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Each month, Texas State University President Dr. Kelly Damphousse sits down with faculty members, staff, students, alumni, and community members for a conversation about all things TXST — the past, the present, and the bright future of the university.
Part of the TXST Podcast Network: https://www.txst.edu/podcast-network.html
- Growing up in the '70s. So it was different era. So a little bit before your time, but they were called the Broad Street Bullies,
- The Broad Street Bullies, yes.
- and I didn't know what that meant, and so it wasn't until I went to Philadelphia, I was doing a research project at Temple University, and I was staying at a hotel, and it was on Broad Street. I said, "Oh, Broad Street is a street." And it just like all came together.
- And I gotta correct the bullies part a little bit.
- No, no, they are the bullies.
- We're just very direct in Philly, but we're loving underneath it all.
- No, that's not true at all.
- Hi, everyone, this is Kelly Damphousse, President of Texas State University and welcome to The Current where we talk to faculty, staff, and students and alumni and friends of the university to find out what's going on here at Texas State University, and I'm so excited today to have my friend Michael O'Malley joining us. Michael is the Dean of the College of Education. Michael, welcome to The Current.
- Thanks very much, Kelly, really happy to be here and be at Texas State.
- You know, we call it The Current because of the river, kind of got the river theme here, but it's also about kinda like current events and current people who are here, and I love to invite people onto The Current that, first off, are doing something really interesting at the university, but also people are just interesting people in general, because this is really a medium about people, and you're one of my favorite people
- Oh, thank you.
- And actually, I don't know the answer to some of the questions I'm gonna ask you today. So tell us, let's start off like, where does Michael O'Malley's story start?
- Started all the way back born in Chicago but actually raised outside Philadelphia. So Philly's my home, go Birds.
- Were you a Flyers fan or?
- Yes, Flyers.
- Okay, Eagles and Flyers.
- Eagles and Flyers, Eagles.
- Okay, I hated the Flyers, because I was a Montreal Canadiens fan.
- Right, of course.
- You know, it's funny. Growing up in the '70s, so it was different era. So a little bit before your time, but they were called the Broad Street Bullies,
- The Broad Street Bullies, yes.
- and I didn't know what that meant, and so it wasn't until I went to Philadelphia, I was doing a research project at Temple University, and I was staying at a hotel, and it was on Broad Street. I said, "Oh, Broad Street is a street." And it just like all came together. I said, "Oh, the Broad Street Bullies." And actually, I guess that leads to the forum or something like that where the Flyers played. So it all made sense to me then, yeah.
- Well, and I gotta correct the bullies part a little bit.
- No, no, they're the bullies.
- We're just very direct in Philly, but we're loving underneath it all.
- No, that's not true at all. So anyways, you're in Philadelphia and what high school did you go to?
- I went to Carroll High School in Radnor outside Philadelphia.
- Okay, what's the mascot of your school?
- The Patriot.
- You remember that?
- Yeah, I do remember that.
- Okay, some people kind of lock up and go, I can't remember what our mascot was.
- Well, jumping ahead a little bit, I remember the Patriot, 'cause it was also the first high school I taught in as a teacher.
- Oh really, you went back as a teacher?
- I did.
- So did you decide in high school that you wanted to become a teacher or was that a little bit later?
- No, not on my radar at all,
- Oh really?
- not at all, actually. So I have a little bit of a meandering path, but it's been interesting for me, and I'm glad it's meandered, yeah. Undergrad, I studied philosophy. I have a B.A. in philosophy, moved on to study theology in graduate school in theology, and then made--
- See, I'm learning something. I did not know that.
- Surprises, yeah, yeah, and then made a move into teaching, yeah, and so my first teaching position was back at the high school that I actually attended. So I remember like my first teaching day, like it was a professional development day, and you're in the buffet line getting your food, and there's this older teacher in front of me, you know, Mr. Schotz, and he's like, "Oh, welcome to Carroll. "It's so nice to meet you." And I said, "Well, actually, you know, we've met before." And he said, "Well, where?" I said, "Well, you taught me high school English, "Junior English." So he was a little surprised. He didn't like that,
- That's funny.
- 'cause he felt older, yeah.
- You made him feel old. Now what were your plans with those degrees? Were you gonna go into ministry or thinking of teaching?
- I was planning that, yeah.
- Oh, okay.
- Yeah, yeah, and so I did some work there, yeah, and it's really come together for me in a great way, because I had opportunities to work with people before I got into education, just all kinds of contacts, people, youth, people, sick, elderly. I did some social work as part of that, and so it really gave me a different kind of perspective that I think I've been able to bring to the classroom when I've been a professor and before that when I was a teacher, yeah. It's a different understanding of humanity, if that makes sense.
- Yeah, so undergrad was where?
- it was called St. Charles in Philadelphia.
- St. Charles, and then graduate school?
- St. Joseph's University, Hawk Hill. So that's the Jesuit university in Philadelphia. So I'm Jesuit trained in a lot of ways, yeah.
- Okay, very interesting, another new thing to learn about you, and so actually it's interesting because you and I have talked a lot about this a lot, a lot of people I think decided to become a teacher when they were in high school, and they go, you know, I love my teacher and she's really influencing me, or he's been a great mentor to me. Say, I wanna do the same thing, and so they go to college planning to be like, my wife wanted to be a choir teacher, but increasingly, more and more students are like discovering it later. They get a degree in something else,
- That's right.
- go do something for a while and then say, you know what? I think I have a calling or maybe an opportunity to do something here, and I want to go. I wanna be a teacher, and the nice thing is that you actually, there's a way of doing that now that didn't exist before, I guess, yeah.
- Yeah, yeah.
- And so how does that work now, if you decide later on you wanna become, and there's a teacher shortage. So if anyone's looking for a job, you could probably help 'em, right, and so.
- I can help very quickly, very easily. Yeah, we have really strong district partners too. So great districts for people to get placed in, yeah.
- So how'd it work in your life and maybe is it different now?
- In general, for now, what we have in Texas is we have these alternative certification routes, and so that's for a person who already has an undergraduate degree. They may have work and career experience, and they're doing exactly what you said. They're taking a shift in life, and they're thinking, hey, there's a different kind of way I want to give back to my community and to families and to kids, and so they start thinking about a teaching career. What's really important about the alt. cert. pathways is that they allow people who are already employed elsewhere or who are career-changing to be able to encounter teacher preparation and to be able to do that well, but kind of fit it into their lives. By this point, they usually have kids. They've got responsibilities. They have to have income flowing while they're studying to be a teacher. So they can't be like our full-time undergraduate student who's also working, but has more time available for school. So the alt. cert. is a little more flexible.
- Yeah, they're not gonna move away from town and move to San Marcos and enroll in classes.
- Exactly.
- So online is probably a very common way of doing this.
- So at Texas State, we just launched this actually with good help from your administration, we launched this last year, and we've just finished our pilot year of our alt. cert. and so, right, the coursework is online, they get a lot of support, but it's online. So it can be flexible, as you said, they don't have to come to campus here, they can continue their working lives, and after about three courses, the equivalent of three courses, they then move into the school, either as a one-semester student teacher or a full year intern, we call it, and the intern is the teacher in the classroom and is paid, and so it helps them to be able to segue, because people have to think about their hopes and desires to make a difference as a teacher, but they also have to think about the finances for themselves and their family and how pieces come together. So being able to go alt. cert. into a paid teacher while you're doing your internship really helps people complete that loop.
- This might be a hard question to answer, but if someone is thinking about this, certainly you gotta think about the time and a shift in what you're doing, but there's a cost factor, too. About how much would it cost for someone who's got a bachelor's degree and then wants to get certified if they wanted to go through our program?
- To go through our program here at Texas State, the full program's $4,400.
- Oh, that's actually pretty manageable.
- It's very manageable, I think. It's still a commitment. I get that, but it is a really affordable price, and so I think the university's put a lot of work into understanding that people transitioning into teaching need some support to be able to get there, and that cost factor, I think, really helps. We have some other universities in Texas that also do alt. certification. I think this price is lower than theirs, as I remind my colleagues sort of frequently, but that's about helping people be able to bridge into the teaching profession.
- Well, I remember about a year and a half ago when you started talking to me and then the provost about this, price was really something you were really concerned about, because if you just did it as a traditional student, the cost of a traditional student cost in tuition and fees, it could get pretty pricey, but you really fought to get the price down. So actually, it's cheaper to do the alt. cert. than to, in some ways, if you were just gonna add another minor or something like that, you'd have to pay a lot more. but actually, we've worked really hard to get the cost down.
- Correct, exactly, and you and your team were really helpful to that, you probably remember, because again, it's gotta be affordable, and the price point for some of the non-university based alt. certs. out there is around the same number, $4,400, and so you have to be competitive, not so much because of just thinking about budget and marketing. It's more about finances and family life and work life has to work for our future teachers, and so I'm really proud that Texas State and our leadership team has solved that problem and offers people a really high quality pathway at a price point that's affordable and supports them in getting into the profession.
- So how long would it take from like the beginning in your brain of start thinking about this to actually being certified to teach?
- It really can be individualized. So the equivalent of three courses that a person takes before they move into that internship or student teaching. So one person, what we're finding, is will take all three courses. Say they start in summer, they'll take all three courses in summer, they'll move through and do the internship fall and spring, and they'll be a certified teacher by the end of the year.
- So within 12 months, yeah.
- Within 12 months, absolutely. Some other people might have been out of college for a really long time and sometimes they feel anxious and they want to start with one course usually because they're taking the course very, very seriously, and they wanna be sure that they do well, and we're assuring them that they're ready, but they want to do well, and they might have young kids at home and working responsibilities. So somebody else might take one course and then the next semester two. So they can pace it out a little bit if they want to. I think the path towards the one year completion is really the good way to go, but for people who have other responsibilities or desire to slow it down, they've got some flexibility to be able to do that, because the most important thing is Texas has about 5.5 million kids in our public schools, the most--
- I heard we have like 10% of the kids in America are in Texas, yeah.
- Exactly, exactly, and so the most important thing is that these teachers are extremely well-prepared, and I think that's our teacher candidates' goal, and certainly our faculty goal. So part of what I'm saying about pacing is what is it really gonna take for them to engage the program the best way possible? And by the time they're standing in front of students in a Texas school, they feel and we feel, everybody knows, this person's really well prepared, and we can entrust these kids to them, and the kids are gonna do fantastic.
- One of the things I love about Texas State is that I think it really does lend itself to kind of individualized approaches. Like it's not one size fits all, 'cause they're not all the same, and this program and your program, in general, is a perfect example of that. There's lots of ways to become a teacher, but we're generating more teachers than any other school in the state of Texas, more Texas teachers than any school in Texas. I always like to say more than any other university in the world, 'cause who else is doing this?
- That's right. That's technically very correct.
- Yeah, and in the universe, and that actually leads back to our legacy. I mean, we started as a normal school, a school who was designed to teach teachers, and I love that we've never lost that part of our legacy, that teaching future teachers, including someone like Lyndon Baines Johnson, who became a teacher after coming here in 1930, a great preparation for him to become president of the United States later on, having gotten his teacher certificate here.
- Talk about a meandering path, right?
- Yeah, exactly, he did, right?
- But it, but all the pieces fit together, and they build skills and experiences with communities, life experiences that empowered him, I think.
- He had to drop outta school for a while, because he ran outta money, and so we went and taught at this very poor school, and he often talked about that experience influencing him when he became president and about all his efforts to create greater opportunity for education for young people and poverty and trying to get people out of poverty through education. He was influenced by Southwest Texas State, but also that experience about being a teacher in a really poor small town, and so yeah.
- That's right.
- So let's get back to your story. So you're teaching at your high school alma mater, and something happens along the way that you're not doing that anymore. So what happened?
- That's true. Well, you know, so I was teaching for a number of years, then I was an assistant principal. So we had 23 high schools in our system, and the way it kind of worked, you tended to bounce if you changed jobs. So I was teaching at Carroll, and then I moved to another school in Lansdale as assistant principal for academic affairs, and then from there to principal of another school, O'Hara, which was the largest school in our little 23 system. I loved it. I loved the whole thing. Being a teacher, my students, the classroom, it does something where it really changes you. Again, you just get a whole different view into humanity. So you get to make a difference. You're responsible and accountable for the learning of the students entrusted to you, but you also just get this whole other picture into life that I just thought was great. So then I was a high school principal. I loved being a principal, and at some point, I was doing my doctoral studies, as I mentioned, Hawk Hill in Philadelphia, and I had done that with the thought of continuing as a school leader. So my degree is in educational leadership, and at some point after completing the degree with more sort of exposure to higher education and kind of how it works from the inside, I became interested in shifting into being a professor. So that's what I did. I came over here to Texas State, believe it or not, 18 years ago from University of Central Florida. I was on faculty there, and then work, our ed leadership faculty was doing here around continuous school improvement, transformation, educational equity was really powerful and well known, and that attracted me here to Texas State, but one thing I wanna share is that once I was a professor, I was like, wow, this is also amazing. So as professors, we get to do scholarship and research and really kind of advance our fields and pursue questions, we teach. So in my program, I was preparing future principals and doctoral students, and you have a lot of flexibility. We work really, really hard as faculty, but we do have a lot more flexibility than I had as a principal, and I remember saying, looking back, experiencing that, this is also great. Wow, I loved being the principal because of my community. My teachers were great. The kids were great. There were a few knuckleheads, but it was a phenomenal experience, and I also remember thinking that was awesome. I'm so glad I did that. I'm never taking on an administrative post ever again. So clearly that didn't hold.
- Didn't work.
- That didn't hold, no, no, and so I continued here as faculty at Texas State for a while and eventually moved into administration, which is an incredibly rewarding experience.
- And how did you end up being the dean?
- Two things happened. I had the opportunity to do a Fulbright and I did my work in Santiago de Chile and I don't know how to describe that. Just being in another culture, what, at the time, felt so far away to me, having the opportunity to do some research and teaching there, and also Fulbright opens doors. So in the country, I only had six months to do my research project before I had to go home, and it does open doors, and so I was able to kind of, you have to do it quickly, and I was able to do that, and something about that experience was really, really empowering. So that was one thing that kind of said to me, hey, I think there are other creative opportunities and pathways ahead. The other thing was our department chair was stepping down, Linda Hallmeyer, who was an awesome chair, and both Linda and the dean, Stan Carpenter, had said to me, "We need an interim. "We're doing a national search. "Could you think about doing this?" And I was, remember, I was never gonna be an administrator again, and I thought, I don't know about this, and I was really uncertain, and then I thought, well, this could be interesting. So I stepped into doing it. Kelly, within four weeks of being in that position, I was like, this is amazing. I'm applying for this job. I didn't think I would. I was like, we have two counseling clinics. We serve a thousand counseling sessions a year, and so I started to learn more about what my colleagues on the faculty were doing, what their grad students were doing, the impact people were having, and that's what drew me in. So I served in that role five years, and then when the dean position became open, applied. That was also a national search, but I wanna go back to that moment. It was something about the unusualness of the Fulbright experience and the opportunity that gave and the invitation of my prior chair that opened the door. So I would say I'm a dean really because of those earlier moments, and what that says to me, I think for our listeners too, for our kids in high school, for our future teachers, is follow those invitations. Life puts invitations in front of us and have the confidence but get the support you need to follow those invitations, and then you'll have that meandering path we've talked about, and it will be wonderful and beyond anything I think people expected for themselves.
- It's so deep, because I think I was talking with a young person recently about, and she's afraid to fail, and there's this mantra, I think it was NASA, like failure is not an option, and I said failure is an option. I'm pretty risk averse generally, but people have opened doors for me that I didn't expect to open, and sometimes it took like prompting, like you, like you didn't really wanna do that at first, and the prompting kinda like forced me to do something, because they thought, yeah, I think Kelly can do this, but I didn't think I could do it,
- That's right.
- and then you get in there and go, holy cow, it's a world I didn't know existed and boy this is kind of working. Lemme see what the next step looks like, and I think that that's something very powerful to understand that you can't just let life happen to you. Sometimes you actually have to be a little proactive,
- That's right.
- and it might not work,
- That's right.
- but if it does work, it can open something up that could be really special.
- I think so, and I think if it doesn't work, in my experience, it's still part of that meandering path. It still leads you towards some other opportunity or some other way of living that is gonna open up. It's all part of the path. I like the way you're describing it.
- Yeah, think about how many people started a business and failed and it didn't work, but you learned lessons, I'm not gonna do that again, and then your next business takes off, and so you think about the overnight success that took 30 years to get there, but you build on these experiences over time, and so that really, it's fascinating to hear your story, because I think sometimes people get, it's kind of mystical how people end up being deans or presidents, and you think that they were just born there and born with a desire to be there,
- That's right.
- But most of us kind of ended up there sort of by accident, taking advantages, getting invited to do things, leaning on mentors who believed in you, and then taking a chance and knowing that you might fail, but if you don't try, you're not gonna get there either, yeah.
- That's exactly right. That's right, and I think a great thing about being a dean at Texas State is it's powered by people. We work with great people, we have phenomenal students, and collectively, this community makes a huge difference, and I think that's what, you know, we talked about how I got into the role. What power is keeping going, you know, and I think that's it. It's our people. It's our students, our faculty, our staff, our community. There's just a lot of people invested in this College of Education, and they accomplish amazing things.
- Well, Michael, the last thing we'll do before you leave is we've gotten in this tradition of having viewers and listeners submit questions to me, and then we like to turn the tables here and actually have you be the interviewer.
- Oh, okay.
- and you get to ask me a question.
- Oh, what is the most unusual item on your desk right now?
- So, I don't know if it's unusual, but it's something I never heard of until about a year ago. There's this thing that goes on in San Antonio called Fiesta San Antonio. It's kinda like Mardi Gras for San Antonio,
- Oh yeah, for sure.
- and I'd never heard of it before, and actually I'm embarrassed to say that I've never heard, but I'm just ignorant about it, but it's a big celebration that goes on for a couple of weeks, and one of the traditions is to make a badge or a medal for your organization to represent, and then during that two week period, you collect them. You go around, it's kinda like beads at Mardi Gras, but you collect these medals, and apparently, I learned this recently, it's a faux pas to wear last year's medals. Like you don't wanna have like all your old medals. It's because the goal is to get as many medals as you can from this year, and so a few years ago, one of our alumni became, he was like the king of Fiesta, and in his honor, we created medals for with a, I'm not sure what was on it, maybe had a SuperCat on or something like that. Darren Casey was the king of San Antonio's Fiesta, and that was like five or six years ago, and ever since then, we've made a limited edition of these medals, and we've just kind of passed them around, but we've not really engaged in San Antonio like I think we should. We've always had kind of a San Marcos, Austin, Round Rock orientation
- Austin, yes.
- and ignored, I think at our peril, and San Antonio's peril as well, what's going on just 35, 45 minutes south of here, and so I said, we're gonna get involved. So last year, we got a little bit involved with the Fiesta San Antonio, and then this year, Beth and I actually went and rode in the parade. We took Coco down with us.
- Oh, fantastic.
- They have three parades, one's at night, one's in the daytime, and it's called the Battle of the Flowers, and we have a big, like a Macy's Day Parade balloon with the hand that the States Up,
- Oh yeah, yeah, I've seen that.
- and so we actually had that on there, but we were on the boat parade, which is on the river, which is really cool, but anyways, on my desk, I've got all the medals we've had for the past six or seven years of the Fiesta medals, which I may be the only person in Texas that has all of them, the whole collection of them. There may be a couple other people, but it's really cool to look back over the years to see, 'cause it's a different design every year, and it looks like a medal like you'd win if you were in the military or something like that. So that's probably it. What about you? Do you have something unusual on your desk?
- I do. That's very interesting, though, the Fiesta medals. It's really cool. All right, let me think. It's hard to choose. All right, two quick things. One, cartonera books. So some of our faculty, they help adults and kids make actual books. They create the story, they write the book, but they make everything out of sort of recycled and easily available material. So it's not a printed book. Like they draw it, they make the cardboard covers, they paint them, and so the faculty who worked on this gave me some of the cartonera projects, and so I have that on my conference room table right next to my desk where we usually sit with people and meet, and I think that's one. Now my other one is, you know those stress balls?
- Yes.
- It's an orange hippo, and I got it when I visited Hutto ISD, Hippo Nation.
- Yeah, Hippo Nation, yeah.
- Hippo Nation, and I love that, and that's always a conversation starter on my desk.
- And we've got a great program speaking of Round Rock and the Hutto area, but with Round Rock ISD where we're growing, they're growing their own future teachers there, and I know you were very instrumental in that, and so I know you're always thinking about how can we get more teachers in the classroom, and I was just so proud of the role that Texas State plays there. So thank you for doing that.
- Well, thank you. Thanks for supporting us and our college and helping us be a good pathway for people into teaching. Thank you.
- That's awesome. Thanks so much, and thank you for joining us here on this episode of The Current. Thank you, Michael, for joining us, and thank you for coming in today to find out a little bit more about what's happening here at Texas State. Until next time, States Up everyone.