In my first blog post, Finding and Sharing Meaning: Developing a Community of Practice, I describe how my colleagues frequently seemed hurried and opportunities to pause and reflect before taking action seemed to be lacking. As I was contemplating this challenge of daily work, I was regularly seeing headlines about the changing landscape of higher education. Books like Breakpoint: The Changing Marketplace for Higher Education (McGee, 2015) and There is Life After College (Selingo, 2016) were making news, and it seemed like every other day a new article would come through my email highlighting the evolution of student and employer needs. How could my colleagues and I respond, or even better, proactively adapt, to the new needs of society if we couldn’t consistently make time to reflect on every day tasks? We needed some intentional, systematic opportunities to reflect and engage with others to plan and implement innovations.
Research suggests learning in higher education institutions is supported by providing spaces designated for learning, incorporating diverse voices representing unique experiences, facilitating dialogue, building skills, encouraging reflection, and legitimizing learning activities (Kolb & Kolb, 2005). Based on these conditions, I began researching existing models for organizational change in practice and found that reflective action learning groups (Yeo, 2006) provide a base from which I could build an organizational change initiative at my college. This process led to the development of PROPEL. The goal of PROPEL is to institutionalize a process and structure to enable groups to reflect, learning, stimulate development of innovative ideas, and put those ideas into action. The title of this innovation, PROPEL, encompasses the process team members engage in to develop proposals for innovations in teaching, learning, and supporting students by: preparing through an in-house training in Canvas, reflecting on college and market needs as well as their own individual and team strengths, originating an idea for improvement, planning a proposal for pilot implementation, engaging with all stakeholders and industry experts, and then leading their initiative if approved.
Development and implementation of PROPEL was and continues to be informed by ongoing research to integrate employee concerns, interests, and experiences. In Part II of this series on PROPEL, I will explain the initial phase of research I conducted to ensure this model of organizational change was relevant and meaningful to my colleagues and for our students.
References
Kolb, A. Y., & Kolb, D. A. (2005). Learning styles and learning spaces: Enhancing experiential learning in higher education. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 4(2), 193-212. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40214287
McGee, J. (2015). Breakpoint: The changing marketplace for higher education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Selingo, J. J. (2016). There is life after college. New York: HarperCollins.
Yeo, R. K. (2006). Learning institution to learning organization: Kudos to reflective practitioners. Journal of European Industrial Training, 30(5), 396-419. https://doi.org/10.1108/03090590610677944
