Focused and sustained professional development for community college faculty is considered a critical component to improving community college student success.  Without a coherent and long-term approach to professional development, faculty will be unlikely to make the types of large-scale changes necessary to improve educational equity and student success.  Despite twenty-five years of policy and recommendations regarding California Community College professional development, few colleges have been able to focus and sustain professional development efforts on improving educational equity and student success. 

     As a community college educator who had experienced close to twenty years of unfocused and idiosyncratic "professional development," I wanted to understand how a college could focus its professional development efforts on improving educational equity.    So, I examined one of the few focused and sustained faculty professional development programs in the California Community College system - the Chaffey College Faculty Success Center - to identify strategies used by college leaders to shape and sustain the faculty professional learning.  Case study findings indicate that college leaders, distributed across the institution, used a number of strategies within three strategic frames - institutional integration, coalition building, and an expanding view of professional learning. College leaders addressed structural factors necessary for professional development, as well as organizational factors that support a culture of professional learning.  The study provides detailed descriptions of the structural, leadership, and organizational strategies used by college leaders, as well as recommendations for other colleges, and recommendations for policy. 

     This article will briefly summarize the case study findings, and then discuss the structural, leadership, and organizational implications for re-envisioning faculty professional development at other community colleges.

Summary of Study Findings

     First, findings from this case study demonstrate that the Chaffey College Faculty Success Center was integrated into the institution.  The Faculty Success Center occupies a physical space, has a faculty coordinator, and receives financial support from both grant and general fund budgets.  The Faculty Success Center is viewed as a critical means by which to improve practice, move organizational goals forward, and ultimately improve student success.  It has an identity that secures its permanency. 

     Second, findings illustrate the importance of coalition building for a new college endeavor.  Coalition building was critical to planning, shaping, and sustaining the Faculty Success Center.  Building a coalition also set the stage for faculty collaboration and the collective changes needed to improve practices for students.  Working both within and across disciplines, faculty supported each other to take risks and innovate practices.  The way the Faculty Success Center professional development activities were structured influenced the college's organizational culture. 

     Third, Chaffey embraced an expanding view of faculty professional learning.  Over time, professional learning evolved beyond the knowledge and skills faculty need to serve students, to include the mindset that faculty need to support student success.  "Hope" (Snyder, 1995) and "growth mindset" (Dweck, 2006) provided the foundation for all the professional development efforts.  

Implications of Study Findings

     From an educational leadership perspective, the strategies used by Chaffey College leaders to re-envision faculty professional development can be viewed through structural, leadership, and organizational frames.  Some of the strategies observed at Chaffey, such as securing top-level administrator support, establishing a professional learning center, allocating a budget, and creating a coordinator position, address structural factors.  Other strategies, such as those related to building a coalition, can be viewed through a distributed leadership frame.  Additional strategies, including the type of collaborative learning activities that were occurring and the resultant learning culture can be viewed through an organizational culture frame.  

Structural Factors

     A structural view of academic leadership (Bolman & Gallos, 2011) views colleges as rational entities.  If the work, organization, and change process are structured appropriately, then the pieces will come together.  Professional development policy (AB 1725, 1988; CCCPDC, 2013) has embraced mostly a structural view.  If we could just get the right structure in place, then professional development programs would be efficient and effective.  If the vision for professional development was clearly stated, allowable activities listed, financial resources available, and a minimum number of flex/professional development days required, then professional development would work.

     Findings from this case study indicate that structural strategies are important in shaping and sustaining faculty professional development.  But, structural strategies alone, are not sufficient to re-envision professional development.  Re-envisioning professional development is not just about getting the right pieces together; it's about getting the right people together in ways that support change.  Chaffey College leaders were cognizant of the limitations of the structural view, and the formal leaders reached out to key faculty distributed across the institution to help in the re-envisioning effort.

Distributed Leadership

     Distributed leadership involves dynamic interactions between multiple leaders and followers.  Decisions about who leads and who follows are determined by the problem, not where one sits in the hierarchy of the institution (Timperly, 2005).  If a problem exists with faculty professional development, then distributed leadership holds that faculty will play an integral role in solving the problem.

     This case study describes the importance of top-level administrators in establishing the Faculty Success Center. But, top-level support and the structural factors that these leaders put into place were not enough to re-envision professional development.  Other leaders, distributed across the institution were needed.

     Mid-level leaders, including one of the Deans and the Faculty Success Center Coordinators were absolutely critical to shaping the Faculty Success Center.  The Dean was able to pull key faculty together, and facilitate early discussions so faculty could coalesce around a vision for the Faculty Success Center.  The Faculty Success Center Coordinators were responsible for expanding the coalition; these faculty leaders strategically reached out to other faculty and brought them into the coalition.  And, faculty, who presented/facilitated professional development activities, further expanded the coalition by bringing new participants into professional learning activities.  All of these mid-level leaders shared in the leadership for the Faculty Success Center.

     A group of leaders, the "coalition," provided the leadership for the Faculty Success Center.  No one person was solely responsible for the Faculty Success Center; the leadership was distributed across a large number of "leaders."  

Transforming the Organizational Culture

     The influence that professional development can have on a community college's culture is an important factor to call out, especially for colleges that look at professional development as imparting only knowledge or skills to faculty.  How the professional development is organized, including who is brought together under what circumstances can strongly influence the organizational culture in ways that support professional learning, changes to practice, and educational equity.

     Chaffey faculty identified with their own departments/disciplines, and they were more likely to attend professional development when it was connected to their discipline.  "We like to support our own" was a common theme that emerged in study interviews. Chaffey college leaders capitalized on this discipline culture and intentionally recruited facilitators from disciplines that weren't regularly participating in professional learning.  But at the same time, facilitators were deliberately paired with a co-facilitator from a different discipline.  This not only honored the existing culture, it also brought faculty from different disciplines together to create a sense of collaboration across the disciplines.

     Shulman (1993) advocates for discipline specific professional development, while Christakis and Fowler (2009) caution that more connections within a group can reinforce behaviors of that group.  More connections between groups, or across disciplines, on the other hand, can open groups up to new behaviors (Christakis & Fowler, 2009; Fullan, 2011).  Faculty Success Center activities respected the discipline culture that Shulman describes, but also made connections between groups of faculty from different disciplines as Christakis & Fowler advocate.  Faculty Success Center activities provided opportunities for faculty from within and across disciplines to come together and collaborate. 

     Faculty, in this study, spoke highly of their colleagues from different disciplines.  They cited the Faculty Success Center as the means by which they got to know and respect their colleagues.  Because of the cross-disciplinary nature of the Faculty Success Center activities, faculty sees each other as colleagues not rivals.  "Not only are we all in it together, we're all sort of teaching the same kind of skills through different disciplines." There is a "level of synergy" in which faculty see each other "as allies even across disciplines."  Collaboration is not an end in itself, but rather purposeful, focused work that motivates groups of faculty to innovate and commit to improvement.  It is this type of collaborative culture that the Faculty Success Center created and supported. 

     Faculty Success Center activities were deliberately structured to work within the existing culture and to influence the culture.  As a Chaffey faculty member said,

 

What is culture if not a creation?  You have to be very deliberate about ways to create a campus culture, and very deliberate about ways you introduce change into a campus culture. 

 

     Faculty Success Center activities supported faculty to look deeply at their own practice, and beyond their own practice.  Opportunities to look both deep and wide created a willingness to consider larger changes that might ultimately benefit students.  Across discipline collaboration was a key strategy to overcoming the types of idiosyncratic innovations that Grubb and Gabriner (2013) describe in their study of basic skills education in California community colleges.  Idiosyncratic innovations, or the type of improvements that occur at the classroom or even department level, reach relatively few students.  For innovations to become widespread, they must be accepted by relatively large numbers of faculty across multiple disciplines.  This is crucial if improvement efforts are to reach large numbers of students. 

     One of the most surprising and significant findings of this study was the impact of the Faculty Success Center's work around hope and mindset.  As a result of the focus on high hope and growth mindset, study participants had higher beliefs in their own capacity, the capacity of their colleagues, and the capacity of their students to learn and improve.  These changes in mindset were instrumental in transforming the organizational culture.  Change is risky.  Innovation is risky.  Faculty has to be willing to take risks, try something different, and perhaps even fail at it.  That's just part of the philosophy of innovation.  Sometimes innovations work, sometimes they don't.  At Chaffey, faculty was willing to innovate, willing to change practices, and willing to risk failure.  When existing practices were already failing students, faculty learned to step up and have the courage to risk their own failure with the hope that changes to practice would be better for students.

     Because high hope / growth mindset were part of the organizational culture, Chaffey faculty also had higher beliefs in the capacity of students. Study participants understood the challenges their students faced, but rather than focusing on how they might "fix" underprepared students, the Faculty Success Center focused on cultivating high hope and growth mindset among faculty so faculty would change their own practices and college structures in ways that showed promise for improving outcomes for students.   

     The Chaffey College Faculty Success Center story shows that re-envisioning professional development is not just about getting the right pieces together; it's about getting the right people together in ways that support change.  Creating a culture (not just a structure) in which faculty seeks new knowledge, tries out new practices, and commits to change is imperative to improving educational equity.  Transforming the culture, or reculturing (Fullan, 2011), not just restructuring, is essential to re-envisioning professional development.  Reculturing activates and deepens moral purpose through collaborative work that respects differences and constantly builds and tries out new knowledge.

     Over the past twenty-five years "professional development" has come to mean many things to many people.  Almost anything has qualified as "professional development" at most of the community colleges across the state.  Professional learning has to be more than one-shot workshops, travel to conferences, and flex days.  Re-envisioning professional development will take more than just restructuring. 

     Meaningful professional learning is about a mindset - it's about constantly trying to improve.  It's asking tough questions, and confronting brutal answers.  It's looking failures in the face, even our own, and maintaining the faith that we will succeed in the end.  It's about improving ourselves for our students. Carol Dweck explains,

 

The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it's not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset.  This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times (Dweck, p. 7). 

 

Challenging times are upon us.  Community colleges are experiencing heightened accountability, increased scrutiny, and the most diverse student needs ever.  It is time for us to stretch and grow, to improve ourselves for our students.  It's time to re-envision faculty professional development.  The Chaffey College Faculty Success Center case study provides us with structural, leadership, and organizational strategies to consider as we strive to re-envision professional development.