I credit my 4th grade teacher, Mr. O’Neil, with sparking my interest in learning—not just in learning more about fractions or perspective drawing (two topics we studied that year), but in learning more about how we learn, and how we might learn better.
By regularly checking in with his students, and inviting us to reflect with him on the learning we’d done together the day before, Mr. O’Neil instilled in us a mindset of continuous improvement. We should be proud of what we’d learned so far, and we should also always be on the lookout for aspects of our learning we could do differently and maybe better next time.
Today, as a learning experience designer and education consultant, with a PhD in educational psychology and technology, and many years of teaching under my belt, I carry forward the spirit of Mr. O’Neil. Learning is fun and rewarding, and so is reflecting on how exactly it unfolds and finding ways to make it even better.
Born in Beirut, Lebanon, I grew up on three continents as my parents’ work for the United Nations entailed frequent moves. I spent my elementary years in Switzerland, my middle school years in Austria, and my high school years in the Netherlands before moving to the USA for college and making the USA my permanent home.
After graduating from Yale University, I taught middle school English for a year at a private school in Massachusetts, and I have worked in education ever since. Along the way,
Today I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and work with clients throughout the state and around the country.
My education spans two continents. The first school I attended was a Swiss kindergarten. I continued my education at international schools in Switzerland and Austria, and finished my high school years at a Dutch public school that had recently launched an International Baccalaureate program.
On the strength of my IB credentials, I was accepted at Yale University (following in the footsteps of my older brother who had started at Princeton University two years earlier), and after graduating from Yale, I continued my education in the USA. I earned a master’s degree in comparative literature at UC Irvine and then, after teaching for ten years, earned my PhD in educational psychology & technology at Michigan State University.
Formal schooling aside, the most impactful learning for my career as an education consultant and learning designer has been the on-the-job and point-of-need learning I did in my years of teaching, developing new curriculum (solo and with colleagues), solving pedagogical challenges as they arose, and working with colleagues to leverage the educational potential of new digital tools. Today I continue building on this foundation, learning with and from my clients, acquiring relevant certifications, and staying abreast of the latest science-of-learning research.
My work as an education consultant and learning designer is informed by my scholarly endeavors over the past 15 years. Sometimes a client’s project makes direct use of knowledge I gained from an article I wrote or a research study I worked on. More often, I find myself putting to use the concepts and skills I honed doing literature reviews, planning original research, collecting and analyzing data, and writing for publication.
Solo and more often with co-investigators, I have done original research on the following:
McEneaney, J., & Morsink, P. (2022). Curriculum modeling and learner simulation as a tool in curriculum (re)design. Journal of Learning Analytics, 9(2), 161-178.
Hartman, D. K., & Morsink, P. M. (2015). Reading at a million crossroads: Massively pluralized practices and conceptions of reading. In R. J. Spiro, M. DeSchryver, M. S. Hagerman, P. M. Morsink, & P. Thompson (Eds.), Reading at a crossroads? Disjunctures and continuities in current conceptions and practices. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.
Duke, N. K., Zhang, S., & Morsink, P. M. (2015). Neglected areas of instruction: Bad for print, worse for the Internet. In R. J. Spiro, M. DeSchryver, M. S. Hagerman, P. M. Morsink, & P. Thompson (Eds.), Reading at a crossroads? Disjunctures and continuities in current conceptions and practices. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.
Morsink, P., & White, A. (2014). Fostering deep engagement with malleable digital genres. In K. Pytash, R. Ferdig, & T. Rasinski (Eds.), Using technology to enhance writing: Innovative approaches to literacy instruction (pp. 41-48). Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.
Roberts, K. L., Norman, R. R., Morsink, P., Duke, N. K., Martin, N. M., & Knight, J. A. (2013). Diagrams, timelines, and tables—Oh, my! Twelve strategies for developing children’s concepts of graphics and comprehension of graphical devices in informational text. Reading Teacher, 67, 12–23. doi:10.1002/ TRTR.1174
Morsink, P. M., Hagerman, M. S., Heintz, A., Boyer, D. M., Harris, R., Kereluik, K., & Hartman, D. K. (2011). Professional development to support TPACK technology integration: The initial learning trajectories of thirteen fifth- and sixth-grade educators. Journal of Education, 191(2), 3-16.
Spiro, R. J., Morsink, P., & Forsyth, B. (2011). Principled pluralism for adaptive flexibility in teaching and learning to read: The importance of alternative mindsets in an increasingly nonlinear world of reading. In R. Flippo (Ed.), Reading researchers in search of common ground (2nd ed.). New York: Taylor & Francis/Routledge.
Hartman, D., Morsink, P., & Zheng, J. (2010). From print to pixels: The evolution of cognitive conceptions of reading comprehension. In E. A. Baker (Ed.), The new literacies: Multiple perspectives on research and practice (pp. 131-164). New York: Guilford Press.
Morsink, P. (1994). Audiences and analysis. In J. Hollowell, V. Russell, J. Stevens, & C. Boeckmann (Eds.), A student guide to writing at UCI (2nd ed.). Edina, MN: Burgess International Group.
Over the years I have worked at almost every level of K-16 education, in a variety of capacities—middle-school and high-school English teacher, soccer coach, yearbook advisor, department chair, curriculum director, undergraduate composition instructor, curriculum developer, literacy consultant, teacher educator, college professor, professional-development coach, and e-learning designer. And I have done this work in a range of institutional settings—suburban and urban independent schools, large public universities, an Intermediate School District (an agency providing educational services to one or more public school districts), and a range of small and large public schools.
I have especially enjoyed my close collaborations with individual colleagues and teams of colleagues where there’s a shared commitment to finding effective solutions—including completely novel solutions!—to the sorts of challenges teachers and learners face every day. Nothing is more rewarding than designing an e-learning module, introducing teachers to a new teaching strategy, or developing a new unit of curriculum that will contribute to improving someone’s learning experience.
