It’s that time of year again: Faculty members are back teaching, and administrators are coaxing them to take part in yet another strategic initiative to inspire classroom innovation or curricular reform. Many colleges try, unsuccessfully, to get faculty to “buy in” by offering them incentives, including financial ones. But what if incentives don’t work? What alternatives are available?
As a psychology professor who studies human development and learning, a former administrator, and a senior fellow at the Association of American Colleges & Universities, I have participated in curricular innovations both at my institution, Clark University, and elsewhere. I can say with confidence that framing innovation in terms of incentives does not work, and, in fact, typically backfires.
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Extensive literature suggests that incentives create short-term change only — at best. Numerous studies in labs, educational settings, and business organizations have shown that incentives lead to diminished creativity and declining interest among participants, and point to the importance of intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, motivation. When incentives become the focus, too often the deep work necessary to produce sustained curricular change is ignored, and the rewards mask the barriers to success.
If incentives don’t work, then, what will? My work, rooted in both theory and practice, reveals three things that are essential to bringing individuals into the circle of change: autonomy, guidance, and a sense of social community, or working toward a larger meaningful goal.
I’ve found that combining the above factors in ways that shape a culture of learning can fuel positive efforts. One important step is to establish spaces where democratic and desirable solutions are discussed. Various kinds of learning communities and idea labs are excellent ways to find, share, and apply new ideas for change. Individuals are most creative when provided space to follow their interests without sanction, when support and guidance are readily available, and when social community is fostered.
We used these key features at Clark to develop and implement a new curricular framework, known as LEEP, which took effect in 2012. The Liberal Education and Effective Practice program enables undergraduates to apply their liberal education beyond the classroom. Part of this work has involved adding “Problems of Practice” courses and a required universitywide capstone experience, both of which provide students opportunities to integrate, apply, and demonstrate their learning and to work on complex projects that do not have tidy solutions and may continue after the semester ends. Fostering such practices required faculty members to develop new teaching pedagogies. We brought together groups of faculty members (and, eventually, staff members) to create communal resources based on identified needs. We continue to share experiences and develop materials that help advance the university’s agreed-upon learning outcomes in our courses.
Motivational psychology has suggested that individuals need space to work in ways that fuel their passions and allow them to take risks, make mistakes, and express creativity. To that end, Clark created a series of learning communities, called the Exemplar Project, which gave faculty and staff members the time and space they needed to put the LEEP curriculum into action. For instance, different learning communities focused on how the LEEP curriculum was being carried out in individual majors, in first-year seminars, and in the capstone experience. This work was not smooth, and often seemed to move backward rather than forward. But over the course of several years it evolved into the curricular framework we use today.
Cultivating and sustaining faculty work on our curricular reform efforts took a significant amount of support and guidance. In my role as associate provost, I acted as more of a resource than a salesperson whose job it was to get faculty members to buy into an already formulated plan of how to teach. I developed open-ended tools that allowed new communities to build upon the work of prior groups. Because the work of these communities was cumulative, it did not require an extensive time commitment from any one individual.
To bring people to the table and keep them there, it is crucial to make participants feel they are part of a larger effort, working toward a shared goal. Learning is social. At Clark, we established networked communities to help professors from different disciplines share innovative pedagogies and ideas for leading student work on group projects.
In recent years, when working with other colleges, I have also encountered faculty members who have embraced innovation for reasons other than incentives. The Pratt Institute invited me to facilitate workshops as part of an interdisciplinary collaboration in which professors conduct research related to teaching and experiment with new practices. This multiyear initiative — driven in part by the art and design interests of many faculty members — has fostered a community of risk-taking and created a space for faculty to discuss what has worked and what has not. For example, faculty members in the studio arts formed a learning community that inspired them to test new ways to evaluate student work. One faculty member from graphic design discovered from colleagues in interior design that the desk critique — an informal critique of a project in progress, carried out in a student’s work space — can create a deeper teaching connection because it implies that there is something special about where a student works.
Across the nation, colleges and organizations like AAC&U are creating spaces that encourage scholars to explore and share ideas for innovation in teaching. Conferences and summer institutes can provide the autonomy, guidance, and sense of belonging that can lead to innovative curricular design. AAC&U recently co-sponsored, with Wagner College, a “reunion conference” that reconvened faculty members from Clark and from Allegheny, Bard, Spelman, Wagner, and Wheaton Colleges who took part in an earlier consortium that focused on cultivating faculty leadership for curricular reform. Participants spent two days discussing the opportunities and challenges associated with their colleges’ efforts. Again, it was apparent that incentives were not the motivator for curricular innovation. What sparked commitment among these faculty members was the fact that they were part of a wider movement in higher education.
Don’t get me wrong. Offering faculty incentives, whether in the form of payment or time away from teaching to work on new pedagogies, is not necessarily problematic when framed properly. But classroom innovation should be driven by much more. A free lunch goes a long way, but never far enough.
Nancy Budwig is professor of psychology and former associate provost at Clark University, and a senior fellow at the Association of American Colleges & Universities.
