College of Community Innovation and Education
University of Central Florida
Dr. Pamela Carroll is the Founding Dean and Mildred W. Coyle Endowed Professor and Eminent Scholar for the College of Community Innovation and Education (CCIE) at University of Central Florida. With its 8 departments, 300 faculty and staff, and 9,000 students, CCIE focuses on using the resources within the college to lift lives within the communities they serve. Her husband Dr. Joe Donoghue, a coastal geologist, is a member of the faculty in the Physics Department. In 2019, Dr. Carroll received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the College of Education at Florida State University, where she completed her Master of Arts degree, and in 2020, she received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Auburn University College of Education.
Currently Dr. Carroll is dedicated to the Parramore Education and Innovation District project, Orlando, for which she serves as the co-principal investigator for grants funded by Helios Education Foundation, Kresge Foundation, JPMorgan Chase Foundation, and the City of Orlando. She also serves on the Board of A Gift for Teaching, City Year, HOUSD (the Central Florida Housing Trust), and as an active member of the Orlando First United Methodist Church, and chair of its Church Council. She is the immediate past president of the Council of Academic Deans of Research in Education Institutions, and Chair of the State University System of Florida Deans Council.
Dr. Carroll began a lifetime career as an educator with teaching high school and middle school students in English language arts classes in Tallahassee, FL, after earning a dual bachelor’s degree in English and in education at Auburn University. As a classroom teacher, she had great mentors, and absolutely loved working with colleagues, students, and their parents. After several years, she wanted to help other teachers become energized about the profession, she returned to school at Auburn University to study and engage in research in English Education. After completing a doctorate and a year of work at Georgetown College, Kentucky, she returned to Tallahassee to accept her dream position as a member of the faculty of the College of Education at Florida State University. While working in the College of Education at FSU for twenty years, she had some of the happiest experiences taking university students into area middle and high schools to engage directly adolescents who needed extra time, attention, and academic coaching. Dr. Carroll published books and articles primarily about young adult literature, particularly in promoting literacy among students in secondary schools, and to anchor literacy practices among faculty members.
Eventually Dr. Carroll moved into administrative roles in the College of Education, including those of department chair and associate dean. With wonderful mentoring and support from office staff, faculty, students, and administrators, especially Dean Marcy Driscoll, she stepped into the role of Dean of the College of Education at Oklahoma State University, in Stillwater, Oklahoma. There, she worked with projects that were intrinsically meaningful and that also contributed to people in very immediate ways. Most notable was an educational, intergenerational project with the Choctaw nation in southeast Oklahoma, for which she and her colleagues were awarded the President’s Multidisciplinary Award. Another memorable project was a collaboration with the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences to develop and initiate OSUTeach, for which they were awarded a multimillion dollar grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Foundation. OSUTeach continues to prepare teachers of math and science for Oklahoma’s secondary schools. In 2015, she and her husband, Dr. Joe Donoghue, returned to Florida and accepted positions at University of Central Florida.
When not working, Dr. Carroll loves to be outside running or cycling with her husband Joe, swimming or gardening, or playing with their dog Sunny and cats, Carl Sandburg and MO.
DL: How and when did you first see yourself as a leader? Who have been your leadership mentors?
Pamela: I felt like a leader when I was a young girl, but that was really true only within the family because I had so much loving support from my parents that I felt like I could try almost anything and, even when I messed up, they would be there to help pick me up, clean me up, and point me in a positive direction again. They did not push me toward any one direction—they let me decide who I wanted to become! I was a good student, because I wanted to please the teachers and my parents so that they would not have to worry about me (especially since they had my sister Peggy, who had to be fed, diapered, and who had no language, to care for. We also had the gentle and wonderful help of my maternal grandparents Nanny and Dado, who lived right next door; Peggy lived with them, and slept with Nanny, a true angel, every single night until Nanny developed dementia in her late 70s. Nanny’s gift: caring for Peggy, meant that Mom and Dad could spend time raising my twin Scott, our brother Bill, on whose first birthday Scott and I were born, and me!) while we were involved in all the things that active school-aged kids do. I gravitated toward swimming and diving, and became pretty good at those, a state and high school champion, then a springboard diver in college. Scott was always nearby, cheering me on. He was not often the one winning races, but he was the one that made swim meets happy for me.
During high school, I taught and coached swimming and diving while I also participated, and a kind of troop of youngsters began to follow me around the pool. They thought that I was pretty cool. I realized that they were impressionable, and I tried to be a good influence. Working with them, leading them, began what has often, for me, been a blend of “leadership” with “instruction”. I enjoyed being on the swimming/diving team in college because it gave me a way to be “different” from the other girls, and gave me a crowd of athletes (swimmers) to hang out with that was totally different from the fraternity boys with whom most of my friends spent time. I wasn’t a leader on the team at all, but I set myself apart from the traditional path that my friends were taking, and doing that gave me a little space to develop my own personality, my own priorities. There were conflicts that I had to try to reconcile sometimes as the swimmers were a wild group and they offended my Christian beliefs every once in a while. Mostly, though, I realized that faith sustains me, and continues to grow deep even if I ask questions of it, and that getting to know more about the world through mingling with a variety of people was good for me.
After college, I moved to Tallahassee, the home of my new husband, while he finished law school and I taught in local high school and middle schools. I continued to develop a habit of separating myself from others, not as purposeful act to exclude, but in order to fill a need. For example, on my teacher’s schedule I had 22 minutes for lunch each day, and instead of listening to the workroom gossip, I found it was a pleasure to go outside and eat my crackers and apple on a bench in the front yard of the school. After a few weeks, colleagues noticed, and a few began finding their own outdoor lunch spots, too. The moments of quiet were restorative for me, and helped me be livelier for the young adolescent students I would face later in the afternoon. I learned, while teaching adolescents, a lesson that has been important to me in leadership roles since then: I don’t have to know all of the answers, but if a group knows that I am willing to take their inquiries seriously, and to work toward solutions with them, they are willing to engage with me in difficult work. On the other hand, if they assume that I do not care about their ideas, they will find most any task too taxing or too uninteresting to try. I was pleased to share insights about adolescent students’ willingness to learn with colleagues, and eventually the need to learn more about adolescents’ learning propelled me to go back to earn a doctorate in education under the supervision of one of my wonderful professors at Auburn, Terry C. Ley, who became my academic mentor and taught me what happiness as a faculty member can be.
Dr. Terry C. Ley was a life-long teacher and a researcher of how students learn. His classes in English Education were difficult, and he expected his students to spend time in the middle and high schools of the area, working with adolescents and their teachers, in order to apply what we learned in campus-based classes. I kept all of my notebooks from his classes and relied on them after I graduated and, within a year, landed my “dream job” as an assistant professor back in Tallahassee, at Florida State University. The university was beginning a shift from an identity as a teaching institution to becoming a research-focused institution, and the lessons Dr. Ley had taught me about a work-life balance, and about taking students into area schools provided me with clarity of purpose, the confidence I needed to determine how to develop a research agenda, and ideas for welcoming research sites in the classrooms of former colleagues in the public schools where I had taught.
I rose through the ranks from assistant to associate to professor, without delays or drama. I was very fortunate to have good mentors along the way; the late Dr. John S. Simmons was my program leader and prominent figure nationally. I frequently told colleagues that I “loved him to death and wanted to punch him in the nose about half the time” due to his sometimes outdated practices and occasionally offensive language. There is no one who was more deeply concerned about students and their learning, however, than was John, and I was able to learn from him how to continually put students first, even as the university was moving in a direction that seemed to value faculty research as its highest achievement. I was asked to become an administrator, a department chair, and thus an official “leader” at FSU in the College of Education when I had just become a full professor. My current chair, who was advancing into an associate dean role, asked me to take his place, noting that I had developed the confidence and trust of our colleagues within the department and college. I was surprised and humbled. I was also nervous. My primary fear was that I would have to give unwanted news to people with whom I had enjoyed working as a faculty member, and that they would assume that I had changed into someone who no longer understood their perspectives. Fortunately, I was able to draw on my faith and understand quickly that kindness and honesty are required, even when news that is to be shared is not going to be received happily. I made it my habit of telling faculty and staff that my intention is to be “direct, honest, and fair” then later added “just” to the formula. I have found that when I apply this formula, I am able to overcome my trepidation about delivering bad news. I can tell a colleague that she is not going to earn tenure, or that he did not receive the award or raise he was hoping for, or that a committee’s evaluation of someone’s teaching suggested that it is below expectations because to do so with directness and kindness is, in reality, the highest form of kindness I can provide for a colleague.
Eventually, Dean Marcy Driscoll asked me to work under her supervision as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. She became my professional mentor. Not only is she an excellent role model as a scholar who continues to engage in interesting and meaningful work in her academic area while serving the college and university as dean. She is also a model for deanly behavior; in many meetings, particularly in the years when university budgets were being slashed by state economic downturns and decisions of the central administration, she could have lashed out at those whom she supervised and accused them of making costly mistakes, ignoring her recommendations, and bringing uncomfortable negative attention to the college. She refused to publicly accuse or demean anyone. She did, however, have a laser-sharp awareness of where problems occurred and worked tirelessly to uncover the causes, then solicit help from those who caused them to correct them. In other words, she was not an easy leader, but a very effective one, one with whom her team enjoyed working, and whom we appreciated very much. I learned from her the importance of allowing those around me to have degrees of freedom to do the work they are expected to do, to set high expectations, and to raise questions only when expectations are not met. Like Marcy, I am not a micromanager. And because I know, first hand, the benefit of the generosity she extended me by recognizing potential in me, and helping me grow in areas that are required for deanly success, I have passed forward her kindness and generosity to associate and assistant deans, chairs, and others with whom I have had the pleasure of working, as well. My greatest joy as a dean is to see those with whom I work succeed in their professional pursuits. It is an unusual exchange: they leave the team, and we lose their contributions, but they gain their own leadership role, and that is a beautiful extension of our UCF CCIE team, and of what we have accomplished together.
DL: What is your biggest leadership lesson or “Aha” moment?
Pamela: Biggest AHA moment: learning that EVERYONE, whether it is students who have an axe to grind, faculty members who have a complaint against me, a colleague, or a requirement, staff members who feel overlooked and underappreciated, stakeholders who believe we are not attending to the needs of the community like they wish we would, EVERYONE wants to be listened to. Often the time they spend telling me (and sometimes in the company of others) their problem or complaint is the single “solution” that they really want to have occur. So often we want to lead by talking when much of the work is actually listening. Leadership is about listening!
A second AHA has been that EVERYONE involved in academia, even at the highest levels, is human. This sounds juvenile, but it is an important realization for me. I mythologized academia, I think, long after I finished my doctorate. I expected those who are involved in leadership positions to be GOOD people as well as intelligent ones. Most are, but some are not guided by ways that they can help others. I continue to hope that I am dealing with people who are good and who have integrity; although I am sometimes disappointed, I would rather have a consistently positive outlook, and be disappointed when someone lacks integrity, and assume the worst in others and be surprised when someone is a good person.
DL: How has your leadership style evolved?
Pamela: My style has become more confident. That is seen in that I am slower to respond with “answers” than I have been in the past. I still respond to questions and requests ASAP, but tell folks that I am thinking it over, and using XYZ information to inform my decisions. I have found great comfort in the strengths of those who are working with me as assistant and associate deans, primarily, and also the chairs team in CCIE, as well. I tend to draw on them to help make decisions when practicable. I rely especially on Assistant Dean Allision Jefferson, who is incredibly wise, and who has been at UCF for about 15 years doing work in administration, HR and finance. She is truly thoughtful, quiet, not easily swayed by barbs that faculty or staff might fling. She is SOLID, and I respect her and trust her through and through. More recently, I have had the pleasure of having Eloy Hernandez as someone to share ideas with, as well; there is no one on campus who has any more integrity than does Eloy, I think, and when he and Allison are counseling me together, I feel absolutely strengthened.
While getting more confident, I have become noticeably calmer and adopting the approach of less about me and more about them. I used to think that I have to run the show but I’m now delegating more and listening. For instance, I realized my role was not fixing the problem and point to where the answers are. I used to think that I was doing the faculty and their chair a favor by taking care of their problem or complaint.
DL: Do you consider yourself a natural leader (NL) or serendipitous leader (SL) and how would you work with a NL and SL?
Pamela: I think I have elements of natural leader within me, because I have had opportunities to lead almost all of my life. The odd thing, though, is that some of the opportunities are like miniature drawings—very small and insignificant, yet, they have helped shape who I am and how I have responded to the larger challenges, I think. As a child, I was more comfortable following when among friends, because I did not want to express my opinion—just in case anyone might think it a silly opinion. But at home, I was happy to be in charge of anything, everything. As I noted earlier, I felt very protective of twin brother Scott, and wanted Mom and Dad to have the time they needed for sister Peggy, too. To accomplish those things, I stepped in to be sure that the world around us was organized in the ways I wanted it to be.
That said, it wasn’t until Dr. Marcy Driscoll asked me what I needed to learn to become a dean that I really considered myself a potential administrative leader in the profession that I had chosen. Perhaps I am a serendipitous leader as well. I had been the editor of the main journal in my field, and the president of the main professional organization; both were academic leadership posts. Yet I thought, “Well, that was nice, but each was just something that I was well prepared by Dr. Ley to do, and I was ready to do them, so of course I did.” But I had never thought about administration, which lies beside academics but is NOT academics. When Marcy asked me to be an associate dean, I was ready to step away from my own academic path. I had published books and articles, had a modicum of funded project success, was successful with teaching and service, and was, frankly, a little disillusioned with some of the directions of the academic field. The offer to shift my role was fantastic, perfectly timed and very fulfilling. I can’t imagine having done anything else during the past dozen years.
DL: Could you think of a question in your leadership journey that is still perplexing or inexplicable? Why has it been perplexing?
Pamela: How might a leader help a person who has lost his or her motivation continue to contribute, if he/she continues to work at the position? Within the College of Community Innovation and Education (CCIE) at University of Central Florida (UCF), as an example, we have a very few tenured faculty members who are NOT good teachers, but they also produce very little research/scholarship and engage in no community service. The common response is to give them more classes to teach, but if they are poor teachers, the students suffer. I won’t trade on a student’s academic experience. I do believe that there are strengths in all of us, but finding the strength and building it into a job description in our university setting is sometimes a baffling puzzle.
DL: Final Thought: What’s ahead in your leadership journey?
Pamela: I will retire from professional work, with health, blessing, and together with my husband, I’ll pour my energy into developing an organization that works closely with my passion in helping abandoned/abused animals and people and continue to find ways to engage in work that lifts lives in our community.
Serendipitous Leaders 