The challenges of scaling effective interventions and innovations in postsecondary institutions are well known (Asera et al., 2013). In this blog post, drawing upon insights from the NSF-funded Scaling Up through Networked Improvement (SUNI) project, we share two leadership practices that are key to scaling efforts. This knowledge will provide practitioners with tools and insights they can put in action today, and it will provide researchers with a new lens to view leadership for change.
Prior research tells us about the importance of collaborative, shared, distributed leadership for spreading innovation in their institutions. Leaders who seek to share the burden of leadership and decision-making have to build trust and attend to hierarchies if they want to effectively engage others in leadership work (Kater & Burke, 2022; Lizier et al., 2022). If leaders want to put in place innovations that have proven promising or effective, they must also pay attention to existing and changing policy and institutional structures at their college (Asera et al., 2013).
But how exactly do leaders attend to these structures and relationships that can make or break efforts to scale? The research tells us what leaders ought to do, but we need to understand how they do it.
Through the SUNI study, our research team sought to answer this question by focusing on practices. We define practices as actions that are simultaneously structured and that structure further action: instead of debating between whether leaders’ actions are dictated by their environments or whether leaders can actively shape those environments, we view practices as a way to understand how both are true at the same time (Feldman & Worline, 2016).
We studied efforts to scale the Carnegie Math Pathways (CMP) across three colleges to understand what actions leaders were taking and the way those interactions were simultaneously constrained and enabled by their environments. The Carnegie Math Pathways, a reform of development mathematics involving the implementation of innovative math pathways, uses an evidence-based, collaborative instructional approach and contextualized curricula to create a supportive and engaging math learning experience that helps students persist and succeed in gateway college math.
To understand how leaders came to shape the scaling efforts of their math pathways we conducted interviews with institution leaders and faculty, conducted site visits, and looked at meeting artifacts and meeting notes. Our analysis revealed that two practices were central to whether scaling efforts broke down or succeeded: tracking and leveraging. Tracking refers to how leaders pay attention to the institutional policies, practices, and structures that might get in the way of or help advance scaling efforts. Leveraging, on the other hand, refers to how leaders use those institutional policies, practices, and structures to support or inhibit scaling practices.
Our analysis revealed a wide range of factors that leaders tracked at their institution and the very specific ways they sought to leverage those factors to advance the position of their math pathways to scale.
In this blog post, we highlight a particularly successful case: Northern Technical College (NTC). NTC was wildly successful at scaling the math pathways reforms. The college offered just two sections (enrolling 27 total students) of the Carnegie Math Pathways quantitative reasoning course, Quantway Core, in the fall of 2019. In the fall of 2021, and in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic no less, NTC had increased enrollments to over 200 students in 14 sections of the course. We turn now to tell the story of how leadership at NTC scaled their math pathways.
Northern Technical College’s Successful Implementation and Scaling of CMP
At NTC, the math department chair, Theo played a crucial role in scaling Quantway. Theo was the first to learn of Quantway in the department and, at first, was reticent to introduce the course to NTC given local conditions—NTC permits the introduction of new courses only when those courses are requirements for a certificate or degree program. However, the college later adopted Guided Pathways, an institutional change framework prioritizing structured guidance in selecting and completing courses, which presented an opportunity for Theo. Courses across the college, including within the math department, would have to be remapped and reorganized to implement Guided Pathways. Shortly after the implementation of Guided Pathways began, Theo pitched Quantway to several departments, starting with the Culinary Arts department given his knowledge of the department’s mathematical needs and his personal connections to the department. As a result, the Culinary Arts program adopted Quantway as one of its required math courses.
After beginning with just two sections for Culinary Arts students in the first year of Quantway implementation, Theo continued to pitch Quantway to other programs and departments whose mathematical needs were well-aligned with the objectives of Quantway. Within just two years, Quantway expanded from 2 to 14 sections.
Tracking and Leveraging at NTC
Prior to even considering whether to adopt Quantway, Theo carefully tracked institutional policies that might limit Quantway’s ability to scale, including a policy that disallowed courses to be added unless they were requirements for a degree or certificate program. This caused Theo to delay advocating for Quantway adoption at the college, waiting for conditions that would enable Quantway to be more favorably considered.
More than a year later, when NTC decided to implement Guide Pathways across the institution, Theo tracked this shift and saw it as an opportunity to introduce Quantway. Anticipating that program directors would now be looking for a math course that would meet their students’ and programs’ needs, Theo leveraged this insight to pitch Quantway as a solution well-aligned to particular areas of study. “Every program was meeting to redo their course mapping,” Theo remarked. “They had to look at what courses they were requiring because they were really asked to start looking at all of the programs within one pillar [to support Guided Pathways].”
Theo’s approach to selling Quantway to program directors and other leaders was effective. Not only was Theo keenly aware of the work that programs would need to engage in to be aligned with Guided Pathways, but he also carefully tracked the mathematics that students would need in each program and targeted his pitches to programs for which Quantway would be an ideal fit.
As a result, several leaders took up Theo’s recommendation to implement Quantway as a required math course for their degree and certificate programs. With over 200 students enrolled per term, Quantway has continued to grow into a core part of the college’s vision.
Lessons for leadership development
This study illustrates the power of closely examining the practices of leaders, at all levels, seeking to advance or limit innovations. Surfacing how leaders do the work of scaling informs the kinds of practices that leaders need to engage in, or begin to develop, to effectively scale reform efforts.
Those responsible for preparing and developing leaders can help leaders develop more effective tracking practices by designing learning experiences aimed at helping them see and analyze existing and emergent priorities and policies of their institution and its departments. This builds on work by Iverson and colleagues (2020) around providing leadership development to STEM faculty to develop wider views of the institution. Leadership development can also focus on developing leaders’ leveraging practice, helping them to reframe barriers and challenges into opportunities that can play a crucial role in transforming the student experience at their institutions.
Tracking and leveraging are crucial practices that constitute the work of distributed, collaborative leadership. By having leaders learn to develop relationships and understand needs that they then leverage, leaders can more effectively engage their institutions to advance innovations that benefit students.
Leadership is not just a set of dispositions and skills, but a set of practices. Our study argues, for both research and development purposes, that attention to what leaders are doing and what they could be doing differently is critical to understanding, initiating, and sustaining institutional change.
References
Asera, R., McDonnell, R. P., Soricone, L., Anderson, N., & Endel, B. (2013). Thinking Big: A Framework for States on Scaling Up Community College Innovation. Jobs for the Future.
Conrad, K. L., & LeMay, L. E. (2020). Lessons from the field: Leading institutional change from the middle. New Directions for Community Colleges, 2020(191), 107-116.
Feldman, M., & Worline, M. (2016). The practicality of practice theory. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 15(2), 304-324.
Iverson, E. R., Bragg, D. D., & Eddy, P. L. (2020). How faculty change agents enact midlevel leadership in STEM. New Directions for Community Colleges, 2020(191), 67-79.
Kater, S. T., & Burke, D. (2022). Getting to shared governance: New perspectives for implementing governance. New Directions for Community Colleges, 2022(200), 37-50.
Lizier, A., Brooks, F., & Bizo, L. (2022). Importance of clarity, hierarchy, and trust in implementing distributed leadership in higher education. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 17411432221105154.
McPhail, I. P., & McPhail, C. J. (2020). Strategic planning as a leadership development tool for midlevel leaders. New Directions for Community Colleges, 2020(191), 21-33.
SUNI: Scaling Up Through Network Improvement is a project funded by the National Science Foundation: IUSE (Institutional and Community Transformation, Development and Implementation). To learn more about the research work of Carnegie Math Pathways, sign up for our In Sum newsletter.
