Classroom Caffeine
Classroom Caffeine
Special Edition: From "I'll never teach" to Teaching Teachers
Ever wondered what graduate education might do for your teaching career? Dr. Alexandra Panos never planned to become a teacher—until life's unexpected turns led her to discover a passion for education that graduate study would transform into a lifelong calling.
"Graduate school is transformation," Dr. Panos explains, detailing how advanced study changes not just what you know, but who you are. She beautifully likens both students and knowledge to icebergs—with most remaining hidden beneath the surface until we commit to deeper exploration. This metaphor perfectly captures why teachers make natural graduate students: they're already practiced in the art of curiosity and discovery.
Feeling inspired? USF’s fully online MA in Reading Education offers flexible pacing, innovative curriculum, embedded media literacy, Florida K-12 endorsement eligibility, and guidance from expert faculty connected to local and global literacy communities. Learn more here: https://hubs.li/Q03J88bv0
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In recent years, we've seen a strong and steady increase in graduate education for teachers and school leaders. Nationally, more than about 40% of practicing educators now hold a graduate degree, and those who do often report expanded career opportunities, higher salaries and deeper professional enjoyment. Even as some other graduate disciplines have declined in enrollment, colleges of education continue to see educators invest in advanced study to strengthen their practice and broaden their impact. Welcome to this special series of Classroom Caffeine, where we're talking with friends, old and new, about their journey to and through graduate school. I'm your host, Lindsay Persohn.
Lindsay Persohn:This special series, produced in collaboration with the University of South Florida's Literacy Studies Program in the College of Education and USF's Innovative Education, explores the question what is the value of graduate education for educators? In each episode, we hear from faculty and teacher leaders who share how advanced study and education shape their thinking, their work and their professional lives. Whether you're considering graduate school or guiding others on that path, this series will help give you insight, encouragement and real stories from the field. Dr. Alexandra Panos is an Associate Professor of Literacy Studies and Affiliate Faculty in Measurement and Research in the College of Education at the University of South Florida. Dr Panos' scholarship prioritizes place-based and community-engaged activities that center on the ecological and geographic dimensions of literacy education. She learns from longitudinal and collaborative connections and shares her own learning with a variety of communities through open access resources and high-impact scholarly publications.
Lindsay Persohn:Dr. Panos thanks so much for taking a few minutes to talk with me today about your journey through higher education.
Alexandra Panos:I'm honored to be here, as always, and look forward to the conversation, Lindsay.
Lindsay Persohn:Thanks. So will you tell us a bit about your path through higher education? Where did you study? What led you to pursue graduate work in education, those sorts of things?
Alexandra Panos:Sure, so I did not do my undergrad in education. I was a kid that loved literature and comparative arts and so studied comparative literature as an undergrad and ended up in Chicago with that degree in 2006. And that was not long before the Great Recession and lots of chaotic times and realized that I didn't know what to do with that degree and, in my sort of flailing in my early 20s for what I wanted out of life and what things should look like, I started tutoring and working with kids in Chicago and found that I really loved it and that my mom who years before had said you would make a great teacher. And I said I'm never going to be a teacher. You couldn't make me be a teacher was maybe right. And so I chose in 2008 or, sorry, 2009, around there it's pretty chaotic times here in this in the United States go back to school and pursue a degree in higher ed. And at the time that was sort of the beginning of alternative certification programs, and when I was researching I saw a lot of those and I started doing homework and looking at like what the difference between a graduate program and an alternative certification would be, and realized that one I love learning, I like being in school and care a lot about getting the best knowledge and developing my skills in the best way possible, and so decided to go and do a master's degree versus an alternative certification program, and you know I made a good decision. It made me very happy.
Alexandra Panos:But so my path to becoming a teacher, I guess, was born out of not always knowing what I wanted to do with my life and finally figuring some things out and then choosing very deliberately to pursue a master's degree that would, I thought, prepare me better to meet the needs of children in schools. And then, once I was that teacher, based on my experiences in grad school, I started participating in research projects, because my mentors from grad school were really active researchers, with teachers and in their classrooms and just very present, and so I learned what research kind of looked like and I was really interested in doing that myself, and so began to study my own practice. And through my relationships with those researchers, those professors, began to realize that there were even more opportunities for graduate school that could help me to continue to grow as a learner myself and as someone that really cared about addressing the needs of children and schools and thinking about reflective practice. And you know, I guess I just wanted to keep going.
Alexandra Panos:Once I was on a path Like my start was so chaotic, but then I was on that path and I wanted to continue to focus on how to learn from students and their context in the world around them and what education can and should look like to serve all children and how the power of teachers can be part of that. So those are the two experiences I had with graduate school and how I came to get to those degree programs.
Lindsay Persohn:I love your story and, as I've said, I think that one of the best parts for me about this process is learning a little bit more about my colleagues and friends and kind of what brought you to the space where you're working right now. It's really interesting to see how everyone's path unfolds differently and I think we all have these moments where you think what am I doing? Where am I going with my life? I know there's something more out there and I'm not quite sure what it is yet, but I do feel like once you find that thing, you know it, you know, and then it does often make you want to keep moving forward. It makes you want to keep growing and learning and moving in that direction whenever you finally feel like you've kind of caught the right path, so very cool.
Alexandra Panos:Yeah, I tell my undergraduate students who are in education how sort of jealous I am that they figured it out so early in their lives and that they have such purpose. But then I think too that that's one of the things that graduate education is really special and appropriate for. As you're a grownup, you're an adult, it's a different kind of educational context and you're making deliberate decisions. No one, no one forces you to go to college, but kind of you're forced to go to college in some, some communities and cultures that's the expectation
Lindsay Persohn:And some families.
Alexandra Panos:Yeah, yeah.
Alexandra Panos:And families, yeah, and in graduate school it's no. This is my decision, this is my path, this is who I want to be and this is how I want to be that person, and I thing that when I realized the complexity of education as as a field and when I began working with children who were just so wonderful and so amazing and I wanted to learn more about how, all the ways that made them wonderful and how schools can be a part of that, and just sort of realized that, oh, I can make a choice to do these things. I mean, I moved my family to go to do my PhD, like that was how committed I was and how supportive my family was and how much support I needed to be able to do it. So all that to say there's once you realize, I agree, like you're a snowball and you keep rolling and rolling and rolling, and then you can feel like an avalanche in a good way. Like you know, I like being an avalanche
Lindsay Persohn:I'm doing it,
Alexandra Panos:yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lindsay Persohn:So, relatedly, in what ways has graduate study shaped how you think about teaching, learning and leadership?
Alexandra Panos:So, like I said, I made deliberate choices, but I didn't know what the outcomes for either of these choices to do graduate degrees would be, because I know that we all know this that education is transformation, right Like that, that's what happens. But experiencing education is transformation as an adult, in your career and and all of the ways that influences who you are, is really pretty profound, and both of my graduate programs, I think, resulted in a changed person. On the other side, my master's program, which was at DePaul University and focused on urban and multicultural education, really I think helped me to be an expert pedagogue and I think that's what a good master's in education program should be. It's someone like you come out, and I feel like I came out as someone who could observe the world around me in my classroom and school and create change within my classroom and school community. I think it allowed me to be efficacious as a leader, someone who could advocate for best practices for my students, like and all of their unique complexity and what all the things they brought with them to school, yeah, and be able to effectively communicate with students and parents and admin and the district and my unions and like all of those things, like I was able to sort of talk the talk and walk the walk as an educator and I'm really grateful for the graduate program for that and I think that's what a good graduate program does. And then my PhD, I think, shaped how I see the world in terms of the complexity of teaching and learning and how they take place in schools. And I'm in literacy studies.
Alexandra Panos:My PhD is in literacy, language and culture from Indiana University and my PhD program disrupted what I thought literacy and reading and writing even meant Like it was disruptive in my life completely and like sort of shook me up and threw me out.
Alexandra Panos:On the other side, I went in thinking that I would study very specific classroom practices and instead I did a five-year ethnographic study on school and community and working with teachers and thinking about the ways that the world influences all that takes place in a school setting and helped me really examine all of the ways that knowing, being and doing are literacy and that we need to examine those and study those and help teachers and children make those things possible in classrooms so that children who are already thoughtful members of their communities can help us all to seek better tomorrows and do all the good stuff.
Alexandra Panos:So, yeah, I think the master's was like oh, I am an expert now and I have a role in being an expert. That's what makes me a leader. And my PhD was like let's shake you up and throw you back out and help you to use all of those other, those skills that you had before, but disrupt them in a way that helps you be a leader and thinking differently, which we need a lot in school space to be a leader in thinking differently, which we need a lot in school space.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, yeah, I love that, that trajectory that you share with us of how your thinking changes. It's not because it's not just your thinking, obviously it's also your knowledge, your kind of content knowledge, if you will, but it is also it's the ways in which we think that change throughout those paths. And one question that came to mind as you were talking, Alex, is like at what point, if any, did you realize it was okay to say you don't know things?
Alexandra Panos:Oh gosh, I feel like that was harder in my master's program because I thought that I was supposed to know and like, oh, I'm becoming expert, I need to know.
Alexandra Panos:But I feel like as soon as you enter a classroom, if you have I don't know, working with kids teaches you that you have to have humility in what you know and don't know.
Alexandra Panos:And so I think that in particular in my master's program, I had to confront that I didn't know a lot about the field and like learn how to learn about the field, I guess, is a big thing.
Alexandra Panos:And then in the PhD program I had to sort of say, oh, my goodness, wow, so many of the practices that I engaged in were correct in a lot of ways and well-meaning, but there's so much more there that I didn't know, like it was an iceberg and I had to go oh, okay, I had to build this iceberg, like I had to like chip it away at the ice for a while, and then now I can see there's all this space below me that I had no idea was there and that's super humbling, um, in a different way than children, children create, um, but it's exciting. And now I feel like I am completely okay, not knowing things. Like I say, I don't know more often than most people do I think in my life and am much more hesitant to claim absolute knowledge about what is right and wrong than I was before either of these programs.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, and I think the reason I asked that question is because that's something that I remember sort of very clearly coming into focus, probably whenever I was at one of my first academic conferences and I heard someone who I had considered to be, you know, an absolute expert.
Lindsay Persohn:You know, there are these scholars you sort of put on a pedestal, they must know everything, they can do no wrong, and I heard this person answer a question from the audience with, well, I don't know, and I thought it's okay to not know.
Lindsay Persohn:I thought we were supposed to know everything. So I agree, I mean, I think that that idea that there's so much more to know than even what we could possibly know and understand, that I think you learn that as you learn more. It's a really interesting paradox that you know, you, I think, when you're younger, you think you know a lot and then you realize that there's so much more in the world that you may never fully understand or know, and I think that that it is humbling, but it's also really exciting, I think, especially for, you know, those of us who claim to be lifelong learners. I think there's something really invigorating about seeing that there's just so much more in the world than we can possibly ever absorb in a lifetime 100% and I think that, like, I think teachers are really set up for graduate school, I guess.
Alexandra Panos:So I mean, every child that comes in to our classroom is an iceberg, right? So we are like they share things in common with us and they don't our, our race, our ethnicity, our language, our religion, our culture, our you know, like where we come from, who we are, our values, like all of those things interact when we work with children and in classroom spaces, and so we already are sort of like who is this person? What do they need from me? And so we're like attuned to this idea of like being curious and being okay with needing to learn, to find out in order to do something effectively. So, like that idea, in a nutshell, is what graduate school is. Okay, so I know I want to learn more about X, so I'm going to go learn about that, to do things more effectively. And we have to do that with every child we encounter, every classroom, we encounter our colleagues, you know. And so I think that that nuance of recognizing the complexity of each individual child translates really well to like, oh, okay, so now I'm going to do that kind of work, but at a different scale, you know going forward, and so yeah.
Lindsay Persohn:That's a. It's such a beautiful metaphor too. As soon as you said that you know, the students we work with are like icebergs, I thought, yeah, they absolutely are. There's only so much that we see and we know, and maybe there's only so much that they see or know about themselves just yet. So, you know, it's again, it's like that the unknowable versus what we might be able to discover once we start to sort of chip away at it. Dive in, however you want to think about it, there's, there's always more, there's always more to know, and I think that, yeah, that you're right. That does set up educators as really great lifelong learners, both informally, but also in informal settings.
Alexandra Panos:Yeah, and they're research. I mean, you're a researcher when you're an educator. If you orient to the children in your classroom and the classroom community and the ways that your pedagogy works and doesn't work, you're already in the practice of sort of. What does this mean? How do I do this more effectively? And while the scope and content of your research might change, given what you learn in a program and where you end up at the end of that program and who you are, that curiosity, that deep responsibility to other humans and the future of the world around us is really what drives, I think, the best researchers and I know, the best teachers I know and the humans that I have encountered in graduate programs at all levels.
Lindsay Persohn:So, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. So what is your current role at the University of South Florida and kind of a follow-up to that? How did your experience in grad school influence your career choices and the opportunities that have come your way since then?
Alexandra Panos:Sure.
Alexandra Panos:So I'm an associate professor of literacy studies and I'm also affiliate faculty in measurement research at USF.
Alexandra Panos:I also serve as the program coordinator for the PhD program and I do a lot of research with teachers and children about our social and ecological educational realities. And I think I ended up where I ended up doing what I'm doing now because my degree programs, like I said, I think, prepared me to be really concerned with teaching and complex contexts of teaching and also doing really ethically engaged research with communities. My PhD was equally in inquiry methodology and research methodologies, and so I've been able to really leverage that into a lot of research with different communities and work with PhD students at USF and as well as master's students, who are the teachers that often end up working with me in my studies and participating along the way. So I guess I think that I ended up here in an academic institution working as a professor and as a researcher in literacy, because literacy is a really expansive way of orienting to the world and understanding what children are doing and the roles that I've taken as an academic have really allowed me to be in community with the folks that I want to learn more about and also are allowing me to help prepare future teachers and researchers who want to go out and do more of that, which is what I really love.
Alexandra Panos:Yeah, did that answer the question?
Lindsay Persohn:I think so, yeah, and I will just add on to that to say that we sure do get to work with some really wonderful, dynamic, interesting people who are so smart and come to their graduate studies with important questions and ways of thinking and knowing that you know you're still always learning, and it's so cool to get to learn from students.
Alexandra Panos:Yeah, yeah, I agree completely. It's being able to work in the programs that I work in here at USF is such an honor to be able to work with people who are doing really diverse things in the world, and it's another way that my I get to keep learning and get to keep being humble, because someone will come and be doing something that I've never heard of before and get to learn about it all anew, because they're doing something in their classroom or they're doing something in a research project and you know that's yeah,
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, totally, totally. So, on that note, what do you think educators should consider when they're deciding if and when graduate study is the next or the right next step for them? What advice would you give to prospective graduate students?
Alexandra Panos:Yeah. So I think that if you're like, if you're someone that's already sort of going, I wonder, my guess is you should do it. Because if, if you are someone thinking about it, seriously, my gut tells me you're someone that would find value in what you're doing, I'd say, you know to reach out to faculty and the programs you're interested in, talk to them. They're people, they want to talk to you. They're not like some nameless, faceless, I don't know, I don't know they're not an entity, right?
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, they're not an entity, they're not just a link on a website.
Alexandra Panos:Yeah, they're people that will be interested to talk to you and help you figure out if it's the right program. You could see if they have projects that you could join beforehand. I did that when I was a teacher. I was sort of interested in going back, going to Indiana University for my degree because they had a focus on critical education and that's what I wanted to do, and I ended up working on a research project with the faculty member who became my advisor and and shared my dissertation. So we're here, we're real people and we'd love to work with you, no question.
Alexandra Panos:The only other thing I would say is I started graduate programs and in a time when things were really uncertain and very stressful financially and politically and socially as well.
Alexandra Panos:So you know, almost 20 years ago now. But I think that uncertainty is something that we all live with and I think making sure that you have your ducks in a row and understand what you're getting into financially and communicating with your family and your loved ones and checking in on your own support system is also something that you want to do. And the faculty in the program can also talk to you about what kind of expectations the program has and how that program supports their students, so that you can make a decision that will work for you and whatever your lifestyle looks like in the present moment is the only other thing that I would say. So like, I think you should do it and I think you should check in so that you can be successful and a good program is designed for your success, right? So like, if if people aren't responding to you or you're not sure that they understand what your life is like, then I would maybe say check somewhere else, because that's what a good program does.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, that's great advice, great advice. So one last question for you what do you wish you had known before starting grad school?
Alexandra Panos:It feels like a loaded question, doesn't it? Yeah, what do I wish I had known? I think we've been talking about this a lot. I don't think anyone told me how much my perspectives on the world would shift and change and like how much work that is it's not, like it's emotional, like sort of complex life work that happens alongside the labor that you already think of would go into learning something. And, frankly, it made me much more like respectful of children going to school all day, every day, imagining how much their lives are shifting with all that they're learning in schools, and I just I think that it gave me a real profound respect for what transformation and education really means, and I don't know that there's a real way for us to know that before we go in and before we experience something, but I do think some preparation for that would have.
Lindsay Persohn:So yeah, a little warning that you're right, it's not just your, your cognition, related to the content, that's changing, right, it's kind of your worldview, your perspective, all of those things do I would. I mean, I totally agree, they broaden, they shift, social relationships change. It is an emotional journey and you're right, I don't know if we really talk about that very much, that it's. It's kind of a change in you know, it's a total change, right, it's not just a singular sort of experience.
Alexandra Panos:So yeah, great point. Yeah, I think that, like that idea that I said earlier, literacy is knowing, being, doing, you're, you're becoming literate in different ways and in graduate programs, and so if, if that becoming is really happening, you are doing, you're knowing, being and doing in all parts of your life differently and and I think that's pretty awesome, but I think it's helpful to know ahead of time.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, yeah, yeah, great. Well, I thank you again so much for sharing your ideas with me and with listeners today, so I will talk to you soon.
Alexandra Panos:Thanks, Lindsay. Thanks,
Lindsay Persohn:Thanks for joining us for this special episode in the special series of Classroom Caffeine, in collaboration with Literacy Studies Program at the University of South Florida's College of Education and USF's Innovative Education. If today's conversation sparked your curiosity about graduate education programs, you can learn more about USF's Reading, masters and Literacy Studies programs by visiting www. usf. edu/ education/ areas of study/ literacy- studies/ programs. So again, that's www. usf. edu/education/areasofstudy/literacy-studies/programs. If you haven't already subscribe to the Classroom Caffeine podcast for more energizing conversations with inspiring educators and education researchers. Until next time, stay curious and keep learning.