span traditional master’s and doctoral programs, as well as executive-format leadership training and non-degree professional learning.
“We are constantly working on improving our preparation of teachers,” said Patrick Sexton, executive director of Penn GSE’s three different experiential-learning teacher-education programs. “We assess everything that we do right after we do it . . . Because we’re a research-intensive institution, we’re always evaluating the work that we’re doing for its long-term impacts and the implications for the rest of the field.”
Sexton proudly noted that the markers of the programs’ success are evident in the numbers of graduates who return to mentor the next generation of teachers that Penn GSE is helping to create.
Research has shown that good teachers are the single most consequential school-based factor in a child’s success, and effective school leadership is the best way to retain those good teachers. But right now, there aren’t enough good teachers or leaders, especially in the under-resourced schools that need them the most. And the outlook for the future isn’t much better. High school students’ interest in the teaching profession has dropped by 50 percent since 1990, and the number of people earning a teaching license each year has plummeted by more than 100,000 from 2006 to 2021. Nearly one in 10 vacancies is filled by people without a standard teaching license, and 44 percent of teachers leave the profession within the first five years.
In the face of this unprecedented challenge, Penn GSE aims to offer an antidote. The strategic vision charts a future in which the education profession is respected, high-quality teacher education is accessible, and the professional pathways for both teachers and leaders are full. Penn GSE can help us get there by enhancing existing offerings to become a “one-stop shop” for lifelong career development, making educator- and leader-preparation programs more affordable and accessible to more people, and advocating for the evidence-backed policy changes that will use research to help change legislation.
“We’re working with policymakers all the time on how to collectively come together to answer the question about shortages, because teacher preparation alone can’t do it,” said Sexton. “We need to be part of the conversation.”
PRIORITY TWO
COLLABORATE
Penn GSE faculty, students, and programs are engaged in roughly 400 different activities in more than 250 schools in SDP annually, said OSCE Director Caroline Watts, meaning someone from GSE touches almost every catchment area in the city.
“[The School’s] major partnership with SDP . . . takes the form of partnerships with our training programs, so that Penn GSE counselors and student teachers and reading specialists are placed throughout the district,” said Watts. “That’s a mutual kind of partnership, where we get our students trained on the job and the schools get extra personnel and resources.”
Now OSCE is poised to expand its work. This year, the office welcomed Assistant Professor Sade Bonilla as its first faculty research director overseeing its community-engaged scholarship. That work includes a collaboration between Penn GSE and SDP that leverages the School’s research expertise in service of the questions the district most wants answered.
But OSCE’s Philadelphia collaborations are just one local example of Penn GSE’s community engagement. There are also collaborations with state and federal education departments, as well as international projects. Penn GSE faculty are currently engaged in partnerships in more than 60 countries. In long-standing collaborations in Mexico and Ghana, as well as in emerging ones in Serbia and Uzbekistan, the School’s faculty are partnering with local educators and communities to imagine solutions that address educational challenges.
One aim of the strategic vision is to formalize this work with a five-year global engagement strategy, coordinating different international engagement, identifying regional outreach priorities, and extending the School’s reach. Another is to make the resulting scholarship available, accessible, and digestible to ensure it informs the work of policymakers and the communities who helped create it.
Many Penn GSE professors are already engaged in this kind of collaborative, community-based work. For example, Professor Nelson Flores, who studies the intersection of language and race in education, has been engaged in a participatory action research study alongside Latinx communities in Norristown, Pennsylvania, for two years. He and a collective from Centro de Cultura Arte Trabajo y Educaçion (CCATE)—including local parents and students—have been working together to identify areas of research that would help improve educational outcomes for Latinx students. Their data collection will begin this year.
Whether in Penn GSE’s hometown or around the world, “we are seeking to effect powerful and sustainable and demonstrable change in educational and human outcomes for kids and families,” said Watts, “by being strong, present, engaged, responsive neighbors.”
PRIORITY THREE
TRANSFORM
Innovation drives everything at the School—its programs, its pedagogy, its scholarship. It’s the reason Penn GSE is home to both the Milken-Penn GSE Education Business Plan Competition, the most well-funded competition for purpose-driven ventures, and the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education, which recognizes individuals for their efforts to elevate human potential through educational leadership. It’s why, more than 10 years ago, the School launched the first ever education entrepreneurship master’s program. And its why the School launched its global innovation center, Catalyst, in 2018 to connect leaders across education, business, and technology to address critical challenges in education.
Identifying challenges and meeting them with novel solutions requires bold, out-of-the-box thinking. So, too, does adapting to new technologies. But innovation without practical implementation is for the ivory tower, not an institution like Penn GSE, which has always been committed to addressing real-world problems with actionable solutions.
“The key thing about the way GSE thinks about innovation is we don’t do innovation for innovation’s sake,” said Dean Strunk. “We’re not just innovating to get the newest, coolest, highest-tech innovation. We’re actually doing things that are intended to improve the public good and the world around us.”
Those innovations include pioneering research that aims to address everything from environmental justice to the promises and perils of AI. They include making interdisciplinary collaboration the foundation of problem-solving scholarship. And they include teaching with and about the latest emerging technologies, so that GSE students know how to use them to support learning in classrooms, community centers, and even C-suites.
Because all innovations must iterate, even vanguard programs need to continually evolve. To that end, Penn GSE’s online Learning Analytics master’s program, which was designed to help students develop measurement, analysis, and predictive modeling expertise, already included a considerable amount of generative AI in its curriculum. But with an increasing emphasis in that area, the program is now adding new courses and being renamed the online Learning Analytics and Artificial Intelligence master’s program.
Innovation is ever-changing, so this third priority in Together for Good is an ever-moving target. There will always be new technologies to address, new pedagogy to invent, and new research findings to put into practice. There is no endpoint to this work, and there is always more to learn. And that is just how the dean likes it.
“We need people to continue to push us, continue to check us, continue to think through with us how this vision can grow and evolve over the next 10 years, because we don’t even know today the education problems of tomorrow,” said Dean Strunk. “One of the commitments that we are making is that the strategic plan is a living document. We’re going to continue to think about the most pressing challenges that we need to address. And we will continue to address them, because that is our job.”
PRIORITY FOUR
ELEVATE
“When I first got to Penn GSE I didn’t actually know this was a strength that we had,” she said. “And then I was talking to our faculty, and I learned about how many of them are doing this work every day, in their research and in their instruction.”
“No other school of education has this kind of concentration of talent that studies this area across multiple levels,” said Dean Strunk. “We are just incredibly lucky that we have this group at this time to meet the needs that we know are coming in our polarized society.”
Like many other things we are taught in school—state capitals, algebra, how to read—participating productively in difficult conversations is a skill no one is born with.
“You have to learn how to do it,” says Ben-Porath, who is also the faculty director of Penn’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Paideia Program. “You have to prepare for that. And this is an expertise that GSE has and can provide to other parts of the University here—and [to] other universities and schools. . . . There is a need for that expertise outside of GSE, which I really think we can transfer beyond our walls.”
In 10 years, my hope is that we have changed the world. I know that that sounds grandiose and unlikely, but I don’t think it is.
—Dean Katharine Strunk
This work has critical implications beyond the classroom. Preparing children for democratic citizenship was a major reason for the creation of public schools in America. Those public schools now need to prepare the citizens of tomorrow to face some overwhelming challenges, such as climate change and inequality, in an era when it seems people can’t even agree on the facts of the matter. Educators who can facilitate inclusive discussions on complex topics with their students will help produce engaged citizens who are prepared for civil debate and civic participation.
“I think we’re at a moment where everyone understands the importance of discourse and the importance of conversation—nobody can deny it,” said Reisman. “And I think the challenge is that we’re still working with really impoverished models of what classroom discourse looks like. . . . As a school of education, we must support teachers in addressing this knotty problem of how to navigate discussions in this really complex historical moment.”