League of Innovation Day 2

The day started out with Applying Management and Business Theory to Community College. It was interesting, looking at the following theories:

• Group Think
• Double Loop Learning
• Stakeholder Theory
• Change Theory
• Upper Echelons Theory

Explaining the effective application of so many unfamiliar theories proved to be a bit too much for a 60 minute session. Still, the ideas were good ones and now I know what to read to learn more about these theories.

Next, I went to a session called Unified Messaging: Reaching our Students and staff wherever they are.  I was particularly interested in this topic in my new role as dean over Continuing education. Our college will soon abandon its print quarterly schedule, the key marketing tool for continuing ed. Thus, I am very interested in anything about how to get the word out.  Sadly, the key policy ideas around unified messaging - who has access to the messaging, how does the college decide what messaging happens, how are the message recipients involved in the process, etc - were not addressed. Rather, it was more a technical presentation, showing us how to use RSS to send messages.  I like the idea and we can certainly make use of RSS without doing unified messaging. So, though not what I was hoping for, still an idea worth pursuing.

Next, I attended Ideation + Implementation = Innovation. The presenter, Trudie Giordano from the Coast Community College District, was clearly passionate about her topic. She presented a pair of methodologies (Action Colabs and scrum) for generating and testing innovative ideas.  However, like the business theory session, the volume and complexity of the information was way too much for the 60 minute session and I and others left thinking it was a great idea, but we didn't understand it enough to do anything with it. 

After lunch, I attended Say Goodbye to BORED Meetings. This was basically a 60 minute advertisement for a program called Meeting Booster. I usually avoid these kinds of sessions like the plague, but I hoped to get a good idea or two about running more effective meetings.  Nearly everything the program did you could do with Outlook and Microsoft Office. However, it did generate some cool analytics that would be really useful in business. I'm not sure we could make effective use of the data in higher ed.  My takeaway ideas were

• identify pre-meeting tasks and who will do them
• have a conclusion statement in the minutes for each item on the agenda
• include all needed documents in a single file.
• have a single college wide location for meeting minutes.

The last session I attended was Strategies for Developing An Adult Learner Support Program came from the folks at Foothill College. Apparently they have a huge traditional college age population, so their faculty and staff were surprised at the significant presence of traditional students. Since our average student age at Seattle Central is 27, not 18, we're clearly coming from a different place. I was hoping to get some ideas about appealing to potential continuing ed students, but that didn't really happen. Still, I got some good ideas about supporting students in general and the take away message was that one size does not fit all and that we should develop student support with discreet populations (adults, veterans, disabled, etc) in mind.

League for Innovation - Day 1 - Afternoon Sessions

The afternoon sessions were not as good as the morning ones. I started out with Stackable Certificates: a win for students and colleges with a panel of people from around the country. They all talked about their stackable certificate programs. They didn't really give any detail about these programs, as they didn't want us to try to follow them exactly, as one size does not fit all. While I appreciate that sentiment, the lack of any specifics made the session essentially useless.

Next, I attended a session called It's alive! Creating a transparent, active guide to making decisions with two people from Orange Coast College.  Here, they introduced a really detailed college wide decision making process. I guess I was expecting something about individual decision making - I should have read the description more carefully. Anyway, it seemed a lot like the process we went through at Cascadia in reviewing the committee structure and insuring it was effective at doing what it was supposed to do. Again, not terribly useful to me, though an interesting session.

That was the last general session - we got an hour and a half off for a break before the evening session, again no food involved.  The highlight of the evening session was a presentation by Martha Kanter, former US Under Secretary of Education. While interesting, there were no big take aways from her talk. The thing that I remember at the moment was that she noted that 10 years ago, her college hosted a League conference. She looked back at the speech she gave then and quoted from it about the dire state of the economy, budget cuts, underinvestment in education, etc. It all applied perfectly to today. Her message was not to repeat the same mistakes as we had in the past, but I felt rather discouraged that there had been pretty much no progress in the situation of community colleges in the last 10 years.

The only to-dos that I took from the afternoon was to read A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy's Future, recommended by Martha Kanter.

League for Innovation Day 1 - Morning Sessions

I'm at the League for Innovation Conference in Anaheim, CA. The conference started on a Sunday morning at 8:30 and went non-stop from there, unencumbered by any actual food or snacks.

My morning sessions started off with Entrepreneurial leadership and disruptive innovation with Chris Bustamonte, president of Rio Salado College. Rio Salado is impressive on many fronts and Bustamonte shared several remarkable things worthy of entire session just in the first 5 minutes. For example, 70% of the college's 40,000 students are online, they disaggregate the teaching role and they have 23 full time faculty and 1500 part time.

He talked about how to get to a culture of innovation and one key takeaway that I had was this - Rio Salado is part of a big system. Most of that system offers education in the traditional manner. His college does not. So, if you want traditional, there are plenty of places to go and teach. Rio Salado is not one of those places. They are not trying to have everyone do things their way, but this is one place set aside for innovation and, if engaging in innovation is not for you, there are plenty of other places to be.  He wasn't being harsh about it, but simply acknowledging that you can't be all things to all people and they were going to focus on doing what they did well - innovation.  Very energizing.

The next session was Yoga Mindfulness in the Classroom for Student Success with Dori DiPietro from Mesa Community College.  She shared lots of studies that showed where engaging in a mindfulness practice really relieved student stress and improved outcomes. She suggested some simple ways to introduce mindfulness and we practiced some focused mindfulness in the session. It was nice. She shared a story about two wolves that battle within one - one of anger and one of peace. The one that wins is the one you feed. Engaging in a mindfulness practice feeds the peaceful wolf.

Finally, I attended a session called Applied benchmarking with Bryan Ryan and Robert Grove.  Essentially, Applied Benchmarking has one

• Identify a problem
• Find someone who is doing well at the thing that challenges us (the benchmark)
• Find a way to bring it back to the college (in a way that does not break the bank)

At their college, Wake Technical College, they have every single employee engage in this process. I asked how they supported classified staff like secretaries and cashiers, who rarely go to conferences to be exposed to best practices, to engage in this process. They didn't really answer this question. I like the idea for administrators and faculty. Actually, I like the idea for everyone, as long as everyone is supported in being exposed to the best practices of their area.
 

 I like to identify some things that I hope to do as a result of what I learned at a conference. My hopes from this morning's sessions are:

• create a mindfulness module for my online classes, make it an optional but rewarded part of the pre-class assignment
• create an optional but rewarded process for Applied Benchmarking for my faculty, directors and program coordinators. Consider whether and how to expand to other employees.
• Rio Salado has a vibrant prison education program. We are expanding our prison education at Seattle Central and trying to do it in innovative ways. Dr. Bustamonte gave me a contact at the college and I will follow up and request a conversation with her.