Susan Olsen Stevens

Susan Stevens is an educational consultant living in Saint Augustine, Florida. Her teaching experience spans private, public, and international schools, as well as homeschool. Susan’s thirty-one years of teaching are roughly divided into halves: she spent one half teaching grades preK–12 art, including AP levels, and the other half teaching grades 3–12 English language arts. Susan served as curriculum coordinator for early childhood through middle school at Country Day School in Costa Rica and was a language arts curriculum team leader at both Country Day School and International American Academy in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Her mission as a teacher is to inspire a joyous exuberance in learning—especially in reading conjoined with writing as a way to learn and communicate important ideas.

Susan has written three educational books: Dr. Goodreader: Teach readers how to diagnose and cure reading “clunks” through metacognition, The Little Golden Book of Metacognition, and The Metacognitive Student, which she wrote with Richard K. Cohen, Deanne Kildare Opatosky, James Savage, and Edward P. Darrah.

Susan has also given popular professional development workshops and classes on problem-solving in reading and writing, metacognition and reading, literacy across the disciplines, using storytelling in the classroom, on using her book Dr. Goodreader.

Susan graduated from the University of Toledo with a bachelor’s in education and received a Master in Christian Education from Logos University and a Master in Literacy from the University of New England. She passionately pursues professional learning through her reading and the courses she takes.

She has also written two Christian books: Fearless: A Bible-based path to peace and security in Christ and Wrestling Grace in a tit-for-tat world.

She and her husband, Pastor Michael Stevens, have been on four summer mission trips to Russia right before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union and were full-time missionaries in Ecuador for 13 years. They followed that up with a four-year church-planting in Costa Rica and returned to the United States in 2016.

Her heart is toward teaching women and she’s taught women’s groups large and small around the world. She’s a confident, intense, and humorous speaker. She’s transparent in her speaking and does not pretend to be a spiritual giant, just a woman who loves Christ and is on a journey to becoming more conformed to His image.