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The Learning Decade
William J. Flynn: <mailto:nccet@earthlink.net>
It's a tough time to be in education right now. Our country is going through a major economic restructuring, with significant negative impact on state budgets and educational funding sources. The challenge of technology has vastly increased demand on college operating budgets to remain current and cutting-edge. The nature of work, jobs, and careers is changing rapidly, creating a nation of lifelong learners returning to colleges for training and retraining. The Internet makes knowledge and information available to us in a way never imagined a few years ago, challenging our ability to adapt and restructure to meet new pedagogical opportunities. Corporations are moving into the training and education sector, bringing resources that publicly funded colleges cannot match. And never before has there been so much public policy debate about accountability in education.
These multiple challenges are a full plate for any college president, administrator, or board member. Standing pat or wishing it would all go away won't cut it. Given the enormous size of our educational system, the sheer scope of change required, and the entrenched forces opposing such change, significant innovations may not be enough to survive. What is needed is not just incremental or even institutional change, but transformation. Unless we can transform our institutions to be relevant, competitive, accessible, and accountable, we may lose the franchise.
The Visionaries
A number of people saw storm clouds on the educational horizon long before the current situation. They have been writing, speaking, and advocating for transformation for almost a decade. At first, their work was considered either visionary or threatening, depending on point of view. In journals, books, and speeches, at conferences and on line, they advocated a simple yet compelling argument: the business we are in is the learning business.
The literature on institutional change began to gather momentum in the early 1990s, as more critics weighed in on what was wrong with undergraduate education. The Wingspread Group on Higher Education (1993) offered a concise statement on the implications of change in academia and what would be the impact of that change:
Putting learning at the heart of the academic enterprise will mean overhauling the conceptual, procedural, curricular, and other architecture of postsecondary education on most campuses.
Terry O'Banion quickly picked up on this thought and began to articulate his analysis in numerous publications on the traditional limits on higher education: time-bound, place-bound, bureaucracy-bound, and role-bound. He artfully echoed and expanded on the Wingspread Group's view, observing that all four limitations place significant restrictions on our ability to design a learner-centered environment. Indeed, it could be said that Prometheus was not as bound as colleges appeared to be in those days, with restrictions embedded in education codes, procedures manuals, state master plans, legislature-driven budgets, and organizational cultures. In works such as Launching a Learning-Centered College and Creating More Learning-Centered Community Colleges, O'Banion identified the basic principles that undergird the concept of the learning college, and articulated the primary issues and challenges colleges would encounter when they decided to becoming more learning centered.
While the community college sector was appreciative of O'Banion's analysis, much of higher education remained disinterested. One impetus for expanding the discussion on the need for change in undergraduate education came from an article that appeared in the November/December 1995 issue of Change, "From Teaching To Learning: A New Paradigm For Undergraduate Education." At the time, authors Robert Barr and John Tagg both worked at Palomar College in Southern California. Although their backgrounds were in community colleges, the impact of their analysis and vision was felt throughout all of higher education. A year after the article's publication, Ted Marchese, editor of Change, stated in an editorial that the Barr-Tagg article was the most cited in recent history.
Barr and Tagg tapped into a deeply ingrained sense that something had to change. By applying the theories found in the writings of scientist Thomas Kuhn and futurist Joel Barker to the current educational scene, they developed a simple and penetrating analysis of the current state of affairs, one they called the instruction paradigm. Stated simply, our colleges were institutions that provided instruction to students.
Despite the significant body of literature on the value of collaborative or self-paced learning environments, the learning-community movement, and assessment as a pedagogical tool, we had done little to infuse these approaches into our curriculum except on the fringe. We all agreed that students presented us with multiple learning styles, that critical thinking should be incorporated into every course. Yet, there was little concrete evidence that we implemented our beliefs or that we practiced what we preached. For years, community colleges proudly identified themselves as teaching institutions, as opposed to the more research-oriented university system. We were proud to be teaching institutions. After all, it was our responsibility to teach and the student's responsibility to learn. It was always thus.
The Paradigm Shift
Barr and Tagg argued that the very mission, vision, culture, and structure of a college must undergo a paradigm shift from the instruction paradigm to the learning paradigm, from being an institution that provided instruction to students to an institution that produced learning in students. Once that shift was made, everything had the potential for change. This deceptively simple semantic change had profound implications for what our colleges could become, and redefined how we could design and shape the complex and rapidly changing relationship between the teacher and the student.
This paradigm shift, whether it tilted toward becoming a learning college or implementing the learning paradigm, offered several benefits for a college. Faculty became the designers of powerful learning environments. Curriculum design would be based on an analysis of what a student needed to know to function in a complex world, rather than on what the teacher knew how to teach. The college would be judged not on the quality of the entering class, but on the quality of the aggregate learning growth possessed by its graduates. Compartmentalized departments would, in time, be replaced by cross-disciplinary cooperatives.
Although early reactions to these ideas tended to center around teaching versus learning in the classroom, thereby frustrating faculty who maintained that they had always been focused on learning, the learning paradigm was not restricted to faculty roles. Instead, it encompassed the principle that every employee has a role to play and a contribution to make in maintaining a learner-centered environment.
Placing learning at the core of every decision and action meant rethinking how we organized ourselves, how we structured our colleges, and how we interacted with each other as employees of an institution. Job roles and descriptions needed to be rethought and modified. Technology must be thoughtfully applied to relieve staff of busywork and meaningless repetitive tasks, freeing them to assume new roles in support of the central learning mission. Above all, a new spirit of mutual trust and cooperation needed to evolve, so the energies of everyone were focused on student learning rather than the preservation of old allegiances, privileges, and mindsets.
In the decade since the Wingspread Group first published its report, many of our colleges have begun the journey toward becoming learning centered. Much of the vocabulary of higher education has changed. For example, we rarely speak of "teaching" by itself; it's now "teaching and learning," and we no longer limit discussions of teaching and learning to faculty roles, but apply teaching and learning principles to all roles in the college community. Look at the mottos used by community colleges these days:
"Learning for Success," "Learning for Your Lifetime," "The Leader in Learning." Look at the revised mission and vision statements that describe community colleges as premier learning communities.
Toward the end of the last decade, the interest in becoming learning centered gained considerable momentum. Palomar College hosted an annual national conference on the Learning Paradigm for five years, attracting teachers and administrators from North America and Europe eager to benchmark the progress of other colleges against their own. Palomar College President George Boggs, through his extensive writing and speaking on the Learning College concept, received the ultimate recognition of his peers when he was chosen to lead the American Association of Community Colleges. The League's Innovations conference annually attracts thousands of educators committed to improving student and organizational learning through innovation, experimentation, and institutional transformation. The Learning College Project identified a dozen pioneer institutions, but more importantly, identified more than 60 other colleges that had made significant strides on the journey. Much has been accomplished. Much more remains to be done.
The Future Agenda
As we plan for the colleges of the future, we must anticipate new societal changes and technological challenges that face us. We need not eliminate the place-bound campuses and locations in which we have invested, but we cannot allow them to continue to function on a part-time or selective basis. We must move from the old agrarian-based calendar to 365-day operation. We must develop a virtual presence to match our community presence in order to meet the incredible increase in learning on demand. In the process of being a responsive learning institution, both virtually and in reality, we will have to re-examine our employee contracts, our labor agreements, what we mean by full- and part-time employment, and how we define the responsibilities and privileges of tenure. In an age where information can flow freely across state and national lines, state master plans quickly will be rendered obsolete, district boundaries will be meaningless, and educational sector politics will become moot. We will have a new set of potential colleagues. We already have a powerful new set of competitors.
To accelerate the movement toward being learning centered, colleges need to invest in supporting the crucial and evolving role of faculty as subject experts, learning mentors, role models, learning-environment designers, and holistic curriculum leaders. Freed from the time- and place-bound curriculum and classroom, the 21st century teacher can have more freedom to experiment with new methods, techniques, and approaches to ensuring that all students learn in whatever manner is most appropriate to the learner.
Another resource to maximize is the tremendous potential of every college employee. As faculty roles evolve in ways designed to improve student learning, the roles of others in the organization are being examined to the same end. We should engage in a dialogue that explores the potential of all our personnel to be used in the most effective and sensible way, so they may become active contributors to the learning process.
Indeed, all academic, student-services, and administrative personnel need to become involved in the transformation process. The ultimate goal is to become a college where everyone is focused on learning. With learning at the center of the organizational culture, this approach becomes an analytical matrix against which current problems may be evaluated, a target toward which institutional energies and resources may be directed, and a unifying goal that will bring campus constituencies together in common purpose.
Today, we are a nation of lifelong learners. Kids come to our campuses for community-services workshops and seminars that enhance their maturation. Older adults seek enrichment through noncredit programs and activities. Workforce members of all ages come to us for refresher courses, skills upgrades, and retraining. We are evolving as institutions. We are no longer simply technical colleges, no longer merely junior colleges. As technology impacts our lives, our jobs, and our society, and as the very definition of what we call community changes, we will become more than just community colleges. We will become the learning centers of our communities.
This is the agenda for the next decade: to move completely from the comfort of our traditional institutional models to the challenge of becoming more learning-centered colleges, to retain and enhance the strengths and resources within our organizations while courageously daring to transform what we do for the sake of our students.
How far have we come in the past 10 years? Thanks to Barr, Boggs, O'Banion, and Tagg, we have made good progress. How good, you may ask? At the Learning Summit in March <https://www.league.org/ls2003/>, these four pioneers will get together at the opening session to share their views on the Learning decade just passed and the one we embark upon now. It should be quite a session.
William J. Flynn retired as Dean at Palomar College in 2001. He is currently serving as Managing Director for the National Council for Continuing Education and Training.
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Published monthly with support from SCT (www.sct.com <https://www.sct.com>)
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Dr. Susan Salvador
Office for Student Services
02/10/2003 |