Carey Borkoski, Ph.D., Ed.D.
Dr. Borkoski has been an educator, advisor, and mentor for over two decades supporting, coaching, and guiding students, graduates, parents and caregivers, and leaders. As a life-long athlete and person committed to health and well-being, she has been coaching and training individuals, groups, and organizations for decades. She is an ICF certified coach with doctoral degrees in Policy, Measurement, and Methods and another in Education Leadership all of which inform and support her work with her clients.
Dr. Borkoski is a Tenured Associate Professor at Loyola University Maryland. Within the School of Education, she teaches and coaches emerging and current leaders. Carey has published numerous academic journal articles, magazine pieces, and book chapters. She has also written and published a book — Dancing with Discomfort: A framework for noticing, naming, and navigating our in-between moments. She and her podcast co-host and research colleague — Dr. Brianne Roos — also recently wrote a book based on four seasons of Tell Me This which is expected out in the first quarter of 2025. Carey’s most recent endeavors include researching and writing about the connections between grief and belonging with a forthcoming publication. She is also leading a new coaching certificate program at Loyola where she and her team are training a cohort of new coaches.
Carey has shared her work at several national conferences and other speaking engagements. She has been invited to share her own journey to belonging as well as her research and teaching related to community building and belonging with audiences of students, teachers, community members, and leaders. In her free time, Carey loves spending time with her family, running with her labradoodle, and biking all over the South Shore in Massachusetts. Most recently, she completed two marathons, including the Boston Marathon.
As a lifelong athlete, I have a deep understanding of the physical and mental demands of training. My journey began as a Division I and nationally ranked goalkeeper, where I learned the value of discipline, focus, and perseverance. After my athletic career, I transitioned into coaching high school girls' hockey and competing in triathlons, 5Ks, half and full marathons, and ultramarathons, including 50K and 50-mile races. I’ve also tackled obstacles like Tough Mudders and countless other endurance events.
Early on, like many newcomers to endurance sports, I followed generic training plans, which were often grueling and sometimes discouraging. These experiences taught me that while hard work is important, sustainable success requires a more personalized approach—one that nurtures not just the body, but the mind and spirit. Over the past two years, working with a coach, I’ve experienced the profound impact of creating tailored training systems that foster not only performance but also recovery and well-being.
This holistic perspective shapes my coaching philosophy. Training is not just about following a plan—it's about creating supportive systems that honor the body’s need for rest, reflection, and growth. As a coach, I help clients integrate fitness and health goals with the other important areas of their lives, offering space for pause, exploration, and mindful progress. Together, we’ll examine your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, experiment with what works, and discover how to align your physical goals with a balanced, healthy lifestyle.
Transitions are universal. They include the important and familiar milestones of starting kindergarten, graduating from high school or college, and becoming employed, parents, or retirees. These transitional moments, however, also include unexpected or unanticipated events like losing a job, joining a running club, or experiencing a global pandemic.
In each of these moments, individuals, groups, and organizations experience the anxiety, self-doubt, worry, and uncertainty associated with these novel experiences. Our natural response to these moments is to avoid, side-step, or hurry through until this moment of transition is over. The problem with these strategies is that while we are trying to shut out the unpleasant feelings of those moments, we also miss all the possibilities and discovery.
Listening to and Crafting Stories:
Cultivating Activism in Online Doctoral Students
The Johns Hopkins online EdD program prepares students as scholar-practitioners who become leaders and agents of change across educational contexts. Advocating for equity and social justice requires our students to not only immerse themselves in the relevant literature and learn the traditional skills of applied research but to master the art of communication through a sort of storytelling. Storytelling, in this sense, represents a means to gather and analyze data and understand and integrate diverse perspectives to engage and persuade relevant stakeholders (Moezzi, Janda, & Rotmann, 2017).
Engaging faculty in service-learning:
Opportunities and barriers to promoting our public mission
Community engagement has been defined as a collaborative enterprise between higher education institutes and external communities where stakeholders can experience and benefit from a mutually beneficial knowledge exchange. A researcher examined a Research 1 university faculty’s perception of community engagement in the form of service-learning and implemented an online community of practice for faculty and community members to increase the faculty’s use of service-learning. The findings revealed that, although faculty see many benefits in implementing service-learning and report interest in learning about and using this pedagogy, service-learning practices are still considered an addition to faculty workloads rather than an integrated and expected role.
Attending to the Teacher in the Teaching:
Prioritizing Faculty Well-Being
Success in academia depends on productivity in research, teaching, and service to the university, and the workload model that excludes attention to the welfare of faculty members themselves contributes to stress and burnout. Importantly, student success and well-being is influenced largely by their faculty members, whose ability to inspire and lead depends on their own well-being. This review article underscores the importance of attending to the well-being of the people behind the productivity in higher education. This article concludes with strategies to improve faculty well-being that incorporate an intentional focus on faculty members themselves, prioritize a community of well-being, and implement continuous high-quality professional learning.