Abstract

One core concept in educational development is reframing, which involves new labels, new perspectives, and the examination of assumptions. In this reflective article, I explore the use of reframing at different levels of educational development work via the 4M framework (micro, meso, macro, and mega) in an effort to assess the utility of this concept to practitioners. I conclude that reframing has utility at all levels and posit why it may assist with change management. Connections to educational developer identity are also explored.

Keywords: faculty development, organizational development, personal development, reframing

Introduction

With more than two decades of experience as an educational developer, I find it somewhat daunting to express only one thing that guides my work. Many years of reading the higher education literature and engaging in research have left me with a tapestry of influences that have informed both my thinking about and my approaches to educational development (ED). The ongoing shifts to my role and areas of responsibility under different institutional leaders have also affected what captures my attention and interest. However, I found it intriguing to contemplate the existence of a constant, or a common thread, that has stayed with me over time and guided my work. I thought deeply about what ED means to me and how I approach the work, and I kept returning to one key idea: reframing. In this article, I explore the construct of reframing, starting with definitions then moving to applications of it according to different levels of ED work. I conclude with a brief discussion about why reframing may assist with change management and how it fits into the literature about the identities of educational developers.

Defining Reframing

Reframing is, at its core, about seeing things from a different perspective. It is a concept used in a variety of disciplines, including education, business, and communications (all parts of my patchwork of disciplinary backgrounds). And, like me, it has some longevity. For example, Watzlawick, Weakland, and Fisch’s (1974) definition of the process of reframing continues to be relevant today: “To reframe, then, means to change the conceptual and/or emotional setting or viewpoint in relation to which a situation is experienced and to place it in another frame which fits the ‘facts’ of the same concrete situation equally well or even better, and thereby changing its entire meaning” (p. 95). Beebe, Beebe, Redmond, Geerinck, and Milstone (2000) define reframing simply as “the process of redefining events and experiences from a different point of view” (p. 63). It may be as straightforward as redefining a problem as an opportunity or a weakness as a strength. Overall, reframing involves perceptions, meaning making, and change.

One well known example of reframing in higher education is Boyer’s (1990) Scholarship Reconsidered. In it, he argues that the mission of higher learning institutions “must be carefully redefined and the meaning of scholarship creatively reconsidered” (p. 13). He later explains that “We believe the time has come to move beyond the tired old ‘teaching versus research’ debate and give the familiar and honorable term ‘scholarship’ a broader, more capacious meaning, one that brings legitimacy to the full scope of academic work” (p. 16). In other words, the term “scholarship” needed to have an expanded meaning and a new and broader frame of reference to capture its complexity and breadth. While the term could remain the same, its meaning needed to be reframed.

Within education theory, reframing appears as an integral part of Mezirow’s (2000) transformative learning theory. This adult education theory was being further developed in the late 1990s, the time during which I entered the ED field, and its underlying premises resonated with me in relation to our faculty members as learners. Central to this theory are frames of reference (also known as meaning perspectives) which are “structure[s] of assumptions and expectations through which we filter sense impressions…[and] are the results of ways of interpreting experience” (p. 16). Each frame of reference comprises two dimensions: a habit of mind and resulting points of view (p. 17). A habit of mind involves a set of assumptions, which he defines as “broad, generalized, orienting predispositions that act as a filter for interpreting the meaning of experience” (p. 17). These habits of mind are expressed as a point of view, which involve “sets of immediate specific expectations, beliefs, feelings, attitudes, and judgments [which] tacitly direct and shape a specific interpretation and…suggest a line of action that we tend to follow automatically unless brought into critical reflection” (p.18). Mezirow (2000) further explains that “our values and sense of self are anchored in our frames of reference…Viewpoints that call our frames of reference into question may be dismissed as distorting, deceptive, ill intentioned, or crazy” (p. 18).

According to Mezirow (2000), learning occurs in one of four ways—“by elaborating existing frames of reference, by learning new frames of reference, by transforming points of view, or by transforming habits of mind”—and often involves critical reflection and discourse (p. 19). He indicates that transformations may occur through objective or subjective reframing: “objective reframing involves critical reflection on the assumptions of others…[while] subjective reframing involves critical self reflection of one’s own assumptions” (p. 23). In essence, for reframing and transformative learning to occur, underlying and often tacit assumptions need to be uncovered, articulated, examined, and changed.

Reframing, then, may involve different levels of change: a surface redefinition of a term, viewing a situation from a different perspective, or digging deeper to examine and question the assumptions that underlie interpretations. However, each instance involves a change, and change is at the heart of ED work (Land, 2001; Timmermans, 2014), including changing people’s minds to help them move past obstacles. How can reframing help and why is it an invaluable approach for educational developers to use?

Reframing and ED

As an educational developer, I have regularly used reframing, and I have witnessed its power and influence when working with both individuals and groups. In this section, I focus on how I and other educational developers use reframing in the practice of ED work. I provide examples of reframing at four different levels of analysis through the 4M framework—micro, meso, macro, and mega—which has been used when analyzing the impact of the scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education (Simmons, 2016; Wuetherick & Yu, 2016). In the context of ED, the micro level focuses on the work we do with individuals, meso on work done at the level of departments or units, macro on institutional level work, and mega on our work beyond one institution such as for a discipline or profession, or within a geographical area. In this article, I use this framework as a means of organizing my examples and testing the applicability of the reframing concept within these four different levels of ED work. The examples of reframing discussed below, however, are meant to be illustrative, not exhaustive.

Micro Level

This level focuses on work done with individual instructors, including individual consultations. Many educational developers provide individual consultations as part of their work. We meet with instructors to discuss topics such as assignment design, ways to engage in pedagogical research, or how to interpret course evaluation results. Reframing is a technique that I have used in meetings with individuals about all of the preceding sample topics.

For example, when instructors bring course evaluations for analysis, it is common that they want to focus on the negative feedback. They may want to deny its validity or skip right to “fixing” it. The comments may involve students’ perceptions of slow turnaround time for grading, unfair assessments of their learning, or any number of other issues. While I do analyze these issues with the faculty members involved, one of my very first steps is to attempt to reframe the situation with them. I begin by helping them to broaden their existing frame of reference through encouraging them to identify and acknowledge the positive feedback. So while they may have come in with a “problem,” I work with them to reframe their situation in order to capture a more balanced perspective. I remind them that we want to understand what is working well so that potential new strategies can capitalize on their strengths and not detract from or diminish those strengths. I also encourage them to think about negative feedback as an opportunity. Their students have identified elements of the teaching that have detracted from their learning, and now the instructors know what those elements are. They can use the information as an opportunity to learn about and try new strategies.

At these consultations, I also help instructors engage in some objective reframing by looking at their course from their students’ perspective. Instructors come to the consultation knowing what they have put into the course, and they are often frustrated when the student feedback does not recognize their efforts. Using the example of negative feedback on assessments, I help instructors to view the course as a student and ask them to contemplate questions such as the following: “As a student, what did I do in the course that helped to prepare me for the assessments? How frequent were the assessments, and did I get feedback from one assessment before the next one was due? How did the workload fit with my other courses?” We also consider possible assumptions underlying the responses, again from the students’ perspective (e.g., “The feedback from one assignment will be helpful, and I should use it when preparing the next one”). Much of my work with these individual instructors focuses on trying to help them view their course critically from the perspective of their students, all while keeping at the forefront their own context as instructors. So, reframing can involve expanding what is being interpreted, relabeling an experience, shifting the focus to a different but related perspective, and contemplating the assumptions underlying that other perspective.

Meso Level

Work done at the level of a department is happening at the meso level. In the case of ED, this work may involve activities such as departmental retreats about curriculum design or other pedagogical topics. One example retreat topic is course design, and my teaching center staff have facilitated numerous workshops on this topic which included reframing. While we start with contextual course factors (e.g., size and year of course) and course content, we quickly shift the focus to the students and their experience in the course via the backward design model (Fink, 2013; Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). Once again, we are adding a frame of reference by encouraging instructors to make the student perspective central to the course and the design process.

Our assistance with assessments of student learning often calls for reframing, since we regularly challenge instructors’ underlying thinking about these assessments. In one multi day workshop, I remember one faculty member who planned to have both a large end of term project and a final exam in his course. We came back to this part of the assessment scheme each day, with me asking the purpose of both types of assessment and whether both were really necessary. From the students’ perspective, the workload would have been immense. In the end, he recognized an underlying assumption: he believed that he had to include a final exam in his course mostly because he had always done so—it was a habitual practice that was not derived from the course learning outcomes but rather from a common departmental practice. The project, he determined through subjective reframing, was a better assessment of the intended learning outcomes, and he ended up dropping the final exam from the course design.

The preceding example highlights an individual’s experience at a departmental retreat. What happens when the assumptions are held by a number of people in a department? At our teaching center, we have worked with some departments that grade on a bell curve because the instructors believe that a good assessment will result in a range of grades. Other departments have discouraged the use of rubrics because the instructors consider them a form of spoon feeding. When we recommend at a workshop that instructors develop teaching and learning activities that will help students do well on the assessments of their learning—and that it is desirable for all students to do well—these rigid beliefs about assessment practices get raised as reasons why they cannot follow our guidance. These become potentially difficult workshops because we have now uncovered not just a practice that opposes our evidence based recommendation, but also a set (or sets) of beliefs that constitute habits of mind. Here is where reframing may also be useful, particularly with those making decisions about departmental instructional practices. Mezirow (2000) indicates that “frames of reference may be highly individualistic or shared as paradigms” (p. 20). In the case of departmental practices, at least some of the department members must share beliefs behind the practices in order for them to be in place. The practices are unlikely to change without some serious critical reflection and dialogue on why they are believed to be valid.

In this situation, both subjective and objective reframing may help since the assumptions of multiple people are involved. I have encouraged participants to contemplate and then discuss why they have such practices and why they are important to them as individuals and as a department. However, the results of this process have been mixed, which has led me to wonder if a more structured reframing activity might be more productive. Many years ago, I taught a critical reflection workshop that included an activity I adapted from the work of Cranton (1994), which resulted in some very deep questioning of existing practices. Cranton indicates that “once underlying assumptions are made explicit through some combination of activities and discussion of those activities, the educator can question the sources, consequences, and validity of the assumptions” (p. 220). Drawing on my previous assessment example, instructors could be asked to write down their own observable behaviors while assessing students’ work and then explore the underlying assumptions (e.g., “I sort the papers into three piles of excellent, satisfactory, and poor. I do this because I have to grade on a curve and need at least some papers in each pile”). Once this activity is completed, instructors could then write responses to reflection questions such as: “How did I decide what to do? Why should I question what I did?” (p. 221). After sharing some of their ideas, they could also respond to similar questions about their colleagues’ underlying beliefs in an effort to reflect on others’ thinking. Then they could discuss the results of their explorations for further probing and analysis. This type of intensive reflection activity may seem outside of a course design workshop, but if underlying beliefs are halting progress, a different approach that goes beyond discussion alone may be warranted. Reframing activities can help instructors and educational developers to dig deeper and work on uncovering, articulating, and questioning underlying beliefs and assumptions that may need to be examined before they can be changed or new practices adopted.

Macro Level

Beyond the departmental level, educational developers can also work at the institutional level, engaging in projects that cut across the institution. Reframing at this level may be much more public in nature and may enable a shift in thinking that affects multiple individuals, multiple groups (e.g., academic divisions, faculties, or colleges), or the entire institution. Here, I will consider an example of an institutional level project on classroom spaces for teaching and learning. At my institution, we recently launched a campus wide committee tasked with a significant mandate, which includes creating a vision for teaching and learning space development that is aligned with the university’s strategic plan. The committee has representatives from a broad range of both academic departments and support units. I am a member of this committee as the director of my institution’s teaching center, and I bring with me an explicit desire to create more spaces at our institution to support the use of active learning strategies. The literature on learning spaces commonly uses terms such as “active learning classrooms” or “active learning spaces” (see New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 137, 2014), and I brought this same terminology to our teaching and learning spaces committee.

Despite me defining active learning spaces as those with movable furniture and multiple writing surfaces, the concept of creating these spaces was met with repeated resistance by many of the committee members. A common response was: “Not everyone uses active learning. Why do we need this type of classroom?” My intention had not been to try to convert every classroom to an active learning space, but that message was somehow heard, at least by some committee members. Perhaps the label suggested to them that the classroom design would be limiting, only working for instructors who used active learning strategies in their teaching. Faced with this discord, I realized that reframing could be helpful.

Almost six months into the work of the committee, a subgroup of which I was a member started working on an instructor survey about classroom spaces. We began to use a different term for spaces that could enable active learning—“flexible classrooms”—and the term started to stick. It broadened the frame of reference from classrooms being just lecture halls to spaces where learning could happen in a variety of ways, but the term also continued to encompass traditional lecturing, enabling it to remain as one option for teaching. “Active learning classrooms” had been viewed as spaces that addressed just the perspective of those who wanted to use active learning, whereas “flexible classrooms” appeared to address the needs and perspectives of multiple instructors. Mezirow (2000) claims that people seek dependable frames of reference, which are ones that are more inclusive and permeable (open to other viewpoints) (p. 19). By reframing these different classroom spaces to fit with multiple perspectives and sets of assumptions about teaching and learning, we had more success in normalizing the concept of developing new designs for our classrooms. Both the terminology and the perspectives included appeared to make a difference.

I have seen a similar situation in another institutional level project that is focused on student input to the evaluation of teaching and courses. During the past three years, we have been working on a cross campus project to revamp our processes for collecting student input on their experiences in courses, and numerous beliefs and assumptions have been uncovered, shared, and debated. One central element of these discussions has been the language used to describe the purpose and intent of this feedback system—even the label for the system has been contested. Reframing was used repeatedly to find terminology that would help to make the recommendations for a new university wide system palatable and get the approval needed to move to the next stage of development. The timing of this macro level initiative also overlapped with hot debates on the topic area at the mega level (e.g., Linse, 2017), making the ground on which to reframe very unstable. As such, our work at one level can be affected by ED work at other levels, sometimes adding further complexity to the reframing process.

Mega Level

The mega level refers to work done within a discipline/profession and/or at the level of a state/province, country, or the world. Beyond the course evaluation example just shared, two common ED examples at this level are engagement in research and professional association conferences. When we engage in disseminating research or evidence based practices through articles or conference sessions, we are working at the mega level, affecting our discipline by sharing our ideas with provincial, national, and/or international audiences. How do we use reframing as scholars?

One example would be the inclusion of limitations in articles or presentations about empirical research studies. As scholars, we engage in research and interpret results in relation to existing literature. Our interpretations are arguments about what the data could mean. In the limitations, however, we often identify that results could be different if we collected data from different sources or contexts, but we may also identify factors that could result in a different interpretation of the findings. In essence, we identify the possibility that the data could be put into a different frame and have a different meaning. While this use of reframing is not unique to educational developers as scholars, it does show how reframing is used at the mega level within disciplinary scholarly discourse. Another example, however, links directly to the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network and the ways that an organization regularly engages in scholarly reframing.

A brief review of the materials to invite participants to our annual POD Network (2015, 2016, 2017) conferences suggests that reframing is an integral part of the conference experience as well as our work as educational developers. In 2017, the theme was to define what matters in ED, and the call for proposals included phrases about refining the ways we assess the impacts of our work and examining a broader view of impact. The conference chairs were, in essence, asking us to reframe our thinking by adopting different perspectives (narrower or broader) when contemplating how to clarify the impact of ED. The 2016 conference theme on transformative relationships challenged us to focus directly on person to person interactions which, according to the conference chairs, called “… for a shift from focusing only on outcomes and results to emphasizing genuine connections and shared growth”. We were being encouraged to reframe our thinking about what our work entails and view it through the lens of our relationships. And in 2015, the retrospective theme of Back to the Future asked us to think, among many things, about old ideas that have been reinvented. Reinvention suggests tweaking or pivoting a familiar concept or theory, which could include rethinking it from a different perspective. All of these conferences also included some element of challenging our assumptions about what our work entails and how we do it. In general, our conferences involve sharing new ideas and ways of thinking with our ED colleagues, and as such, they provide a natural venue for reframing.

Final Thoughts

What I most value about reframing—regardless of the level of ED work—is that it provides a way to invite different thinking. It also honors multiple perspectives, promotes transparency, and helps to uncover new insights. I acknowledge, though, that when there is a need to dig deeper to uncover and examine underlying assumptions, reframing can result in discomfort for all involved because beliefs are being challenged. However, we can do this work with respect and care. Reframing can be both collaborative and supportive, enabling us to work together with instructors and other colleagues to think through a situation or experience and help them (and us) identify ways to move forward.

My preceding descriptions of the use of reframing in ED suggest that it can serve as a key approach to guide our work. And it is an approach that fits and has relevance at all levels of ED—micro, meso, macro, and mega. I have found that reframing helps in the quest to facilitate changes in practice because those necessarily require changes in thinking. Overall, reframing can help get things unstuck.

One reason why reframing may work to facilitate change fits with Lewin’s (1999) force field analysis model regarding change. In his theory, he indicates that any change situation includes both driving and restraining forces—reasons that encourage or discourage making a change. These forces push against each other and exist in a quasi stationary equilibrium. In his model, he found that change can occur in one of two ways—increasing forces in the desired direction or decreasing the opposing forces—in order to reach a new equilibrium. To minimize tension in this system when making a change, he recommends decreasing opposing forces (p. 281). In ED, when we work with others to help them reframe their perceptions and/or their assumptions, we, in essence, help them to reduce or remove an opposing force. In the examples that I described, thinking differently through reframing led to greater understanding and less resistance.

Reframing is also part of the identity of educational developers. For example, one of the 12 orientations to ED practice that Land (2001) identifies is the reflective practitioner, one who “seeks to foster [a] culture of self or peer evaluative, critical reflection amongst colleagues, to help them cope with uncertain and ambivalent organizational environments” (p. 6). Reframing often involves critical reflection; as such, it is a strategy that appears to fit with this orientation to ED. In addition, Timmermans’ (2014) work on threshold concepts in ED explicitly includes reframing. In her study to understand educational developers’ ways of knowing and being, she identifies 21 threshold concepts. Of these, reframing is included in three as ways of knowing and being to facilitate change: building capacity in individuals and groups, seeing and seizing opportunities at the systemic level, and understanding and helping knowledge flow. That she connects reframing to a variety of ways of knowing and being suggests that for educational developers reframing is a flexible approach that we can use when facilitating multiple types of change.

To me, however, reframing is more than a strategy or an approach: it is a way of thinking. It not only highlights what to focus on but also how to think about an experience. It fits with and can be used to promote positive and inclusive ways of thinking, and it focuses on the possible. These are key characteristics of what it means to me to be an educational developer, and I anticipate that reframing will continue to be a guiding constant in my work for many years to come.

Acknowledgment

The author wishes to thank Dr. Crystal Tse, Instructional Developer at the University of Waterloo’s Centre for Teaching Excellence, for her feedback and insights on this manuscript.

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