This newsletter covers what happened in February and will give you a heads up on what to look for in March and the months following.

In this issue:

"The way we're going to be a better [organization] is by ... working on [ourselves], and helping others work on themselves."

― Robert Kegan & Lisa Lahey, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

February was African-American History Month. Multiple programs highlighted the struggles, challenges, and contributions of African Americans or Black people from slavery to the present. During the past year, injustices and equities were visible for everyone to see. In that context, individuals and businesses stepped forward and acknowledged a need to change the status quo. They saluted the contributions of African Americans, made commitments to invest in underserved communities, and explored how they could improve equity, inclusion, and opportunity.

Over the past month, I reflected on my life journey as a teacher, college administrator, state leader, and university president. Most of these positions required leading and managing change to create an envisioned future. It was an unusual path that began as a faculty member at a small junior college in eastern North Carolina. My path also included serving as a senior executive for the states of Tennessee and Iowa before being appointed as the first woman president of Texas Southern University (TSU). TSU was the largest HBCU in the nation. 

My career journey began at Kittrell College, a two-year institution established by the African Methodist Episcopal Church in eastern North Carolina in 1886. Historically, slaves and their descendants were forbidden to learn to read and write. So, Black churches took on lifting their communities by establishing schools, colleges, and universities. These institutions had to be creative and resilient to overcome multiple barriers to their survival. They had to be resilient to evolve and transform to meet needs. For example, during the first fifteen years of its existence, Kittrell's mission expanded from training artisans, teachers, and ministers at the secondary level to post-secondary education. In 1901, Kittrell was re-chartered as Kittrell College, a liberal arts junior college.

During the early 1970s, Kittrell College focused on using innovative instructional strategies to educate first-generation, underserved, and academically challenged students. The college was an incubator of innovative teaching strategies, including mastery learning and competency-based education. Its community culture exuded a passion for students, teaching, and learning. Working at Kittrell provided an opportunity to improve the lives of students. I enjoyed supporting students in their growth as college students and as citizens.

Two decades later, upon my appointment as president of TSU, I was challenged to create a new, shared vision for the University. That charge required the understanding of the institutional culture, community, and the desires of multiple constituencies. The presidency required continual learning and growth. It required being developmental and strategic in addressing the unique challenges of the University in educating a diverse undergraduate and graduate population.  My charge was to guide the transformation of the University in establishing a new global vision. Exciting and challenging.

We need developmental journeys to grow and become better versions of ourselves as individuals, organizations, and a society. To survive and thrive, we must evolve and transform.

As the Academy focuses on actualizing its vision, the forward movement will require our continual focus to transform into an organization that lives its values of growth, community, performance, and diversity. To do so, it must have transformative resilience, which Daniel Christian Wahl describes as the “ability to transform … in response to changing conditions and disruptions.” We need to empower our change process with focus, determination, and joy. We need to generate the momentum to enjoy the journey, not as a random exploration but a gentle flow that trickles forward with purpose and deliberateness. As we make strides to evolve and transform into Academy 2.0, let's celebrate the journey.

"Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.” — Rebecca West

Quarterly reports were due at the end of February. If you serve on the board or as a director and have not yet completed the report, please do so as soon as possible and send to Joann Horton, Marie Baehr, and Mary Moore.

If you are interested in serving on this year's Awards Committee, please contact Matt Watts.

Recent Board Meetings

Remember, you can find out the Board’s current work by checking the Academy Board Meeting Agendas and Minutes posted on the Academy members’ page:

January 2021 minutes (approved)

February 2021 minutes (not yet approved)

Summary of February Board meeting work:

In February, the Board

• Approved co-sponsoring a three-day professional development institute with Pacific Crest to be held prior to the Summer Conference on June 21-23, 2021

• Reported on the progress made to date in completing this year's Operational Plan Goals

• Reported on update of plans for Summer Conference

• Reported on need for interested members to serve on this year's Awards Committee 

• Clarified Role and Opportunities for Research within the Academy

• Discussed the synergy between the Academy's work and powers of habit (see minutes for link)

• Discussed draft of Profile of a PE Expert and Certification Framework

The Next Board Meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, March 12, 2021 (10:30am to Noon CST).

All Academy members are welcome to participate. You will be able to find the agenda for the meeting as well as the needed information to attend through Zoom on the Academy Member site.

The 2021 Virtual Annual Conference theme “Experiencing Growth in Times of Change” is stirring excitement among Academy members as details are coming into focus.  As Mahatma Gandhi told us we must “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”  Let us gather together to become a force for that change. To that end the conference planning team continues to create new opportunities for learning, growing, fellowship and making change. 

During the upcoming conference, participants will sharpen their knowledge about issues, methods, and practices devoted to these four threads:

•  →  Social justice and institutional discrimination
•  →  The challenges of designing and delivering effective courses in an online environment
•  →  Making the campus experience (physical or virtual) inviting, personal, and meaningful
• →  Topics that impact teaching and learning, educational practices, and leadership
  

Plenary sessions will be devoted to the four threads listed above. Keynote presentations from Academy Leaders will focus on the continued development of the Academy as leaders of innovation and change. Workshops, Research Sessions, and an enhanced Hall of Innovation (Poster Sessions) will highlight the unique contributions of Academy members from around the world. Virtual Social Hours offered each afternoon will provide opportunities to network and meet other likeminded faculty, staff, leaders, and partners. Pre-Conference Technology and Welcome Sessions for New Members will assist presenters and participants with an introduction to the online conference experience.

New! A 3-Day Pre-Conference Leadership Institute will help participants lead change efforts at their respective institutions.  Registration and detailed information about the Leadership Institute will be added to the Website soon.

Registrations for the Conference are currently open. Session proposals are being reviewed and presenters will be announced soon. The deadline for final session proposals is set for April 15th.

Please join us in this growth focused experience. We invite you to seek to be the change; propose a new session idea, register for the Conference, and consider the Pre-Conference Institute.

If you have any questions about the registration, submission process or guidelines, please contact Patrick Barlow

Active Learning and the PE Classroom
March 9th, 2021, 7:00pm Eastern
Facilitator: Tris Utschig

Active learning has a broad research base supporting its impact on improving student learning (Freeman et al, 2014). You might then wonder — how I can I be inclusive in my active learning approach? How can I design active learning experiences that are resilient and adaptable to our ever changing learning environment? In this webinar we will explore what makes certain types of active learning highly flexible, resilient, and inclusive, and we will experience some simple active learning techniques that can be applied in any discipline and in any teaching modality. Specially, we will consider how these active learning approaches align with Process Education.

Systemic Racism and Bias Conversation Series Event #6: Establishing a Bold Plan to Support Equity and Inclusion in Academic Affairs
Tuesday, March 23, 2021, 7:00PM Eastern
Facilitator: Geoff Bradshaw

Join us for a presentation highlighting the new Madison College Academic Affairs Equity & Inclusion Plan and how it relates to Process Education. In August 2020, Madison College created a new role of Academic Diversity Officer and committed to a bold plan to align operations and culture with the values of anti-racism, inclusion, and intercultural learning.  Dr. Geoff Bradshaw will discuss the 5 pillars of the new college plan and lead our audience through a discussion of the conceptualization, implementation, and assessment cycle for organizational change. Key outcomes in the plan can serve as a planning template for any institution.

When I discuss instructional design with other academics, I find that learning objectives are usually the anchor for activity and even program design. One of the most important lessons I learned when working with PE experts on curriculum design is that long-term behaviors are actually the best starting point.

One of the experts I have had the honor of working with is Wade Ellis Jr., PE Academy Ambassador and author of the module we are spotlighting this month, 2.4.4 Long-Term Behaviors. When I told Wade that he did not need to pick an module he authored, the response was along the lines of 'Well I would like to see how much my understanding of this has changed', modeling his commitment to lifelong learning. After reflecting on his own work from 13 years ago, Wade had this to add:

"Long-term behaviors are the residual that is left after a course is long over.  We often neglect to consider what we would like students to get out of a course beyond the course discipline content.  What are the ways of thinking, the ways of being that the students will carry with them the rest of their professional careers and personal lives?"

Along the lines of instructional design, here are a few questions to guide your use of this knowledge.

1.    What are the long-term behaviors you expect from a successful graduate in your program?

2.    What aspects of your program bolster the development of these behaviors?

3.    For any long-term behaviors that are not explicitly supported by the program, what can you include in courses and activities to include these in the future?

If you have a suggestion for Module of the Month then email me at matthew.watts@rrcc.edu

(This is the second of a two-part series. The first part, Illusory Superiority: The Dunning-Kruger Effect, is available in the November 2020 Academy Newsletter.)

Dunning and Kruger, authors of the eponymous Dunning-Kruger Effect (Illusory Superiority) suggest that, across many intellectual and social domains, it is the poorest performers who hold the least accurate assessments of their skill and performances, grossly overestimating how well their performances stack up against those of their peers. These are the performers who not only perform poorly, but who believe they perform well. Or, put another way, clueless yet confident.

As they explain,

It seems that poor performers do not learn from feedback suggesting a need to improve. Hacker, Bol, Horgan, and Rakow ¹ provided direct evidence for this failure to learn from feedback when they tracked students during a semester-long class. As time went on, good students became more accurate in predicting how they would do on future exams. The poorest performers did not— showing no recognition, despite clear and repeated feedback, that they were doing badly.

What is it that makes an illusion compelling? That is it not an obvious illusion – that it looks real. Consider Figure 1 below (an example of the checker shadow illusion). Look at the squares labeled “A” and “B”. Are they the same color?

Squares A and B are the same color.

Simply being told that squares A and B are the same color, does not change what you see. We are, by and large, creatures who have evolved to assume that seeing or perceiving is believing.

To counter an illusion, you must find a way to demonstrate that it is illusory and not representative of reality. In Figure 2, the illusion is ‘broken’ by connecting the squares. It could also be broken by excising the two squares and laying them side-by-side, as in Figure 3:

Metaphorically, then, we insist that the learner grasp his or her illusion and manipulate it in such a way that the illusion becomes obvious and a vastly more realistic condition is perceived.

With respect to the Illusion of Superiority, this exploration is called self-validation of one’s learning (Faculty Guidebook 3.3.5) and there are seven techniques for performing this kind of validation:

1.    Concretize the knowledge
2.    Transfer contexts
3.    Generalize the knowledge
4.    Create a general model
5.    Identify the critical issues
6.    Use the knowledge in a problem-solving situation
7.    Teach others

Figures 2 and 3 could be seen as a transfer of contexts (Technique 2) – transferring the context of A to B and vice-versa. We can also measure the color of both squares A and B (both measure as #787878 in hexadecimal and 120,120,120 in RGB), thus implementing either Technique 3 or 4, depending on how we choose to frame it.

The point is that asking learners to validate their own learning by any or multiple of these techniques is the best way to help them move past the illusion of their superiority which effectively keeps them from accurately assessing their ability, improving their performance, and increasing their learning. That it is self-validation, done by the individual with a focus on the self is critical – the input, feedback, or information is not coming from an external source. Being told that you’re wrong is information that must internalized before it holds any meaning; realizing that you’re wrong is, by definition, already internal. The actual techniques for validating learning are then ways of breaking the illusion by making it real, moving it around, generalizing it, modeling it, looking closely at it, using it, and transferring ownership of it.

In what ways do you insist that your students validate their own learning? Let’s share our best or favorite practices on this one.

[The explanation for how the illusion works (Technique 5) is available HERE.]

1.    Hacker, D. J., Bol, L., Horgan, D. D., & Rakow, E. A. (2000). Test prediction and performance in a classroom context. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92, 160–170.

As we evolved into Homo Sapiens over hundreds of thousands of years, our earlier genetic forbears faced life-threatening dangers daily. Sabretooth tigers lurked around every corner. Woolly Mammoths could easily crush a hunter who let down his guard. A whole host of predatory beasts could turn a casual stroll to your favorite watering hole into a tragic ending in a split second. A blustery spring day with clouds on the horizon could turn into a tornado of destruction that would devastate entire communities. Nothing about life was assured. The possibility of death and mayhem was more of the expected outcome.

In response to these threats, we naturally developed bodily mechanisms to give us an edge or at least a running start to survive. Facing daily threats changed our neurobiology in fundamental ways. Generation after generation passed on these genetic markers to their descendants. In simple terms, our brains learned to scan our environments for anything that could result in a negative outcome, cause us pain, or kill us. Avoiding the negative and all that it implied soon trumped the pursuit of the positive. Not experiencing pleasure never killed anyone. At best, maybe it produced a little disappointment. In contrast, events at the other end of the continuum could be lethal.

This vigilance for what could harm us extended even to our relationships within our social structures. It was also ever-present in our tense competition with the bands of other clans and tribes who lived close to our territory. Slighting someone more powerful than you could have as dire a consequence as fending off a mother bear who decided you got just a little too close to her brood. Challenging another group for supremacy of the valley could result in significant rewards if you triumphed and dire results for you and your progeny if you failed. Going to war was something they had to weigh carefully, and even then, nothing was ever assured. Not surprisingly, we have become much more attuned to pain and suffering than pleasure and joy. As a species, we have a built-in caution governor.

On the spiritual and psychic levels, the tension people felt between the positive and the negative was soon translated into mythic terms. There are good and bad angels, heavenly forces that protect us from evil actors like the Devil or other demons from the underworld; and, good inclinations and bad ones implanted in us by our Creator. We are counseled not to let these evil inclinations overrule the good ones, but they are strong in their daily effect on us and do battle on our souls’ psychic plains with our better tendencies. Avoidance of hell becomes as big a motivator (some would argue bigger) than doing the things to get into an imagined world beyond this one that rewards us for our good deeds, heroism, and altruism toward others.

These positive and negative forces have become deeply embedded in the tales we tell about ourselves and the world. Archetypal myths like the Hero’s Journey pit individuals against all kinds of forces designed to destroy us. Whether it’s a symbolic dragon who can consume us in flames or the murky psychic energies of the dark night of the soul that can consume us in the depressive hell so well described by Dante, we all must find our way to resolve these personal challenges. Just as the hero must traverse the smoldering landscape of his or her world and emerge on the other end transformed, it’s incumbent for all of us to see our lives through mythic lenses. Then, and only then, can we begin to see that nothing, however horrific, is forever, that we each have the resilience to face down our demons, and that every story, even ours, can open up to the expansive plains filled with sunnier days.

© 2020 Richard Stone, Storywork International

Academy of Process Educators
www.processeducation.org