Pedagogical change and institutional transformation: The effects of simultaneous reform in community colleges

Heightened external pressure for educational reform combined with higher education's internal paradigm shift from teaching to learning has created an opportunity for profound change. As a result, new perspectives and a plethora of pedagogical innovations are altering the landscape of higher education.;Educational reform has primarily been addressed through a model of centralized planning and top-down strategies to achieve large scale transformational change. Centralized strategic initiatives, however, have produced few examples of successful transformational change in higher education. At the same time, pedagogical innovations that emerge organically from the grassroots level often remain isolated in individual classrooms and fail to transform the institution as a whole.;Research is needed to explore how pedagogical innovations can facilitate organization-wide change. This study examines how pedagogical innovations emerge at multiple levels, including faculty initiative, administrative strategy, and institutional participation in national reform projects. Moreover, the study explores the interactions among these innovations and their effects on the institution as a whole.;This collective case study research examined pedagogical change at three community colleges. Pedagogical innovation is of particular importance in the community college sector as it enrolls the largest number and most diverse group of post secondary students. The study found that pedagogical innovations had institution-wide effects when structural linkages among the innovations were created by faculty and academic administrators. The colleges that were most able to link pedagogical innovations with institutional priorities demonstrated the broadest and deepest effects at the organization-wide level. College-wide professional development programs emerged as primary mechanisms for linking innovations and providing sensemaking opportunities for organizational members. Sensemaking and organizational culture shaped the context in which pedagogical innovations emerged and affected each other. Learning and evidence emerged as values shared by faculty and administrators and served to unite them to work collaboratively toward the enhancement of student learning.