Beyond Survival: Educational Development and the Maturing of the POD Network

Abstract

Scholarship about the growth of educational development has charted major shifts in developers’ focuses and roles through time and, especially in recent years, has explored the professionalization of the field around the globe. This essay uses a lifecycle analogy to consider the development of one organization, the POD Network (The Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education). After a brief and heady “start up phase,” and a long organizational “adolescence,” characterized by growth and by increasing formalization of processes, governance, and strategy, the POD Network is on the brink of entering a phase of greater maturity.

Keywords: POD, values, sustainability, organizational development, faculty development, metaphor

Concerns about “survival” in the field of educational development resurface with some regularity, as news spreads of a center closing, as individuals and programs experience changing institutional conditions, and as the entire field shifts and adapts in a turbulent higher education environment. But concerns about survival are not new. In 1979, Mary Lynn Crow, the second leader of the POD Network (POD), reflected on the evolution of the fledgling organization, established just three years earlier. Drawing on her academic background in human growth and development, she sketched what she termed the network’s “emotional history” by means of a lifecycle analogy, noting its “brief carefree childhood,” and locating the POD of the late 1970s in a period of “soul searching adolescence,” characterized, on the one hand, by a mixture of enthusiasm and idealism, and, on the other, by disillusionment and conflict in the face of the growing pains associated with becoming a larger and more formally structured body (p. 4). Though she was optimistic that POD was poised to progress from adolescence to adulthood, for Crow, the most fundamental challenge to the achievement of a “mature” version of the organization was, she suggested, “the survival of the professional development movement itself” (p. 5).

Clearly the “professional development movement” has survived and has expanded not only in the United States and Canada, where POD’s sister organization the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) has existed since 1981, but in places outside of North America, where there are well established organizations such as the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA) founded in 1972, and the United Kingdom’s Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) founded in 1993. New organizations have continued to emerge around the world, especially in the last decade. The Professional and Organizational Development Network of Thailand Higher Education (“ThaiPOD”), for example, will hold its 10th annual conference this year, and a new Taiwanese professional development organization, “TPOD,” was scheduled to hold its inaugural conference during the summer of 2015 (M.Y. Shih, personal communication, May 11, 2015).

The POD Network itself has proceeded to grow—and to thrive—beyond many of its founders’ and early leaders’ expectations (Burdick, 2007, Fall; Burdick, 2011, Fall; Burdick, 2012, Winter). That is not to say that the decades have passed without struggle and loss; there have been wrenching instances of teaching center closings, deep budget cuts, and reorganizations that have severely curtailed or ended the work of POD members as developers at their institutions. Many have experienced a sense of insecurity and loss that has led colleagues to warn this can be a “dangerous profession” (Nilson, Nuhfer, & Mullinix, 2011). But though individuals and centers do, at times, experience the impact of market fluctuations and suffer the results of changing leadership priorities or administrative capriciousness, I would argue that the field is well and growing, despite challenges and inevitable changes. The creation of new centers and new positions, for one, would seem at least numerically to balance out the loss of more established ones (S. Kuhlenschmidt, personal communication, May 24, 2014; Flaherty, 2014; Ortquist Ahrens, 2014). And the possibility for longevity and impact is clearer nowhere than in the 50th anniversary of what is not only the oldest but also one of the most influential teaching centers in the United States, the University of Michigan’s highly regarded Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, in 2013 (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Fiftieth Anniversary of the University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, Courtesy of Jake Jacobson

But what about the POD Network itself and its vitality? As the POD Network has just celebrated its 40th conference in November, 2015, the time is ripe to take stock of the organization’s own growth and development, to reflect on where it is now, how far it has come, and where it might go, even as the future for the ultimate shape of higher education itself generally remains fluid and uncertain. While some have explored educational development’s increasing professionalization and significant growth over the past decades (Clegg, 2009; Land, 2004; Little, 2014) and while others have charted phases in the field’s development (Tiberius, 2001; Sorcinelli, Austin, Eddy, & Beach, 2006; Ouellett, 2010), this essay will focus exclusively on the development of the POD Network as an organization. Like Crow, I employ a lifecycle analogy to frame and explore POD’s trajectory. Doing so leads me to suggest that POD is in the process of becoming and in some ways, perhaps already is, a mature organization. As such, there are particular developmental tasks its members and leaders must attend to, including making some important and difficult decisions while being mindful and responsive in the face of its particular “survival” challenges.

The Lifecycle Metaphor

In his study of the range of images and metaphors deployed explicitly or implicitly in thinking about organizations, Gareth Morgan (2006) observes that, after moving beyond a mechanistic and highly bureaucratic model of organization development in the early 20th century, “most modern organization theorists have looked to nature to understand organizations and organizational life” (p. 65). As opposed to mechanical metaphors that can lead people to imagine and create organizational forms that are inflexible and unable to adjust easily to changing contexts, organic metaphors allow a more fluid and responsive thinking about organizations as organisms that can evolve and adapt. Furthermore, organizations can be conceived of as open systems that operate and develop in the context of complex and changing natural environments and that even have the potential, especially in concert with other organizations, to (re)shape the environment itself (p. 63). A focus on survival as the “key aim or primary task facing any organization” (as opposed to a focus on operational goals alone) can help leaders become more flexible in their approaches, since “specific goals are framed by a more basic and enduring process that helps prevent them from becoming ends in themselves, a common fate in many organizations” (p. 65). While Morgan emphasizes that metaphors and images can be powerful tools for deepening our understanding and seeing things in fresh ways, he also makes clear that they bring with them limitations and can distort or hide as much as they illuminate. It is with this qualified understanding of the pros and cons of using metaphor as a tool that I explore some key moments in POD’s history with a lifecycle analogy.

Thinking about the evolution of nonprofit organizations in terms of lifecycle is not new. While theorists already embraced the metaphor of organizational lifecycles for the corporate sector in the 1970s, it was not until the 1990s that Susan Kenny Stevens applied the framework to writing and thinking about the nonprofit world (Brothers & Sherman, 2012). In light of this development, Crow’s use of the analogy in the late 1970s seems prescient. Many contemporary books and guides written for leaders of nonprofit organizations frame their advice in terms of a lifecycle model (Brothers & Sherman, 2012; Nonprofit Board, 2012) that generally includes five or more such phases as “start up,” “growth” (also “adolescence” or “infrastructure”), “maturity,” and some sort of “decline” (“stagnation”) leading possibly to an ending, or “defunct” status. Some lifecycle models more strongly emphasize elements such as “progress toward achieving mission” (Brothers & Sherman, 2012, p. 5) than the chronological and structural factors characteristic of the Stevens model, or may overlay the two (Brothers & Sherman, 2012, p. 6). Such resources typically present the framework along with a number of caveats about its limitations: that the elements of the model, or the phases, do not necessarily all occur, that they do not necessarily unfold in a linear progression, that some aspects of an organization may be located at one stage and other aspects at another, and that any one of the stages may be sustained for long periods of time, if not indefinitely. A decades old organization might, thus, find itself still characterized by aspects of a start up. Despite limitations, one benefit of this model is its ability to help leaders and boards anticipate likely opportunities and challenges at different moments, and to suggest developmentally appropriate tasks or key questions in an organization’s development.

Developmental tasks for human adults around “middle age” often involve, as in Erik Erikson’s scheme, making a choice between generativity and stagnation. Besides the fact that the POD Network was founded in 1976—long enough ago to make it close to 40, or about “middle age” in human terms in the developed world—what’s my evidence that the organization has come through adolescence and up to a place of maturity, that it must work to make choices that foster generativity and help it steer clear of stagnation? In what follows, I will trace POD’s evolution through phases of “start up,” an extended “adolescence,” and up to what I argue is the brink of “maturity,” and I will offer some thoughts about the current opportunities and challenges a mature POD Network faces.

Start Up

Joan North, the POD Network’s first president—then called “coordinator”—chronicled together with Stephen Scholl the organization’s early history in an article entitled “POD: The founding of a national network.” The piece appeared in the same inaugural issue of the POD Quarterly as Crow’s complementary “emotional history.” North and Scholl detailed a mid 1970s “explosion” of committees, offices, positions, and grant funded projects devoted to institutional renewal through “faculty development,” a term they presented tentatively in quotation marks, as there was not yet consensus about what to name the emerging movement (p. 10). Certainly, there were precursors to this flurry of activities, such as efforts to collect student evaluation feedback at a number of institutions over the previous half a century, the appearance of the first few teaching centers in the 1960s, and new and foundational scholarship in the field of instructional design (Burdick, 2012, Fall). But this extensive energy and groundswell of activity devoted to faculty development efforts and projects—in a 1975 study, Jerry Gaff counted 218 in a single year (North & Scholl, 1979, p. 11)—was something new in both nature and volume.

One of the most formative and influential initiatives for the emerging movement and for subsequent practice of many members of the POD Network was a project at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, called The Clinic to Improve College Teaching.

Video 1: Promotional Video for “The Clinic to Improve University Teaching” is available under Supporting Information.

Funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation from 1972–1975 and based on a 1972 dissertation by Michael Melnick, the approach involved “a series of specific steps to improve teaching using a trained consultant…that offered faculty the chance to confidentially examine multiple data sources which focused on specific teaching skills and try many different improvement strategies” (Burdick, 2008, Spring; Burdick, 2011, Winter, p. 4). Not only has the Clinic process influenced practices of educational developers in the POD Network and beyond for decades, but many of the participants in the project, such as LuAnn Wilkerson, Bette LaSere Erickson, and Mary Deane Sorcinelli, went on to become prominent members and leaders of the organization.

What did not yet exist in the mid to late 1970s was a systematic approach to “establish[ing], maintain[ing] and evaluat[ing] new efforts at professional development” (North & Scholl, 1979, p. 12) nor any sort of overarching body to coordinate and link the myriad initiatives and projects. Some early explorations into creating a national umbrella organization took place during dedicated sessions at the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) National Conference in both 1974 and 1975. During a special meeting at the 1975 conference, 150 participants came together to explore options for creating a new organization devoted to faculty development. While no clear proposal emerged, two participants in the discussion, Bill Bergquist, a consultant with the Council for the Advancement of Small Colleges (CASC), and Bert Biles, who was in charge of Kansas State University’s new Center for Faculty Evaluation and Development, “resolved to take some action” (North & Scholl, 1979, p. 13). The result was a regional workshop, held near Cincinnati, Ohio, at the College of Mount St. Joseph in January of 1976 and preceded by “a T group [involving a small number of participants, called together] for the purpose of exploring central problems involved in their professional development work….Several members of that group met each other for the first time in Cincinnati and later became members of the first core committee of POD” (North & Scholl, 1979, p. 13). A number of attendees at the larger workshop signed on as potential members for the new organization, signaling their seriousness and interest by contributing their contact information to a mailing list. Twenty people even paid “dues.” At a special session called together by Biles and Bergquist at the March, 1976 AAHE convention, the name was chosen for the new organization, “The Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education”; an initial group of volunteers agreed to form the first board, which would go by the less formal moniker “Core Committee”; Joan North was chosen to lead the group; and the first official conference (notwithstanding the fact that the Cincinnati meeting was often fondly referred to as the first “‘national conference’”) was planned for the fall (North & Scholl, 1979, p. 13). A year later, a two page typewritten document of about 200 names and organizational affiliations—many of them small colleges in Ohio—comprised the first official membership list (Figure 2).

Figure 2. 1977 Member Directory, POD Archives

These were the heady early days of a start up organization that emerged from the cultural climate of the mid 1970s. Building on the idealistic energies of the decade’s social movements, the faculty development efforts promised to offer renewal and hope for the future in the face of general retrenchment in higher education. Crow recalls it as a time of welcomed mutual support, interpersonal bonding, high levels of trust, and enthusiastic volunteerism among a small group of people, without the trappings of “organizational appendages like large scale communication channels or a strong research base” (Burdick, 2010, Winter, pp. 4–5). It was bittersweet for this close knit informal group, she admitted, when newcomers discovered its existence and wanted to be included in order to gain access to resources and support.

North & Scholl, too, outlined tensions in the new organization between conflicting visions for “affiliation, support, and friendship as key goals,” on the one hand, and “the exchange of information,” on the other. They also admitted that “[a] few people resented the closeness of the organizers. There was an ill defined ‘in group’ running things, somehow larger than the Core Committee but identified in part with those who had belonged to the T group that had met in January in Cincinnati” (1979, p. 14). While membership fluctuated between 300–400 members in the early years, “almost the same approximately two score people worked on the Core Committee, led regional workshops, were featured in conference sessions, or did all three” (1979, p. 14). Besides leading to some resentment, this meant that the volunteer leadership was severely stretched. In these accounts, one clearly sees characteristics of a start up organization, led by founding members who engage in not only much of the leadership but also much of the work of the organization.

Others have shared portraits of the informal new enterprise. In one of the more than 80 interviews he has conducted with early members and leaders as part of the organization’s Oral History Project, POD Historian Dakin Burdick asked Mary Deane Sorcinelli about her entrée into the organization. She reflected on her first conference in 1979 at the Fairfield Glade in Tennessee: “We brought sleeping bags and stayed in a condo nearby owned by a relative… [of my dissertation chair, Sher Riechmann Hruska]. We’d walk across a field to the POD conference, which was… [completely different] from today’s annual conference—maybe 100 people, a modest plenary room and a few breakout spaces. A simple easel with a topic written in magic marker identified the sessions” (Fall, 2009, p. 5).

Burdick also interviewed Linc Fisch about his early memories. Fisch was recruited in advance of his first conference in 1981 by colleague Steve Scholl from Ohio Wesleyan University, who was in charge of that year’s Cincinnati based conference. Scholl asked Fisch if he could bring some AV equipment—in fact, a lot of AV equipment—with him from Kentucky as, Scholl explained, the hotel was charging “‘an arm and a leg for all this stuff’” (Burdick, 2012, Spring, p. 2). In true POD spirit, and characteristic of member actions in the start up phase of an organization, Fisch complied, rounded up all of the equipment he could find, put it in the back of his station wagon, drove it to the hotel, and even set it up in the rooms himself. To his even greater surprise, Fisch departed from his first conference as a member of the organization’s Core Committee, despite his protestation that “Wait a minute. I’m not even a member of this group. A nd…[certainly] you want [people with] some experience.’” At the reply that, no, they simply needed new people, Fisch replied “okay” and ended up serving two consecutive terms on the board, as too few people self nominated for the positions (Burdick, 2012, Spring, p. 2).

The tone of these early members’ recollections persisted in the documents produced by the organization for many years. Throughout the 1980s, for example, a marked informality of address together with playful allusions to shared conference experiences continued to characterize the POD Network News, a quarterly newsletter that served both informational and community building functions for members in the pre listserv, pre email era. In addition to previews or recaps of the annual conference, reminders to renew annual memberships, corrections to membership listing errors, and information about position openings, colleagues career moves, or resources and conferences of interest, each newsletter included a message from the organization’s leader (until 1993, called the “Executive Director,” and, thereafter, “President”). These messages were typically extraordinarily informal and often even chatty and personal in tone. Not infrequently they included something like a homespun limerick or a reference to goings on at the previous conference such as talent show antics, line dancing, or general “silliness” (A final report, November 1987). But beyond attesting to continued informality of a young POD Network, the newsletters also provide a window into the workings of the early Core Committee and demonstrate the organization’s initial efforts as a start up to achieve financial stability and to invite more members to consider participating in governance and the conference (Figure 3).

Figure 3. 1987 POD Network News, POD Archives

Adolescence

Though the POD Network has sought to maintain, as much as possible, the unusual ethos, friendly informality, generosity, cooperative spirit, consensus based decision making approach, and other to some degree countercultural values and norms embraced by its founders in the mid 1970s and cultivated throughout the 1980s, the organization has grown significantly in size and stature and has, of necessity, become more formalized. In the process, it has come to evince essentially all of the characteristics of an “adolescent” organization. Some of the requisite structure came early. As we have seen, POD’s board of directors—the Core Committee—was established within the first year and a leader was chosen. And already in early 1977, the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education was registered in the District of Columbia as a legal entity (North & Scholl, 1979, p. 16). Other elements characteristic of the adolescent phase emerged gradually over the succeeding decades.

Though narratives with recollections about POD’s more recent decades have yet to be published, a good number of the changes through time can nevertheless be charted in the POD Network News [http://podnetwork.org/publications/networknews/]. Increasingly in the early 1990s, at the same time POD’s current leader Dan Wheeler announced that “POD [was] no longer a bootstrap organization” and could afford to explore new projects (A few reflections, February 1993), the newsletter itself began to change in tone, focus, style, and layout, indicating—or possibly helping to facilitate—a shift in the organization away from the informality of the start up phase.

Figure 4. 1993 POD Network News, POD Archives

In 1995, a strategic planning group recommended that the newsletter become more substantive and serve as more than as a source of announcements (Increasing authorship, May 1995). Various newsletter columns attest to the growing attention to infrastructure. It is clear that the Core Committee worked:

• to adjust and readjust leadership structures, to clarify titles, and to experiment with different leadership configurations to best meet the growing organization’s needs (Core meeting, May, 1988; 1993 POD Conference, June, 1993);

• to add administrative support and capacity, for example, with the hiring of a part time Manager of Administrative Services (Core Committee News, May 1991);

• to introduce and enhance budgeting and planning processes (Core Meeting in Washington, D.C., June 1993; Presidents Column, Sept. 1998);

• to codify practices in what was to become a Governance Manual and to streamline and assess processes (From the President, March, 1996);

• to develop and formally adopt Ethical Guidelines for Practice (President’s Column, Jan 2001); and

• to return at regular intervals to develop new strategic plans as the outgoing ones were assessed (Report on Core Committee, Dec 1994; Presidents Column, Jan. 2001).

All of these efforts correspond with the attention of an adolescent organization to issues of infrastructure and identity (Brothers & Sherman, 2012, p. 45).

Furthermore, increasingly during the early 1990s, the Core Committee recognized the need to rely more and more strongly on standing committees, rather than board members, to do the work of the organization (Standing Committees, November 1992). Repeated calls went out in the POD Network News to encourage increased member involvement in governance and committees (Core Committee Activities, September 1987; From the new POD President, May 1995). Yet, until recently, most of POD’s active committees were chaired by a member of the organization who was also a member of the Core Committee. Now, in 2015, those same committees have become larger, more productive and sophisticated, and less directly tied through membership to the Core Committee. In response to and support of these changes, members of the Core Committee and the Executive Committee (President, Past President, President Elect, Executive Director, and Chair of the Finance Committee) are coming to the consensus that the focuses, processes, and tasks of the leadership group must shift to larger and more strategic questions, as the organization and its internal complexity grow together with calls for external service and leadership. At the same time, attention to communication and alignment between committees and the leadership are more crucial than ever.

While the past 25 years have witnessed growth, development, and professionalization, there have, of course, been ongoing challenges, tensions, and even, at times, experiences of loss, as cherished traditions of early years have given way to new practices. For example, some members were disappointed when the handcrafted POD Bright Ideas Lamp, introduced in 1986—which had grown fragile from being shipped to each year’s new recipient of the Bright Idea Award—was retired to the POD Network’s Archives at the University of Nebraska, and the honor was reconceived as the Innovation Award, announced each year at the conference and recognized with an engraved plaque (Figure 5). While some such organizational traditions have come and gone, a number of administrative challenges in running the organization have persisted and grown. Something as fundamental as accurately charting membership numbers, for example, has long proved vexing for POD, which has operated with an essentially all volunteer workforce and with limited administrative staff and resources; the ongoing nature of this challenge points toward a continued need to monitor and improve the organization’s record keeping processes and infrastructure. On a different level related to organizational goals and identity, the early tension between a desire to foreground community and information sharing, on the one hand, and to emphasize research and scholarship on the other, lives on, and, in fact, might be said to characterize dual values at the heart of the organization. Finally, some nagging patterns persist: despite a greatly increased involvement on the part of hundreds of POD members in the work and leadership of the organization, and despite intentional efforts to enhance transparency and to signal and structure inclusivity, newcomers at times still express a perception that the organization is “cliquey” or that there is an “in crowd.”

Figure 5. POD Bright Idea Lamp, POD Network (Flickr)

Still, all in all, a myriad of changes and developments in organizational structure, policy, leadership, volunteer involvement, financial stability, and increased programming have yielded a more robust organization that has successfully cultivated and maintained its identity and professional role in a national, and increasingly international, context. Over the POD Network’s nearly four decades, both its membership and the range of the organization’s offerings have burgeoned. From just a handful of close knit and devoted volunteer leaders and members in the mid 1970s and from the original narrow programming focus on a single small annual conference held in far flung places and isolated resorts, ideal for relationship building and networking, and some involvement with the AAHE Annual Conference, POD has expanded both in number of members and active volunteer participants as well as in offerings.

• Today, in 2015, the organization’s membership tops 1,100[1] and includes representatives from 641 institutions across the nation as well as from 21 countries outside the United States.

• Conference attendance over the past decade has averaged 730. Attendance at the 40^th Anniversary Conference in San Francisco in 2015 reached 948. As a result of its size, the annual conference has been located in large cities that are easily accessible from many locations and at venues that can accommodate all of the attendees and sessions. Scores of volunteers support the work of the Conference Team members, a rotating foursome of volunteers from the organization’s membership (Figure 6), who plan and execute the entire conference each year together with the Executive Director (the current designation for an updated and reconceptualized version of what was the Manager of Administrative Services) (Figure 7).

• At the November 2014 meeting in Dallas, 31 of the 731 attendees came from countries outside of the United States, including Canada, Chile, China, Ghana, Japan, Lebanon, Nigeria, Peru, and South Korea. At the November 2015 meeting in San Francisco, 76 of the 948 attendees came from Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Estonia, Ghana, Japan, South Africa, Taiway, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom.

• “Getting Started,” the annual daylong preconference workshop, designed for new developers, drew a record 107 participants at the Dallas conference, some of whom registered on site, stretching the capacity of the venue (a cause for celebration). What is more, the majority of these newcomers came from teaching centers that were, themselves, relatively young. In all, 36% of the centers they represented had been around for less than 3 years; another 22% for 3–10 years; and the remaining 42% for longer than 10 years (Figure 8).

Figure 6. 2012 POD Conference Volunteers, Courtesy of Jake Jacobson

Figure 7. 2015 POD Conference Team Announced at the 2014 Conference, Courtesy of Jake Jacobson

Figure 8. 2014 Getting Started Preconference Workshop, Courtesy of Jake Jacobson

These numbers suggest that not only the field of educational development but the POD Network itself is thriving.

The annual conference remains, arguably, the centerpiece of POD’s programming and services to its membership (Figure 9). However, in the past four decades, the POD Network has greatly expanded the array of other services, programs, and resources it offers throughout the year both to members and to others interested in educational development. One of 16 of PODs active Standing Committees, a vital Professional Development Committee (PDC) devoted to the growth of the organization’s own members, has sponsored a biennial week long Institute for New Faculty Developers since 1997, and since 2012 a Leadership Development Institute in alternating summers (Figure 10). Beyond sponsoring its own events, POD has continued to cultivate important partnerships with other organizations, part of its long term identity and commitment as a network organization. Starting in 2009, under President Virginia Lee’s and President Elect Matt Ouellett’s leadership, POD began a collaboration with the AAC&U (Association of American Colleges and Universities)—holding an Organizational Development Institute devoted to multicultural organizational development just before the start of the AAC&U Annual Meeting, and offering one or two featured POD sponsored sessions during the conference. These sessions frequently draw standing room only crowds of attendees, including many upper level administrators, who are curious about the work of educational development and the roles of teaching centers (Figure 11).

Figure 9. 2012 POD Conference Poster Session, Courtesy of Jake Jacobson

The organization has also moved beyond a strict reliance upon face to face meetings to function as a strong and supportive network. In addition to its growing slate of programming, POD has an active listserv, founded in the 1990s by Nancy Chism (Burdick, 2011, Spring). The listserv provides an open forum for discussion and a means for sharing knowledge, advice, and encouragement and has been a powerful networking tool, though, admittedly, at times, concerns flare about the forum’s lack of moderation; the desirability of retaining a virtual discussion open beyond the organization’s membership; and the possibility of moving to other forms of interaction through new social media. A recently redesigned web site heralds a growing digital presence, and POD’s Electronic Communications and Resources Committee is working to meet member needs through increased use of social media. Committees can now meet virtually on a regular basis through a conference hosting platform, as a Small Colleges Committee sponsored group has done with great success on a monthly basis over the past year, setting a model for many others in the organization.

Other changes signal the development of POD beyond the start up phase. In 1982, The POD Quarterly stepped aside for an annual monograph, To Improve the Academy: Resources for Faculty, Instructional, and Organizational Development (Figures 12 and 13). And in 2014, under the leadership of editor Laura Cruz, To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development, the flagship publication and benefit of membership, appeared for the first time in digital format as a biannual journal and with an updated subtitle to more accurately reflect the nature of its focus. Between the time of the launching of the biannual journal in July 2014 and the November conference, there were over 5,000 hits on the site as well as 2,255 full text downloads. The increased accessibility, the clarified journal name which foregrounds the organization’s embrace of the internationally current term “educational development” (Felten, Kalish, Pingree, & Plank, 2007; Little, 2014), and the biannual publication schedule all make this important organizational resource stronger and more visible.

Maturity

Is POD a “mature” organization that has “hit its stride,” and, if it hasn’t quite yet, what might it mean for POD to be able to demonstrate more clearly what it has to offer both to those within and those beyond the network? Why might POD be moved to make the changes necessary to expand its work, enhance its stature, deepen its impact, and grow in sophistication? How far is the organization already down this road? What would it take—and what would it cost—to evolve into a new phase of organizational life that would allow POD to engage successfully in new arenas? A phase that would enhance POD’s external visibility and stature—one of the current strategic plan’s four major goals—while balancing this increased external focus with continued high quality services to its members, a non negotiable priority? These are significant questions for the organization as it hovers in the place between “adolescence” and “maturity.” Becoming more visible and demonstrating greater impact are two ways in which an organization may move to a place of maturity. In the lifecycle model explored by Brothers & Sherman, progression toward maturity starts with a focus on the core issues (and may last well past an organization’s early years), then moves to a second phase occupied by infrastructure development, a key capacity building phase. Only if the conditions are suitable and capacity significant at both program and infrastructure levels might an organization move into the final outward looking phase, the mature phase of “impact expansion” (2012, p. 7).

In a seminal article, “The role of educational developers in institutional change: From the basement office to the front office,” Nancy Chism (1998) explores the ways that faculty developers—most of whom were focused at that time primarily at the level of the individual faculty member—could contribute their particular and considerable aptitudes and skills to organizational change in their institutions. More than a decade later in 2011, Chism again addresses the importance of “getting to the table,” making the case that developers are uniquely positioned to help institutions navigate the turbulence of the higher education environment, and emphasizing that it is essential to combine the important work developers do behind the scenes with “work that is more publicly influential” (2011, p. 52). Similarly, developing a voice and a presence and representing POD’s expertise in public forums and in collaborations with other organizations could lead to continued thriving while helping POD to move forward its vision “for all institutions of higher education to value, promote, and reward teaching as a core scholarly activity that is informed by research and reflection and which results in deep learning for all students.” In 2015, I would argue that the POD Network is at the brink of becoming a mature organization and is poised to contribute the same competencies and talents that Chism has identified as important within institutions, but now to shared projects beyond the membership, including, for example, initiatives going on under the auspices of other nonprofit organizations.

There are indications that POD is already moving toward a new phase in its organizational life. Besides what is visible as increased growth and sophistication in the services, resources, and governance POD provides to its members, there is evidence that the organization is gaining a degree of external recognition, at least in some circles. More than once over the past year when a topic pertinent to educational development has been in the news, members of the Executive Committee have been contacted by key trade publications such as Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education to provide an expert perspective. Having a “place at the table,” or having a “voice” in prominent higher education publications or policy conversations has long been an aspiration of many members and leaders, as evidenced by conversations in Core Committee meetings for a number of years now and as occasional debates or calls for advocacy on the POD listserv make clear. What’s more, several foundations, initiatives, and even companies in the business of online professional development have reached out to invite POD to join efforts, seeking to engage the expertise of the organization’s practitioners and scholars, to build new partnerships, or at least to learn from or poll POD members. Some potential collaborators (and some potential competitors) are asking POD how to offer and use professional development to help a higher education system in the United States that is in need of significant and informed attention.

In addition to such opportunities to interact and work with publications, foundations, and businesses, the POD Network has the chance to explore partnerships with other nonprofit organizations. There may be good reason both for POD and for those in like minded nonprofit organizations to join efforts, as the authors of The Nonprofit Board Answer Book note, for “[f]ew organizations can do it all. Fewer still can afford it all. Surveying the economic landscape often leads boards to realize that it is futile to duplicate efforts when much can be gained by exploring partnership options with other nonprofits” (The Nonprofit Board, 2012, “When should we enter strategic alliances,” para. 1). Building strategic alliances may be a particularly promising way for the organization to flourish, contribute, and grow.

Over the past year, POD’s dormant Outreach Committee has been reconstituted and an ad hoc Committee on Partnerships formed to explore, define, and recommend (or discourage) undertaking key external partnerships and initiatives. As just one example, Cassandra Horii, Core Committee member and Co Chair of the recently reconstituted National Organizations Subcommittee of the Outreach Committee, has been leading efforts to connect POD with a groundswell of interest from STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) organizations in effective educational practices for all students. Horii maintains that, “[w]ith the federal push to graduate 1 million more STEM majors in the next 5 years, the NSF and other agencies are focused in unprecedented ways on evidence based instruction at the college and university level. Implied within the call for…implementing more evidence based practices…is a need for faculty and educational development practices that work—an area of particular expertise for POD” (C.V. Horii, personal communication, October 20, 2014). Beyond the involvement of many developers on their campuses as collaborators in grant funded projects such as the NSF WIDER (National Science Foundation Widening Implementation & Demonstration of Evidence Based Reforms) project, there is much activity and excitement about partnerships with STEM educators among POD members. In multiple concerted efforts to achieve the goal of enhancing STEM education, the need for deep learning, better and more effective teaching—and thus educational development—are apparent to those heading these STEM initiatives; however, the POD Network is not necessarily well known by those leading the charge. As a result, co chairs Horii and Matt Ouellett collaborated with the APLU (Association of Public and Land grant Universities) STEM Education Centers Network and other national leaders to develop a meeting that took place on November 8 9, 2015, directly following the annual POD Conference. This NSF funded symposium, Collaborating at the Centers: A Workshop on STEM Transformation, brought together leaders of interdisciplinary teaching centers and STEM education centers to learn about each others’ goals and values, to expand networks, and to consider how working together might enhance efforts at improving undergraduate STEM education.

The potential for POD’s growth, vitality, and contributions through work beyond the organization’s bounds is limited neither to engaging with domestic for profit or nonprofit ventures. For one, while the POD President has long sat on the Board of the International Consortium for Educational Development (ICED), for the first time a POD member is participating in the executive leadership: in 2014 Former President Kathryn Plank was elected to serve as ICED’s vice president, providing the POD Network with a seat at that international table. Furthermore, requests for partnerships, collaborations, or support from those in other countries eager to establish or grow their own educational development capacity have begun to multiply and represent another major external arena for a mature POD to consider. For many years, POD members have explored international partnerships on an individual and institutional basis. Only recently has POD as an organization undertaken a small scale pilot project of its own. But many questions remain: What might POD’s greater contribution to educational development be internationally? How does work with international colleagues and organizations help us further our mission and support our vision? How might engaging with colleagues from around the world, helping them to grow their own capacity, further the work of POD and help us grow? What do we stand to learn? Engaging in international projects and partnerships would require the organization to re examine questions about ethics, mission, and vision, and also to keep cultural competency ever front and center (DeZure et al., 2012). Again, it is important to keep in mind when considering any of these possibilities that the needs are great and the requests are likely to outstrip the organization’s current abilities to effectively respond, limiting what can be supported due to the POD Network’s current organizational capacity, or making it important to consider how to grow the organization’s resources.

Conclusion

I would argue that the POD Network finds itself at the threshold of maturity, and that our current developmental challenge involves making strategic, careful, mission aligned choices that move us toward generativity in order to avoid stagnation, and certainly to head off increasing irrelevance or decline. There is clearly a wide array of intriguing opportunities to consider, and many of these are related to potential partnerships or work beyond the organization that are presenting themselves to us with increasing rapidity as the world around us changes. As the Nonprofit Board Answer Book suggests, an organization seeking to “hit its stride” and “flourish,” to thrive, to be generative, and perhaps to enter a new phase of organizational life, needs more than ever to stay on top of emerging trends and shifts in the environment (“What is the typical lifecycle,” para. 12). For POD, this means, among other things, fine tuning a sensitivity to changes in the unpredictable and constantly evolving local and global contexts for higher education. It also means becoming more nimble—but not careless—in decision making processes and in the ability to respond wisely to external challenges or requests while balancing these with central commitments internally to members. It means deciding what kind of advocacy is appropriate and sustainable for the organization as well as supported by its membership. Furthermore, to “hit its stride” and “flourish” in the current environment, POD must be clear about whether the organization’s infrastructure can support taking on new outward facing initiatives and advocacy on top of already existing commitments to a body that has grown substantially in size of membership; in complexity and number of committees and special interest groups (SIGS); and in the number of programs, services, and resources available to members. If the capacity is not adequate but the aspiration remains to expand impact, the leadership and the membership will need, among other things, to explore new approaches to generating revenue and to increasing staffing. There are intriguing, promising, and time sensitive opportunities in the world around us at this moment when, I believe, educational development is becoming more relevant than ever. The POD Network must discern its role and clarify what it would take to move into a new stage in its organizational lifecycle. And while there is risk inherent in the new, there can also be very significant risk involved in maintaining the status quo—at least in an unreflective way—in a turbulent context.

Finally and fundamentally, as the organization asks questions about the scope of its resources and energies, it must be ever mindful core values and commitments. Deliberations about current challenges and opportunities for the organization, together with their implications for respecting and preserving the central values of POD, constitute much of the ongoing work of the Core Committee and the Executive Committee. Though eager to help the POD Network flourish and thrive in the 21st century, and though eager to see POD contribute to moving toward achieving its vision, the leadership is also very aware, respectful, and protective of what has long made this organization unique and its work effective. Attending to and living into one of the four identified goals of the current strategic plan, “acting on our commitment to inclusion and diversity,” has never been more important than it is now.

The value related part the organization’s identity was clearly reflected in the responses of the 2013 conference attendees who attended the Presidential Address. Their commitments are appear here in a word cloud formed out of their responses to then President Kathryn Plank’s question “What do we do and why do we do it?” In essence, “What does POD stand for?” Audience members readily tweeted their responses, which scrolled across the screen (Figure 14). As articulated by its membership, these responses drove home that the organization’s priorities start with students, focus on change for higher education to meet the needs of all students, and include the vision of helping to “imagine a new academy”:

• It all goes back to the students.

• We may serve underrepresented populations who deserve to be taught by people who teach well.

• We create and foster opportunities for an educated citizenry.

• Education changes lives. Education is an enchanting experience.

• We are here to build community in higher education that has been missing.

• To bring out the best in others.

• We do this work to enhance research [on teaching and learning and educational development].

• We do this work to be agents of change.

• We are here because it’s needed, because it works, because it often subverts dominant cultures.

• We are here to make a difference.

• We owe it to our students.

• Can we imagine a new academy? There is such potential at this time. (Plank, 2013).

The verbs that run through these participant responses are verbs of support, help, change, and improvement: inspire, empower, improve, enhance, connect, facilitate, foster, mentor, challenge, change, influence, help, all based on equally important values involving solid grounding in scholarship, good practices, thorough assessment, and thoughtful research. These are some of the individual reasons POD members give for doing the work they do in their contexts; but they can and must also continue to be central for a POD as an organization that seeks not only to survive but to thrive in the 21st century.

Despite her initial concerns about survival—concerns that have echoed through the stories we continue to tell ourselves about our work across the decades, even in spite of evidence to the contrary—Crow’s conclusion to her 1979 essay about the future of POD was an optimistic one. It called for colleagues to remain open to growth, not only the growth they might help foster in others, but growth and evolution in the organization itself. “I hope you will concur with me,” she said,

Since the early, heady days of POD’s start up phase, the organization has evolved considerably, yet there are many striking continuities. For one thing, concerns about survival are not new; they are part of our foundational narrative. And, as was true for the founders, the current moment is one of change and disruption. Still now, in the second decade of the 21st century, I believe that Crow’s words continue to speak to us, and, we have the room, the possibility, and a strong reason—helping to shape the future of higher education—to continue to develop ourselves.

Note

1. 1100+ represents the accurate membership figure for the POD Network in June 2015. Higher figures which have been cited over the past decade resulted from a database error that has come to light in the past year. There has been no decline in membership.

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