The disruption created by the COVID-19 pandemic underscores the vital need for continuous learning that promotes collaborative and systemic improved outcomes for students and faculty. This rapidly changing environment requires campuses to evolve as agile and adaptive learning organizations.
The New Learning Compact, and "Every Learner Everywhere" asset offers evidence-based principles for high impact professional development and a framework for continuous learning and strategic capacity building. Some instructors discussed ways to leverage professional learning and development to meet the challenges of the current pandemic era and prepare for the future of on-going change.
Randy Bass is Vice President for Strategic Education Initiatives and a Professor of English at Georgetown University. He and his collaborators offered a broad strategy for campuses to help them in three specific ways: prepare better for the upcoming semester by providing a framework to increase student learning engagement satisfaction; help instructors and faculty adapt into a continuous learning environment; and help create institutions that are more adaptable, equity focused and responsive to issues of systemic injustice.
“This work is grounded in the absolutely foundational and too often neglected idea that the quality of teaching and learning matters. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that active learning pedagogies that privilege community and connection are key to effective student engagement in educationally distance settings,” Bass said. “This is a critical moment when institutions must support educators to adapt their practice and to rise to this challenge,” he said.
The current environment requires college campuses to become “adaptive learning organizations”, he said. To do that, they need to:
- Build on existing strengths
- Draw on evidence, best practices and data
- Engage all voices, including the voices or students
- Smartly leverage its financial and human resources to respond most effectively to an uncertain and fast-changing world.
Bass, along with Dr. Laura M. Gambino, Vice President for the New England Commission of Higher Education and Bret Eynon, retired Associate Provost of LaGuardia Community College, outlined a framework for continuous organizational learning and laid out a framework intended to promote continuous organizational learning and ultimately create institutions that are more adaptable, equity focused and responsive to systemic injustice during REMOTE: The Connected Faculty Summit
“[This] is a big but crucially necessary challenge. It requires doing things differently. It requires a continuous focus on learning—not just student learning but learning for all educators,” Dr. Gambino said, adding that higher educational facilities are broadening faculty development to include to include all campus educators and engaging them in collaborative practice-focused learning, and putting professional learning at the center of student success and institutional transformation in a way that aligns with the mission and purposes of each individual institution.
“When institutions begin to integrate this type of professional learning into their culture, they're better positioned to address both the immediate needs of the moment, preparing for new and uncertain learning modalities and responding to issues of equity, diversity, and inclusivity,” she said.
So how can higher educational institutions get there? How can they develop high impact professional learning strategies that can transform their teaching and learning practices and develop a true learning culture?
A framework is required, according to Dr. Gambino. She then introduced The New Learning Compact: A Framework for Professional Learning and Educational Change. The framework has a set of core values including being learning centered, being inclusive and equity focused, and personally empowering, that in turn shape its core principles.
“This is one of the distinctive features of the New Learning Compact is that it looks beyond the individual educator development and it looks at the community, institutional and ecosystem levels,” Dr. Gambino said, adding that at each level there is a set of integration strategies to engage stakeholders on your campus as you design a long-term professional learning strategy.
According to Eynon, the four core principles for strategic engagement are:
- Individually: Individual faculty and staff practice as the cores site for the learning/teaching connection.
- Institutional: Campus cultures and structures that support learning-centered change.
- Community: Practitioners in context: Programs and departments, seminars, teaching circles, and other venues for collaboration and exchange.
- Ecosystem: Systems and networks shape learning across levels.
“So this is a big framework and when he started we were trying to think comprehensively, but we are also thinking about how do we make this useful at this current moment to meet the pressing needs that institutions have at this time,” Eynon said, adding because of the immediacy of the current education environment they’ve distilled the framework down into five essentials principals that are crucial to help higher education institution adapt for the future.
- Build on knowledge
- Connect to practice
- Bridge boundaries and engage all educators
- Learn in community
- Engage institutional and systemic change
Instructors and faculty need to take this framework and move forward. They need to apply these principles as they plan their professional learning activities related to COVID adaptation to address both equity and educational distancing, according to Bass.
They also need to partner with key stakeholders and engage their center for teaching and learning, institutional research, student affairs offices responsible for diversity and equity and others in order to build a shared strategic vision and make all these stakeholders critical to information gathering and sharing to planning, he said.
And finally, faculty and instructors have to plan now for continuous learning and have a plan from previous semesters including building and sustaining professional learning communities, he said.