Abstract

In addition to traditional roles, educational developers increasingly find themselves considering their involvement in issues of institutional change. However, this evolution leads to new challenges as educational developers attempt to discern whether and how to be involved in particular organizational change efforts. This chapter provides a framework that can help centers of all types reflect on the broader risks and rewards of institution-level leadership. Through a series of context-based reflective questions, the authors hope to promote strategic thinking among educational developers (particularly center directors) and to spur new questions and research as our field continues to evolve.

Keywords: organizational development, strategic planning, campus initiatives, institutional initiatives

Many educational developers and directors of Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTLs) probably have their own versions of a common story filled with conflicting emotions: We get a call from a high level administrator—perhaps a provost or a dean—asking for our assistance with some nascent initiative taking shape elsewhere on campus. The request may be for data about the prevalence of a certain teaching approach, or perhaps for references to scholarly literature or work being done at peer institutions. But the requests are often vague, sometimes ill formed, and frequently mysterious: What exactly are they getting at, and what are they trying to do? We provide assistance the best we can, but we wonder if we could be of more use if we had been more deeply involved in the conversations that led to the surprise requests.

This common scenario centers around the analogy made popular by Nancy Chism (1998, 2011) to describe our involvement in campus level discussions about teaching and learning—whether or not we are “at the table” when key issues are discussed, policies are formed, and new initiatives are launched. The desire to contribute more deeply to the institution’s work on teaching and learning marks an evolution in how we view our role as educational developers, both individually and collectively. It reflects a shift from thinking about educational development as individual consultation with faculty clients to campus leadership as institutional change agents (Chism, 1998, 2011; Diamond, 2005; Gillespie, 2010; Lieberman, 2011; Schroeder, 2011).

This shift closes the gap between educational development and organizational development, a move that has become an increasingly important topic for discussion among CTL directors trying to find appropriate roles for their centers within shifting institutional frameworks. Sorcinelli’s 2001 research indicates significant involvement in campus level discussions, a level of involvement that continues to increase as administrators see CTLs as pockets of expertise on important campus issues such as assessment, student engagement, and retention. As Schroeder et al. found in the 2006–2007 study that led to Coming in from the Margins: Faculty Development’s Emerging Organizational Development Role in Institutional Change, emerging evidence clearly demonstrates that “a necessary and significant role change is underway in faculty development” (2011). Chism, Gillespie, Blumberg, Schroeder, and others provide useful suggestions on how educational developers and CTL directors can increase their campus visibility and leadership ethos, with the aim of being invited more regularly to serve on important committees, brought in to consult with faculty governance bodies, and generally improve contact with senior administrators.

As we find increasing success at being called to the table, however, we find new challenges arising, including the way movements into organizational development can impact the mission and daily work of our CTLs. Being included in discussions of campus wide assessment efforts, for example, provides an opportunity to shape a significant initiative that can impact faculty work and student learning; however, getting tapped to lead a major assessment effort might overwhelm a center’s staff, significantly change its ability to offer core services faculty clients have come to expect, and change its reputation or perceived neutrality on campus. So while getting to the table can greatly increase our potential impact on teaching and learning, it is a complex endeavor that must be approached thoughtfully and strategically.

Our goal in this chapter is not to restate the calls to arms made so eloquently by Chism, Schroeder, Sorcinelli, and others mentioned here. Instead, we seek to complicate the metaphor of the table to allow new questions to enter our discussion:

  • What is the range of tables that present themselves to us, and which are best aligned with our expertise?

  • How do we make strategic decisions about when to seek out a seat at the table, or how to identify what kind of seat we want?

  • When might we want to avoid being at a table, and how might we say “no” (or at least offer a carefully framed “yes”)? When might it be wise to push away from a table, after one has made a significant contribution?

  • At what point do we cease being called to the table and start constructing our own?

The true power of metaphors comes in our pushing them to their limits and using them to explore our thinking, and we hope to do just that with this metaphor of tables in a way that speaks to the complexity of our roles within our respective institutions.

If the early call to arms is working, then it is time to respond to Schroeder’s most recent call to “further define” our organizational role (2011)—what it might look like in different contexts, how different tables might demand different roles, and how to balance the work of “playing reactive, supportive roles” and “assuming proactive, leadership responsibilities” (Blumberg, 2010). In what follows, we seek to offer a framework for doing what Gillespie (2010) calls “thinking organizationally.” By presenting a series of questions regarding participation in campus wide discussions and initiatives, we hope to promote strategic thinking among educational developers and CTL directors and to help them begin to articulate the concomitant risks and rewards of campus level participation and leadership. As Gillespie suggests, only through extensive practice in thinking organizationally can we begin acting organizationally and fully embrace the potential of being at the tables where the most important decisions are discussed and made.

Reflective Questions

As we consider the field of educational development and the metaphor of “getting to the table,” we suggest consideration of both context and practical questions to allow educational developers to consider where they are and where they want to be in their institutional conversations. To begin the next phase of the professional conversation and extend the metaphor, we offer a set of questions that can serve as a guide for reflection and decision making when considering your involvement with campus wide initiatives. We recognize that there is not a “one size fits all” approach and instead suggest that this reflective process should be fluid as you consider your individual and organizational positions within your institutional context, whether your CTL is a central resource or is situated within a specific academic unit. Below, we offer several different sets of questions, loosely grouped by different contexts but organized by a consistent framework. As you reflect on them, you may find yourself resonating with specific questions within the proposed question sets even if you do not particularly “match” with the designated context or if the entire question set is not a perfect fit. Either way, these questions should help you take stock of your current relationship to a campus wide initiative and identify strategies by which you could get involved or be involved without compromising your own mission (and/or perhaps even reenergizing your mission).

Whether you are at a new or well established CTL, there are certain questions that are important for us all to contemplate as we determine a course of action related to a particular campus initiative. These overarching, big picture questions are meant to guide you through a reflective process that will ideally provide you with a more complete picture of your role(s), the ways in which you can most effectively engage with an initiative, and the ways in which your CTL can or currently functions on campus. The questions are ordered purposefully from a more general perspective to a more specific framework.

Big Picture Questions (for all contexts):

  • How important is this initiative to the institution, your faculty clients, and their students?

  • Do you need to be involved for a broader or strategic purpose, either for your CTL or the institution?

  • Who are the stakeholders in the initiative? What are the politics involved?

  • How does—or might—the initiative tie into your mission?

  • What are the potential benefits and risk of your involvement (or lack thereof)?

  • What would you like for your involvement to entail, and is this realistic or likely?

  • What unique resources and expertise do you bring to the initiative?

  • What is your motivation for being involved?

New or Newly Revived CTLs

Staff and administrators of new CTLs find themselves in the overwhelming position of trying to prioritize initiatives, establish a clear identity, get core services in place, make a case for additional resources, establish relationships with faculty, chairs, deans, and more! With all this in mind, new CTLs may find campus wide initiatives too distracting as they can potentially pull attention and resources away from core services and signature programs. In fact, if you are just starting or are involved with a new CTL, it can be intimidating to even consider the existence of new initiatives or tables at which you might want or need to be involved. You might also find yourself in the position of wanting to contribute but not knowing how to get your foot in the door. Perhaps you find it tempting to say “yes” to everything as a way of contributing, making a name for yourself, and justifying additional resources. Establishing your CTL as a vital player in campus discussions is essential to the development of a successful center; therefore, we offer the following set of questions to help new CTLs navigate their way to “the table.”

Questions:

People/Relationships:

  • Who are/were your early allies and supporters who could help you get involved in important discussions and initiatives?

  • Were there specific administrators responsible for your CTL’s founding who could be your advocates for getting to the table?

  • How might you leverage work on this initiative to develop relationships you feel are important to your new center?

  • Who else is involved and how might building relationships with them help you in the long term?

Role/Identity:

  • Will involvement reinforce your CTL’s nascent mission or distract from it?

  • Does your potential role in the initiative speak to your personal and organizational expertise?

  • How might involvement allow you to establish your and/or your CTL’s identity and credibility on campus?

  • Does your participation reinforce the image you are trying to present about your new center?

Resources:

  • How might you contribute to the initiative with resources, programs, and services you have already developed, or that you might readily adapt? (Sometimes it can be hard to see what this might look like. Consider whether you can offer articles, research, resources, professional connections, an expert on the topic, etc.)

Strategic Thinking/Planning:

  • If the return on your investment of time and resources is questionable, how might you balance a “yes” with an attempt to negotiate a more focused or limited role in the initiative?

Established CTLs—Uninvolved/Not Yet Invited to the Table

If you are a part of an established CTL, you likely have established programs and services and an established reputation on your campus. You may feel that your resources are stretched as is, or you may be satisfied with your current role on campus. Some centers may have inadvertently built walls around their offices that lead to their being overlooked or not thought about when new initiatives are being planned or implemented.

Questions:

People/Relationships:

  • Are you on your administration’s radar? If not, how can you get on their radar? (See questions above for new centers.)

  • Do they know what you do and what you can bring to the table?

Role/Identity:

  • How are you perceived on campus—as a support service, a place for remediation or for excellence, a valued partner, or perhaps as an expert resource with knowledge about teaching and learning?

  • How might involvement reinforce or change those perceptions?

  • In what ways might you send the message that you’re “too busy” to get involved? If so, is this really true?

Resources:

  • How might involvement benefit you? Could aligning your center with this initiative help secure additional resources—staff, budget, facilities—in the future?

Strategic Thinking/Planning:

  • Have you isolated your center by saying “no” in the past, and if so, how does that impact involvement in the current initiative?

  • Will a lack of involvement or input now hurt you later, either in later stages of this initiative or in the possibility of being included in future ones?

  • Who will you alienate if you do not participate?

  • Whose “baby” is this initiative?

  • If you are trying to get involved in someone else’s project, how might you gain an invitation without seeming pushy or territorial?

Established Centers—At the Table/Partially Involved/Hesitant

As CTLs establish a stronger foothold and identity on campus, they often find themselves with a new set of concerns related to their presence “at the table” and in new initiatives. Some of the more established centers may find it potentially disruptive to their mission and identity to be drawn into administrative projects, or they may fear a loss of self determination if they embrace particular projects. Similarly, some CTLs are justifiably concerned that involvement in an initiative will result in the perception that they are part of or aligned with the administration (this is especially true for centers that were started by faculty driven initiatives). Other CTLs fear that their involvement in campus wide initiatives will take over, making it difficult for them to focus on the more traditional work they have been engaged in, the work that created their longevity and reputation on campus. Whether or not you want to be “at the table” or involved in new initiatives, it is critical that you thoughtfully weigh the implications that new opportunities could potentially bring to your center.

Questions:

People/Relationships:

  • How could your involvement help merge or connect different campus groups or cultures (such as faculty, staff, administrators, and/or students)?

  • Is this initiative someone’s pet project? If so, can you distance yourself from being part of that agenda and still contribute, preferably without damaging important relationships?

Role/Identity:

  • If the initiative seems to be unrelated to your mission, are you thinking too narrowly?

  • Have you looked beyond the “letter” of your mission to consider the “spirit” of your mission?

  • Have you fully considered the long term benefits of involvement as well as the implications of not being involved?

  • How might involvement change perceptions of your center’s neutrality in campus politics?

  • How might you overcome “us versus them” thinking to portray your involvement as beneficial to teaching and learning in general?

Resources:

  • Are your resources fully maxed out, or would involvement reduce your ability to accomplish critical functions? If so, who could help you prioritize work, support your decision to not be involved, and/or advocate for the additional resource you would need to get/stay involved?

Strategic Thinking/Planning:

  • If you have no options and have to be involved, are there ways you can negotiate your level of involvement?

  • Can you move from a leadership or working role on a committee to serving more as a consultant?

  • If you are hesitant to get involved in a new initiative, what are the underlying reasons you want out? How can you articulate this to your administration in a way that emphasizes your strengths?

Established CTLs—Heavily Involved in Campus Initiatives

Of course, some centers have been involved in campus level initiatives for years—and increasingly, more centers are heeding the call to arms, and as the literature suggests, more CTLs do appear to be getting to “the table.” This is further evidenced by the fact that, of the 142 sessions at the 2013 POD conference, there were 18 separate sessions focused on topics that relate to CTLs’ roles in organizational change, campus wide initiatives, and transitional identities. With this in mind, it becomes even more essential for centers to reflect on their evolution and the direction of their center on their campus, as well as within the overall field of educational development.

Questions:

People/Relationships:

  • How might involvement allow your CTL to work on key institutional issues that affect your daily work with faculty clients (i.e., working on policies or curricula that impact the faculty’s work)?

Role/Identity:

  • Has your role in this initiative and/or your center evolved since you became involved?

  • Do you need to re evaluate or re negotiate your role moving forward?

  • Is it time to re evaluate your mission? Has it grown or changed direction since the establishment of your center?

Resources:

  • Do you need more resources or staff to effectively handle the initiative?

  • Is there a way to involve graduate students or other students in this project or perhaps partner with another unit?

  • Can you build capacity within the faculty or other groups to increasingly shift responsibility to them for this work?

Strategic Thinking/Planning:

  • Have you considered a succession plan or exit strategy?

  • Does a new office or position need to be created to carry this initiative forward? In other words, is it time to pass the baton?

  • Are you effectively promoting your CTL’s involvement and work in this initiative to the upper administration? In other words, do they realize how instrumental you’ve been and the implications of this involvement on your resources?

Conclusions

We hope the sets of questions presented here will offer a framework for reflection that guides educational developers to examine their relationships to institutional initiatives and the ways they can engage in important conversations occurring “at the table.” Of course, the answers and implications of these questions may differ, depending on the context. Therefore, each CTL will have its own answers–and will likely come up with other questions we have not included here, an intended and hoped for outcome. Although we have tied the questions above to particular evolutionary stages of centers, the questions are designed to be fluid, and we believe that all questions potentially have applicability regardless of where you see your CTL. Our hope is that these questions will provide a starting place for reflection, both for individuals (in decision making and in discussions with staff teams and administrators) and for our field more broadly (in future research and in expanded opportunities to learn from one another).

As much as possible, we have attempted to situate our questions at the level of strategic thinking, in part because more concrete, practical concerns (about the amount of resources we can devote to a campus wide initiative, for instance) should only be addressed after we have determined whether or not a particular initiative is aligned with our strategic goals and interests, but also because it is only at the level of strategic thinking that we can truly discern how we may begin to shape the broader organizational identity of our institutions. We hope our work helps individual educational developers and CTL directors to cultivate the habit of thinking strategically when making decisions about involvement in campus wide initiatives and to develop a more nuanced relationship to “the table.” This is how we cultivate organizational thinking that eventually manifests itself as “acting organizationally” (Gillespie, 2010).

Of course, the shift from educational development to organizational development presents its own challenges, including ones that can sometimes forestall strategic and organization level thinking. Understanding that we “have a critical role to play in furthering institutional transformation and institutional initiatives” (Lieberman, 2011) does not mean that the work is simple or that the answers to questions like those we have posed here are straightforward. For many of us, our roles are evolving past our foundational work of leading workshops and providing teaching consultations. Embracing our new roles as campus change agents requires us to “walk the tightrope in a delicate balancing act” (Sorcinelli, 2002), and teaching centers “must constantly recenter themselves with the priorities and demands in constant flux around them and within multiple institutional centers of decision making” (Schroeder, 2011).

All of this comes with inherent tensions as we determine when to “serve” faculty and when to become “advocates” (Lindsay, 2011) for campus change, when to offer “support” and when to become “activist sites” (Tassoni, 2010) for change, and how to “align ourselves with senior administrators” (Lieberman, 2011) on particular initiatives while still inhabiting the “neutral posture” (Sorcinelli, 2002) that may have gotten us invited into those initiatives in the first place. As we become more active at more institutional tables, we must consider when/how we serve as participants in campus change and when/how we become catalysts for it (Baron, 2006), an issue that has implications for both individual CTLs and directors and for our broader field. In order to make strategic decisions about all of these things, and to arrive at the next set of questions that educational developers will need to consider, we will continue to see an increasing need for broader research that can help us to:

  • Better articulate and understand the roles we are playing at our institutions and how these roles are shifting as the broader higher education landscape evolves;

  • Conduct more effective benchmarking for our roles in similar kinds of centers, educational development offices, and institutions;

  • More effectively educate administrators on the value of involving educational developers in decision making about their institutions’ broader educational initiatives; and

  • Establish collaborative partnerships with other organizations (e.g., the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the Association for the Study of Higher Education) to advance the role of faculty developers in shaping the future of higher education.

As more educational developers bridge the divide to organizational development at their institutions, still other questions will emerge. The framework we have offered here focuses on receiving invitations to the table, on centers that have not yet been invited to the table, and on centers that have been invited and are, to varying degrees, involved in institution level initiatives. One final question bears repeating, then,—for the field, if not for particular CTLs or directors—is this: At what point do we cease being called to the table and start constructing our own? We hope the possible answers to this question–and the others that might follow from it—will motivate future research and move us past a state of “flux and formation” (Gillespie, 2010) to a more solidly integrated identity for all of us.

References

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