Case study Facilitating Individual and Group Learning Processes
What does it mean to redesign an entire curriculum around sustainability? This case study outlines how an instructor and graduate student partners took on the challenge.
Weaving in regeneration: Redesigning the curriculum to foster sustainable change through process consulting
What does it mean to bring a holistic understanding of sustainability into the classroom? How can we help students adopt a life-affirming approach to change? Those are precisely the questions that Instructor Ann-Louise Howard and student partners Tina Shah and Christiane Stilson asked themselves as they worked through the Sustainability Co-Design Project.
Although the co-design program is designed to help instructors and student partners redesign a unit or develop an instructional module in their AHSC 680: Facilitating Individual and Group Learning Processes course, Howard, Shah, and Stilson took on the challenge of infusing sustainability throughout the entire class. But that is not all. The team wanted to make sure that students were not just learning about sustainability and regeneration in a theoretical way, but also in a practical manner. In other words, their goal was to ensure that students grasped the process of producing sustainable and life-affirming change from within, beginning with themselves and extending their sustainable mindset outward into the world.
The redesign at a glance
The team redesigned the course to help students develop their use-of-self as an instrument of change (Seashore et al., 2004) and facilitate change with a client system. Students who take this course will learn by doing, as they will engage individually and collectively in a process consulting (Schein, 1999) project. They will learn how to provide feedback to one another, to understand their impact on the cohort’s effectiveness and how to be most helpful to their client system.
Through different assignments, students will have the opportunity to explore regenerative change, discover the client system’s relationship to regeneration, collaboratively design and facilitate a change process with their client, and reflect on the whole experience as they move into their final master’s project.
Exploring regenerative change
As a form of critical reflection for transformative learning, this assignment asks students to explore and describe regenerative leadership through an individual paper while considering how this framework can be integrated into their own process consulting approach. An opportunity for experiential learning is embedded in the assignment as students are required to design and conduct a personal action step that allows them to explore regenerative change in a concrete way.
Exploring the client system
Students are asked to prepare for and conduct interviews with members of the client system about their relationship to regeneration, including their current mindset and their vision for the organization. Collectively, students will create a graphical representation of what they discovered that will be shared with the client system.
Individual contribution to cohort regeneration
The goal of this assignment is to help students understand their role within their interdependent team. The course was designed as an interactive pedagogy with opportunities for collaboration and peer-learning. As a cohort, they will plan and facilitate a change process, which includes three client sessions. Through this assignment, students are asked to reflect on their contribution to the team and complete a self-assessment form, which they will review and discuss with their peers during class.
The impact of love
This is the last assignment of the course. Students are tasked with writing an individual paper considering the impact of their interventions and learnings through the individual, cohort, and client-facing approaches. Through critical reflection, they will consider the meaning and role of love in process consulting and in regenerative leadership.
Cited works:
- Schein, E. H. (1999). Process consultation revisited: Building the helping relationship. Addison Wesley.
- Seashore, C., Shawver, M., Thompson, G., & Mattare, M. (2004). Doing good by knowing who you are. OD Practitioner, 36(3), 42-46.
Assessments and feedback
Assessment
The instructor’s approach to assessment will depend on the type of learning activity.
Knowledge
Students will be assessed based on their expressions of the knowledge they have acquired. Students will be given the option to express their knowledge through written work, verbal presentation, artistic expression, or a combination of such expressions.
Attitude and skills
Students will be assessed based on a set of competencies (tailored from the Human Systems Intervention (HSI) competencies). This will include self-assessment, peer assessment, and instructor assessment.
Feedback
The instructor will facilitate reflection on experience. Students also can regularly intervene in cohort dynamics, which represents informal feedback. In addition, as students collaborate to design and facilitate the process consultation with their client, check-ins with the instructor will be conducted.
Examples of redesigned or created teaching resources
As a teaching and learning resource, the co-design team created a PowerPoint presentation that outlines the ways in which sustainability was woven into the course. There is a QR code within the slides that leads to the final course outline, supplemental material, course competencies and glossary, and a guide to the client engagement approach.
Redesign summary
Instructor
Assistant Professor Ann-Louise Howard
Student partners
Tina Shah and Christiane Stilson
AHSC 680: Facilitating Individual and Group Learning Processes
- A 600-level Human Systems Interventions graduate course that helps students put into practice learnings from year 1 in a team-based, interdependent, supervised environment. Students use experiential learning with a client to explore client-centered sustainability approaches for meaningful change.
- Between 12 to 20 students take this course per session.
- This is a 6-credit course that extends over the fall and winter terms. The class meets for one intensive week of classes, followed by three intensive weekends spread over two terms.
- The course assessment structure includes an individual exploration of regeneration, a collaborative exploration of the client system, an assessment of the cohort’s capacity for learning through experience, a self-assessment on students’ individual contribution to the cohort’s regeneration, and a final reflection paper that prepares them for their final master’s project.
Goal
The goal of the redesign was to integrate sustainability and regeneration through the entire course, working on building capacity for sustainability and regeneration for external clients, but also for students themselves.
Redesigned units
Concepts of sustainability and regeneration were woven throughout the entire course.
Sustainability lens or Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
The redesign addressed all three spheres of sustainability: environmental, social, and economic. Additionally, the course was redesigned to help students develop their use-of-self as an instrument of change in relation to sustainability and facilitate change with a client system on the sustainability goal of their choice. For example, incorporating UNESCO SDGs encompassing personal (SDGs 12 & 17), environmental (SDGs 11-15), economic (SDGs 8-10), and/or social (SDGs 1-7, 16) dimensions of sustainability.
Sample learning outcomes
By the end of the course, students should be able to:
- Describe sustainability across holistic dimensions, including how process consulting can build capacity in individuals and groups to better align their patterns of thinking, patterns of behaviour, and structures with sustainability principles.
- Critically examine their evolving use of self as an instrument of change, in general and particularly in relation to sustainability.
- Observe, name, and intervene into group dynamics, including those grounded in leadership paradigms and power dynamics, with the goals of supporting sustainable decision-making, promoting sustainability, fostering collaboration and resolving conflicts.
- Design and facilitate a change process with a client system using process consultation with a focus on building the client’s capacity to define and move toward sustainable goals.
- Observe and assess the impact of interventions, including personal behaviour change, reducing environmental footprints, improving social cohesion, and enhancing overall well-being.