Working within the Organization

Today's Dilemma

Higher Education is immersed in one of the more fundamental transitions of its history. Because of changing demographics, changing social needs, and changing technologies, new definitions of the professorate are being developed, along with different approaches to the teaching, learning, research, and service missions of the university.

The course transformation process places us in the midst of shifting expectations about what we should do and how we should do it. It challenges organizations (and their leaders) to adjust institutional structures and rewards to support the new (and often until recently unknown) approaches with new (and as yet unknown) administrative procedures. How should we work within an organization that is, itself, unsure how to adapt to novel expectations?

As we find that we need to work in new ways, we find that the traditional manner in which universities are organized may not accommodate these needs. As the CTA process helps you become one of the change leaders on a campus, it is important to understand how to find the best way to work with others during this transition period.

Clarifying the Dilemma

At the turn of the last century, Edwin Abbott wrote a fantasy tale about a world called Flatland that was defined by the boundaries of a geometric plane. The inhabitants were 2 dimensional figures, like triangles, squares, circles, and lines. The culminating moment of the plot involves the arrival of a 3 dimensional sphere who tries to explain the idea of a third dimension to our hero, a square, who had no prior experience through which to understand it. Eventually, the hero is able to understand this notion. He tries to explain the idea to his unbelieving family and friends (without the help of the sphere) and finishes his days in a imprisoned for his blasphemous assertions.

This cautionary tale warned last century's readers that they would soon be facing a world with many new ideas. Its moral is a good one for today's educator. Those who discover the social and psychological dimensions of learning challenge some of the current orthodoxy in higher education. They understand the need for a new, different ways of teaching and administering programs. For traditional colleagues, the new pedagogical questions such educators ask and problems they try to solve will seem unnecessarily ephemeral or complicated.

To make web site that brings students through an effective learning process, for example, electronic educators must be aware of developmental stages, learning routines, and social structures that map out the site. The simple linking of pages of information alone cannot guide learners through the steps of engaging the material. Traditional teachers may address these needs (or make up when they are missing) through their intuitive reactions to students. The effective distance educator must know about these deeper learning dynamics when designing the lesson.

Developmental psychologist Robert Kegan puts the concern in stark terms:

Higher education will disappoint the real learning needs of many modern adults if it assumes that the hidden curriculum is already mastered; if it tries to train adults to master that curriculum (by focusing too exclusively on the skills and behaviors associated with mastery) rather than to educate adults to the order of consciousness that enables those skills and behaviors. (1994: 287)

Kegan provides a careful discussion of the changes in consciousness that a college education can provide, as long as the teacher knows how to deliberately lead students through the transformative process. It is educational scholars like Kegan who are re-defining the expectations of college teaching by describing the "hidden" dimensions upon which success truly depends.

As you have been engaged in the pedagogy discussions of the course transformation academy, you have been introduced to several of these underlying dimensions (and the practical accommodations that might be made). As you integrate these ideas into your own teaching approach, you may well find that what you need in order to work together with others is likely to change -- at the risk that you may be making demands on them that they do not understand.

Working with the Dilemma

For the educator who is struggling to transform higher education so that it better responds to the unrecognized social and psychological dimensions that undergird its success, work within traditional institutional structures may be discomforting. The curriculum may not be adequately sequenced. Prior courses may not have led students to do the developmental work that would prepare them for later courses. Institutionally, teaching may be defined and rewarded only in terms of its content coverage.  Administrators may not know the questions to ask or the supports to provide to faculty who are addressing the social and psychological dimensions of students' experiences. They may make demands that, seen in light of these dimensions, are not doable. Such conditions make the teacher balance the successes gained in their transformed lessons against the added frustrations of working in a new way.

To achieve a better balance between the advantages and the drawbacks created by this dilemma, the educator can follow some deliberate personal and political strategies. A summary of each of these kinds of strategies follows.

The first personal strategy is to become aware that in fact many of the frustrations are part of an historical transition. The problems are common (both within our university and across higher education), even though we experience them as personal ones. These problems also have certain patterns to them. As we come to understand these patterns, it is easier to understand the confusions and contradictions that we face.

A second strategy is to find others who recognize that our success depends on the attention we give to the extra dimensions of students. Faculty and administrators who understand the need for developmental learning, active thinking routines, or social support structures will recognize the efforts that you are making. They are likely to be able to give advice and suggestions. They can share frustrations. Building your own support network is an important element in sustaining early successes.

A third strategy is to become deliberate about your own professional development. "Paradigm pioneers," as one author calls those using new ideas, must often discover the right applications of new ideas to their special area. We have to invent our own answers rather than fall back on prior solutions. By engaging in reflective activities, such as portfolio writing, group discussions, action research, we can track our experiment and confirm our insights. We can share these early drafts with those in our support networks and further spur those conversations.

These three personal strategies are augmented by some political ones. Ultimately, institutional structures need to develop to support those who attend to the learning dimensions of our students. Organizational structures change more slowly than individuals, however. There is a need to engage in the political work involved in transforming traditional organizational structures into offices and programs that adapt to students' learning needs. There are three key strategies that may, at times be out of our immediate control, but remain, nonetheless, important to re-landscaping the university's infrastructure so that it better supports a more complex understanding of the learning needs our students have.

Strategy four, then, requires us to build consensus around a new vision. For those without any opportunity to be exposed to the new ideas about student learning, there is a natural inertia, a willingness to live with the existing structures. They may not even be prepared to listen to new ideas. As a result, we must be willing to engage in conversations that look for common ground where, despite different views, our interests continue to overlap. Few faculty, for example, are against student learning success. We should also look for those moments when our colleagues are ready to be challenged by the ideas we have been discovering and open up the conversations to discuss our emerging ideas and our suggestions for new ways of advising, teaching, evaluating, etc.

Strategy five involves taking social action. We must be willing and ready to become involved in the governance of the university if we are to ever live in an organization that supports the deeper dimensions of student success. Many of the terms by which faculty are evaluated are set at the department and need to be addressed at that level. Other procedures that guide faculty activities are determined in school and university level committees. The advice, requests, and concerns we bring to academic administrators also helps determine the conditions under which we work.. These all represent normal spheres of interaction where we can press claims for policies and procedures that are more supportive of the new kinds of work that we must do. Where we can build alliances with similarly-minded colleagues, we can multiply chances of enhancing the existing institutional practices.

A sixth strategy necessitates a developmental approach to leadership. This is really a two-fold application of the need to promote the developmental growth of all individuals so that they understand how to engage in the civic life of the university. First, it accepts the fact that the welter of day-to-day details means that some academic administrators have less time to engage in personal development activities. Their immediate needs are not addressed by transformative projects. For them, a developmental, rather than confrontational, approach suggests that we create occasions for introducing ideas and recommendations that derive from our experiments. We can offer explanations along with our requests that use scholarship to describe how our needs are connected the conditions for student success. We can help educate leaders from stages of flat-out-rejection-based-on-lack-of-understanding to a stage of full-involvement-in-a-dialogue-about-solutions.

The second application of the leadership strategy is for those of us who have leadership roles (as administrators and as faculty leaders). Knowing that change is likely to be resisted by colleagues who still view problems through traditional lenses, we need to introduce new ideas through a series of developmentally guided conversations. Our aim must be to create more thoughtful, informed dialogues that resist the temptation to grab for quick solutions and develop, instead, a more scholarly understanding of the dimensions of student success. At the same time, it is important for leaders to use the opportunities that present themselves to discover procedures and practices that can better support faculty who are attempting to find the best ways to work with all the dimensions of student success.

The personal growth that comes from re-imagining our roles in a cognitive, developmental, socially-supportive university put us in a difficult position when the current university continues to operate along traditional lines. It is, thus, not enough to wish that the university would be more responsive, we must accept the social responsibility of guiding our institution through the transitions of our era. We must recognize our personal concerns as calls to civic responsibility for the future of our university. These six strategies provide some ideas for how we can personally (and politically) navigate out times. Create a conversation that considers how you might best work with our changing university structures. What support do you need in undertaking the transformative work of teaching for student success in a new technological age? What strategies might help you develop this support? Use your discussion group to share your thoughts