It may indeed be time to stop strategic planning, at least as it has most typically been considered and conducted, in favor of approaches that focus on articulating visions for a future built on the individual and collective experiences of learners and future learners of an institution. Instead, it may be time to create operational plans designed to sustain a culture of community commitment and ensure an inclusive teaching and learning environment. Such an inclusive teaching and learning environment is founded on (1) an understanding of learners as whole people with pasts that must be honored throughout the learning process, (2) a set of complex social circumstances that must be considered in the design and delivery of learning experiences, and (3) a future that is unpredictable and ever-changing.
TopIntroduction
As institutions of higher education look to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education programs, they create strategic plans to guide future efforts. These initiative-level strategic plans are often in the context of a larger university strategic plan. As larger university strategic plans may be written from a university growth lens, it is important to recognize where inclusive teaching and learning supports university growth. Inclusive teaching and learning, which strives to support individual students, has the added advantages of broadening the attractiveness of a university to prospective students, improving student retention, and may serve to attract donor interest. Leaders who are building strategic plans to promote inclusive teaching and learning can tie their key approaches to larger movements around new student growth, student retention, diversity, and equity initiatives.
Strategic plans in general vary in their ability to guide universities towards their vision in support of their mission. Popular narratives hold that up to 90% of strategic plans fail in implementation. While this may be an exaggeration that does not account for more recent advances in the field of strategic planning (Cândido & Santos, 2015), such critical views outlining difficulties with strategic planning in higher education are not new. Strategic planning at institutions of higher education is so notoriously subject to failure that a recent article in Inside Higher Ed (Eckel & Trower, 2019) suggests institutions stop strategic planning altogether, in favor of focusing more fully on the strategy itself. Others (Gordon & Fischer, 2015) infer that management motivations for strategic planning are grounded more in external influence and/or to simply comply with accreditation checklists, resulting in very few strategic achievements.
Strategic planning for inclusive teaching and learning shares these challenges and must consider the additional complexities that arise when truly striving for inclusivity. Building on the literature around strategic planning, we propose three reasons why inclusive teaching and learning strategic planning initiatives fail (see Figure 1).
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Strategic plans were built from a narrow world view with a lack of surfacing of underlying assumptions and perspectives.
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Strategic plans fail to address the variety of lived experiences current and prospective students face outside of the ever-changing classroom environment.
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Strategic plans were created for linear instead of complex systems, assuming that the same macro or micro events will affect people and programs similarly.
Together, these shortcomings lead to strategic plans that are incapable of surviving even small perturbances to the educational system.
Figure 1. An illustration of the three reasons why inclusive teaching and learning strategic planning initiatives fail
To address these challenges, particularly in institutions serving working professional and/or non-traditional age learners, institutional leaders have the opportunity to create achievable and sustainable strategic plans by adjusting their vantage point and focusing more time and energy on understanding the full student (and prospective student) experience. Too often institutional leaders overly consider the employee and organizational stakeholders, systems, and processes in the planning process. These plans may include tidy phrases such as “putting students at the center” or “being student-centric” to address the learner as the stakeholder, using only broad survey data or the voices of a handful of students involved in the planning process superficially. When taking such approaches, the starting point is institution-centric, with students playing only a small role in influencing a substantial institutional infrastructure that already exists – largely to support its own great weight.