MOVING UP THE LEARNING CURVE: PREPARING NEXT GENERATION EDUCATORS FOR THE NEXT GENERATION HIGHER EDUCATION CLASSROOM

Education, its consumption, and its delivery are seeing unprecedented change. A recent report (Ernest & Young, 2012) not only singled out digital technology as one of the five key drivers of this change but that “Campuses will remain, but digital technologies will transform the way education is delivered and accessed, and the way value is created by higher education providers, public and private alike” (p. 4).
Today’s higher education students, frequently referred to as netgens, millennials or even “me-llennials” (Buckner & Strawser:2016), have grown up in a world other than that of those educating them. This new generation of student needs a new generation of educator and in order to rise to the challenge this should ideally occur in what is sometimes called the next generation classroom (Carlson: 2004; Clarke:2012)

Despite considerable research on today’s higher education student as well as about teaching this new generation of students, there is relatively little research that provides insight on managing change at the level of the educators. Dawson, Mighty and Britnell (2010) looked at the role of faculty developers as change agents and Diamond (2005) examined the role of academic support centres. This research looks directly at the educators as agents of change. It is being conducted with educators in a University of Applied Sciences where there are over 20’000 students as an action research project with clear pedagogical objectives and a sub-objective of evaluating organizational change along the lines suggested by Lewin (1952).

Lewin (1952) saw change at an organizational level as a three-phase procedure of: unfreezing; moving or changing; refreezing. Quin, Amer, Lonie et al. (2012) rephrased these phases calling them stage setting; making change happen; making things stick. The key elements in each phase are shown below and draw on Kotter’s 8-step model (1995) as presented by Quin et al. (2012) but adapted for educator change in the present case.

Phase 1: Setting the stage for change needs impetus or a sense of urgency and a guiding coalition in order that the situation unfreeze and to “break open the shell of complacency” (Lewin:1952, p.211).

Phase 2: Making change happen calls for having a clear vision and ideally a strategy supporting it, communication and actions that give substance to the vision and finally, the “empowering of others to act on the vision through encouraging risk-taking, and non-traditional ideas, activities, and actions” (Kotter:1995, p.3). In other words, developing next generation educators.

Phase 3: Making it stick is where clear outcomes that demonstrate change are necessary and building upon such change can have a wider impact on systems and structures resulting in the institutionalizing of new approaches and encourage the development of next generation classrooms.

The research presented in this paper reports on making change happen and the challenge of turning educators into change agents. It is not through the provision of training sessions and workshops, course materials, and technical support alone that the kind of change called for today will occur. Rather this level of change calls for those involved to be supported and empowered, adhere one hundred percent and, inspire their colleagues. A description of the programme, its implementation and feedback from those involved provides the basis for discussion and suggestions are made for enabling change in the higher education arena.