What is systemic change?

Posted: Mar 9 2017 by

Charles Henderson
Western Michigan University

Charles Henderson

"Systems are perfectly designed to achieve the results that they are achieving right now."¹ Higher education organizations are complex systems with many interacting subsystems. In order to create sustainable change, it is necessary to understand and align these subsystems. Subsystems include the faculty reward system, the higher education funding system that is based on student enrollment, the organization of universities into academic departments, the tradition of faculty autonomy over instruction, the metrics used to judge student performance (grades vs. learning), etc. Many change initiatives fail because they focus on only one subsystem without considering how this subsystem interacts with other subsystems. For example, in STEM it is common for education reformers to work to convince individual instructors about the benefits of active learning (that is, to change the instructor-student-instructional method subsystem). Research suggests that many instructors are receptive to this message and are interested in using more active learning strategies. More

What does systemic change mean to you?

Posted: Feb 1 2017 by

Mark Connolly
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Mark Connolly

One of ASCN's working groups is focused on theories of change. Its role in the project is to help people engaged in change efforts understand theories and models that could profitably inform systemic change work.

At this stage in our working group's development, co-leader Susan Shadle and I are trying to help our 15 members not only get acquainted with each other but also with each other's ideas about systemic change. In November, we asked the group members to answer in 1 or 2 pages this question: What does systemic change mean to you? Below is my response to that question. It is the first of several responses from members of our working group that will be posted on the ASCN blog. More

Insights into systemic reform from K-12 research on data driven decision-making

Posted: Jan 6 2017 by

Matthew Hora
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Matthew Hora

In the Spring of 2015 I was part of a research team that visited three California universities, as part of a study on the prevalence of data driven decision-making (DDDM) in STEM departments. We spoke with people about student evaluations, exams, hallway conversations, learning analytics, ABET, and increasing pressure from institutional accreditors, finding that these issues were on everybody's minds. This was unsurprising, because it's safe to say that higher education has entered a data-focused accountability and reform phase not unlike the K-12 sector in the 1990s.

But as we gathered accounts of how people used these forms of data "in the wild" of their departments and offices, the study took a surprise turn. We simply couldn't escape an issue that we hadn't anticipated being so central to our research – that of organizational systems and how they function (or not). More