Episode 100: Brian Rosenberg on Overcoming Resistance to Experiential Learning
How can you make experiential learning not just something your college does but part of who you are? As you move from doing it ad hoc to integrating at scale, how can you overcome resistance to change? What's the right mix of communications, incentives, and training? On a special 100th episode, we dive into these questions with Brian Rosenberg, author of "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It", Visiting Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, and former President of Macalester College.
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Brian Rosenberg: When you're working in a group or a team, you have to give up a certain amount of agency. That is your success becomes dependent, not just on your own effort and ability, but on other people. And that's really hard. \ That involves a level of trust and vulnerability that work simply working on your own.
Doesn't. Inevitably in a group or a team, there are gonna be different levels of quality work. There's gonna be different levels of dedication, but we both know that's life, right? It's, that's the way being in a workplace is, then you have to take all that at mass. And succeed at something
that was Brian Rosenberg, past president of McAllister College an author of the book, whatever it is, I'm against it. Resistance to change in higher education. We had a great conversation about how to enable experiential learning and the skills, the mindsets, the [00:01:00] relationship it builds, and we dive into how to deal with the resistance you might face trying to adopt and accelerate experiential learning with better communication techniques, incentive structures, and ways of developing people. I think you're really gonna enjoy this, so let's dive in.
/ Welcome to the Connected College Podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and how they're organized to enable student success. And if you're a leader in higher ed, and you think that the silos and separations get in the way of student success, then this podcast and , The Connected College, are for you.
Elliot Felix: We're here to learn and work together to bust silos, question [00:02:00] tradition, and forge partnerships so that students feel connected to their college, their community. Their coursework and their careers./
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Elliot Felix: Welcome Brian.
I'm so excited for our conversation about experiential learning and are the. that people face, the resistance they face and how they can get over, around and through them.
Brian Rosenberg: I'm pleased to be here, Elliot, I've been looking forward to this.
Elliot Felix: Awesome. And I should say this is our. Hundredth episode of the Connected College podcast. And I could think of no, no better person, with no better perspective. So I'm I'm excited too. And maybe just tell us a little bit about yourself. How you got started in higher ed, what you're up to today.
Brian Rosenberg: I fell in love with with being an English professor in college and I was fortunate enough to be able to do that for 15 years. And then for some crazy reason, I moved into administration. I became a dean of the faculty for five years and then spent 17 years as president of McAllister College in your neck of the woods.
[00:03:00] Decided 17 years was enough. And since I left McAllister I've been doing a variety of things. I teach in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I've been working with the African Leadership University. I'm chair of the board now, the Tegel Foundation and I like to write. So yeah, I've totally failed retirement.
Elliot Felix: Nice. I, it seems like you're failing up. Or it, it seems to be quite positive and. It's interesting, like tying it all back to english professor roots. What was your favorite class that you taught as an English professor?
Brian Rosenberg: I loved teaching 19th century European novels. That's what got me interested in the first place, a freshman seminar on that. And so I. It didn't always delight my students, but I loved teaching these big, long book, bookend kind of books. Dickens was my particular interest, but Dickens George, Elliot, Jay and Austin [00:04:00] Henry, James, Charlotte Bronte.
I just love that stuff.
Elliot Felix: Of course, you're. Your book whatever it is I'm against, it resistance to change in higher education is an amazing work. And it's not every day that something comes along and like perfectly captures the sentiment, in the like on the road or whatever, whatever it might be, fear and loathing. but, do you see a connection between 18th century European novels and resistance to change in higher ed?
Brian Rosenberg: I'm not sure. I, there's a direct connection to the book. But there is, my reading of people like Dickens. Shaped in very profound ways the way I think about my work. And in particular it was Dickens' suspicion of the tendency of institutions to dehumanize people and to take away individual agency.
That was a theme that ran through all of his novels. And so when I became an administrator, I was determined not to stop being a human [00:05:00] being. And so you know that, that sense of thinking with your head and thinking with your heart. Which was really important to Dickens was, is something that I've tried to be informed by throughout my entire career.
I think at McAllister, people got tired of me quoting from Dickens or Keats or George Elliot. So yeah it's part of who I am which is I suppose, the sign of a good education.
Elliot Felix: I love that. The head and the heart, and sometimes I'll add hands to that. Dave Gray, who's the author of Gamestorming and a book called The Connected Company, which a way and a session with him inspired. Naming the connected college. He in, in one of his books, I forget which one, but he talks about, whenever you're communicating, there's a message for the head, there's a message for the heart and there's a message for the hands, which is like the practical.
Brian Rosenberg: Right.
Elliot Felix: different people have those dialed up or down and and so I think that's a good,
Brian Rosenberg: Yeah. I love that.
Elliot Felix: [00:06:00] checklist.
Brian Rosenberg: gonna have to add that third component.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. And remembering to be a human that you're, you're not a automaton who, can't express any emotion or authenticity, I think is a
Brian Rosenberg: and it's one of the things that, that honestly frustrates me a little bit. Right now. I, I think, I know there's a lot of pressure on college and university presidents from all kinds of directions, but. I'd like to see them maybe a little bit more often, speak as human beings and not speak as messages from a communications office.
I think that makes a real difference in their communities real difference in the level of trust that they inspire. I always tried to be not just President Brian Rosenberg, but Brian Rosenberg and it was important to me.
Elliot Felix: it's surprisingly easy to lose yourself and forget to be a human in those situations. A high pressure. Novel, high [00:07:00] stakes situations where you're getting advice from all side. I've been there, you're getting advice from all sides all of a sudden it feels like you're walking a tightrope and you can't say this and you can't say that.
It's easier than you might think to lose sight of who you are. I think it's a good, it's a good reminder.
Brian Rosenberg: For me at least, I always had to be able to pass the look of the mirror test. I had to be able to look in the mirror and think I might've been right, I might've been wrong, but I did what I thought was the right thing to do. And sometimes it means ignoring all that advice that you get from lots of other people.
Elliot Felix: And when you have to look at the mirror and. You have to make these tough decisions. I think one way that people do that really successfully is by on the student, and understanding their needs. And when you're making a tough decision, thinking through what, what's gonna help our students, and I'd love to hear how do you define [00:08:00] student success?
Brian Rosenberg: There are a lot of different ways to answer that question. But for me, thinking about the work of higher education, it's equipping students. With both the frame of mind and the set of skills that they're gonna need to be lifelong learners. Very little that you actually learn in college in terms of information is gonna stick with you.
But the skills that you learn the habits of mind that you learn those are the things that are gonna allow you to learn. Whether it's in your first job or your last job, and whether it's in, in small group or large group interactions. To me, education works when they educate learners. Not learned, but learners.
And sometimes we do that well, and sometimes maybe we don't do that so well.
Elliot Felix: So student success is the, the mindset and the skillset to be a lifelong learner. And [00:09:00] you're focusing on those not so much the, the information that might come and go over the, the specific plot or character within a Dickens novel. But the fact that systems can dehumanize people
Brian Rosenberg: just learning the skill of close reading. Reading one of those books demand, what does it take to read an 800 page novel? It takes determination
Elliot Felix: Yeah.
Brian Rosenberg: and it takes care and it takes resilience. And you learn as much from the act of reading this, of doing this thing that's hard
Elliot Felix: Yeah.
Brian Rosenberg: you do from anything that's actually in it.
And it's one of the reasons I think that the loss of reading. Or the diminishment of reading has been so problematic. It's not just a matter of getting the information, it's the actual act of doing the work.
Elliot Felix: And what are some of the ways tackling an 800 page tome and the grit and the perseverance to do that is one way? are some of the other ways that [00:10:00] students can learn this, the mindset and skillset to be a lifelong learner, to be successful?
Brian Rosenberg: And I know this is a topic for our conversation and it's important to you, but I really do believe that what we sometimes call experiential learning what at a LU, the African Leadership University, they're referred to as learning through doing. I really think that's where you develop.
The skill sets and the personal qualities that you need to be a lifelong learner when you are actively engaged in shaping your own education as opposed to simply a passive recipient of something that's being passed on to you from someone else. And so I think making the student the center of their own educational journey and getting their mu, getting them much more involved.
In doing things in active learning rather than in listening and in passive [00:11:00] learning. I think that's where those muscles get formed. I don't think a lot of those muscles get formed when you're just sitting in a large lecture hall and taking notes. I think they get formed more effectively in lots of other ways.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, I'm totally with you and think you can't have a experiential learning unless you have an experience. And in the, in the book I talk about maybe the simplest definition of an experience is you have to have a person and that person has to have interaction with another person or with information with ideas. then you have to have thoughts and feelings about, about that interaction. And that's my simple formula, but I think it's really rooted in the fact that, you have to make it personal and you have to take the ownership. And I it's interesting, at the risk of repeating the pattern of head, heart, hands I think for me, the experiential learning in addition to the mindset and the skillset you mentioned, I [00:12:00] think it's also the relationships you build from those. From those interactions, it's class project for a company and it turns out, they need an intern that summer or you meet someone who becomes your role model and then all of a sudden you're stats class comes alive when you meet a market researcher where do relationships fit in your view of experiential learning?
Brian Rosenberg: It is interesting. I happened to be teaching this coming week a piece by David Brooks. Got a lot of attention. It was. In the Atlantic, and I think it was called something like how the Ivy League Broke America. Got a lot of attention. And there are aspects of the piece with which I agree there are aspects with which I don't, one of the interesting things he says is that we have defined higher education, really education in general as a form of individual success.
You get the grade, you're the person who speaks the most in class. [00:13:00] You are the smartest in the room. Whereas success in life really is about collective success. It's about success with other people and until higher education. Begins to shift the model away from individual success to collective success.
We're essentially gonna be educating people the wrong way. And we're gonna be graduating people, even from the most elite institutions who are not equipped with the skills that they really need to be effective in a workplace or in a social environment. We're teaching them the wrong things.
We're rewarding the wrong things. Which really means shifting the whole model of how we evaluate performance, quality, excellence, and higher education.
Elliot Felix: So it's not enough that you build habits of mind and the skills to go through a text or analyze data or communicate in compelling [00:14:00] crisp ways. It's also that you. Do those things with other people and and you're learning from them. They're learning from you and you're building relationships along the way.
Brian Rosenberg: Elliot, the most important leadership lesson that I had to learn, and it was not easy for me to learn, was that it wasn't my job as a leader to prove that I was the smartest person in the room. It was my job as a leader to make other people feel like they were smart. And when you come up through a traditional education, you go to graduate school again, you're always competing to show you're the smartest.
And even as a faculty member you walk into a classroom and you're trying to show the students that you're the smartest and through trial and error and a lot of error, and through getting some really good advice. I learned that [00:15:00] doesn't work when you're a leader just coming in and showing that you're the smartest or you're the most powerful.
That's not good leadership. Good leadership is empowering other people, making other people feel like they're being listened to, making other people feel like they have good ideas. And I think that's something that a lot of leaders honestly get wrong. Leadership is not dominance. Leadership is not ordering people to do things.
Leadership is setting the right example and inspiring people to bring out the best of themselves.
Elliot Felix: So if we think about that to learning, how can leaders, whether it's you know, a president, a provost, a board, or even like a director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, or a director of Alumni Affairs, like how can the folks that are. Along the spectrum, center for [00:16:00] Engaged Learning, center for Civic Engagement. How can these folks lead the way on experiential learning so students can take ownership so they can apply things in the abstract to real world situations.
Brian Rosenberg: The answer to that question I think has pretty deep roots. We have to remember that the dominant model in higher education has been around for a millennium. And that dominant model is that students come to this place where there are smart people and buildings and a library. And those smart people pour knowledge into their heads.
And again, that, that was the model in medieval European universities. And in many ways, it's still the model in contemporary universities. It centers everything around the faculty member not around the student. And so moving away from the faculty member being what some people call the sage on the stage.[00:17:00]
Is really a gigantic cultural intellectual shift. And it's not the way most faculty members are trained. It's not the way I was trained. And so it's why, despite the fact that there are reams and reams of evidence showing that learning through doing is more effective than learning through listening, we continue to.
Shovel students, intellectual halls. 'cause it's really hard to change it. To me it's about, people respond to the right incentives and right now the incentive system in higher education is still built around a traditional model. How do you get tenure, what you publish? What your teaching evaluations look like.
And there's not a lot of reward involved in going out into the community in making connections with employers in getting students involved in pro, in projects [00:18:00] beyond the campus. In having students work in groups, they often, students often don't like it at first. It's not familiar. And so maybe your teaching evaluations will suffer even though, students are learning more.
I think we need to start thinking about different ways of defining and evaluating excellence among faculty members. And only when we change that incentive and reward system, are we really gonna get. Some movement. There's only so much that a teaching and learning center, and a lot of these people in teaching and learning centers totally get it.
They read the research, they know. And a lot of people who work in civic engagement centers know and talk to almost any of them at almost any campus, and they'll tell you they get a lot of resistance. And so it's not a matter of knowing what the right thing to do is. It's a matter of.
Beginning to change the reward system so that you can slowly begin to change the culture. And I would add [00:19:00] changing graduate education because that's where all of these faculty members are getting trained. So it's, there's no simple, easy answer. But but it's, it's just, it's gonna be a, it's gonna be a slow and difficult process is what happens when you're trying to change a culture.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, I'm hearing at least four ingredients to this. Not so secret sauce for experiential learning. One is centering the student rather than the faculty. The other is changing the incentive structure in order to make that possible. The third is, resetting expectations among students and faculty about, working on a problem, working in a, in a group. Understanding expectations to that, which by the way makes a ton of sense. And then the fourth is looking at the training, the resetting student expectations. That makes me think of a [00:20:00] national student satisfaction survey we did it looked at 68 different dimensions of student experience. Group work classes was the absolute bottom, in terms of student satisfaction. And I think that's, I think students understand they're gonna be working in teams in the workplace, usually there's pretty poor infrastructure around. Team formation. do you, what do you do to form the teams so that maybe there's some kind of common ground shared interest, whatever it might be.
Defining roles, defining goals and, usually those aren't there.
Brian Rosenberg: I think it comes back to training, putting students into groups and having that work effectively is hard.
Elliot Felix: Yeah.
Brian Rosenberg: And I still haven't mastered it a at, at this very late stage in my career. I'm still learning how to do that, and that's why I think it goes back to how people are [00:21:00] educated.
Faculty members, by and large are educated to, to lecture, maybe to lead a class discussion to run a lab. They're not educated in the art of having students do effective group and teamwork. And so I can understand why students don't like it because often they're broken into groups and within five minutes they're talking about what they're gonna have for lunch that day,
Elliot Felix: Yeah.
Brian Rosenberg: they feel like they're wasting their time.
Elliot Felix: When MIT, famously started moving, to a group work model for some of their key introductory STEM courses. They called it Teal Technology Enabled Active Learning. The students that were most resistant to it were actually the top A students because they had the most to lose, they had already optimized for the old system, so they didn't want to change, they didn't, they were. They were [00:22:00] crushing the kind of recall testing idea. So the, the, and the listening, model that your passive model that you were talking about. So they were the most resistant to a new model 'cause they had the most to lose and they had already done the work to optimize for the old model.
Brian Rosenberg: And when you're working in a group or a team, you have to give up a certain amount of agency. That is your success becomes dependent, not just on your own effort and ability, but on other people. And that's really hard. That, that involves a level of trust and vulnerability that work simply working on your own.
Doesn't. And inevitably in a group or a team, there are gonna be different levels of quality work. There's gonna be different levels of dedication, but we both know that's life, right? It's, that's the way being in a workplace is, it means working with other people, some of whom you think are great, and some of whom you [00:23:00] wonder like, why are they even in this job?
But then you have to take all that at mass. And succeed at something you don't, there are almost no jobs where you just go in and it's all right, this is gonna be successful based entirely on my ability and dedication. We're all dependent on other people in the stuff that we do. And so yeah, I could see how that's really uncomfortable, particularly for the Type A high achievers, but that's what you need to learn.
And you need to learn how to be successful even when not everyone else around you is as good as you or as dedicated as you.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, and I think people talk about being comfortable with ambiguity and I think there's, often that's in terms of. Information, but at least if, as I reflect on my own experience, going back to grad school after being in [00:24:00] the workplace for four or five years, kinda depending on how you count the. The most difficult part of group work the lack of formal roles and hierarchy that I experienced in the workplace, and I came from a very top down environment, so it was very clear our decisions were made. And then I entered into the, the wild west of. Unbridled enthusiasm and, unclear roles and responsibilities.
And it was it was hard like struggling through that. And I think I, it I think that thinking through how some of that is good for you, right? Hard stuff is good for
Brian Rosenberg: Freedom is always scarier than restriction.
Elliot Felix: Yeah.
Brian Rosenberg: it, we we tend to think of freedom as a positive. And it is but freedom is also scary. And without a clear structure, without a clear hierarchy, there's a lot more that you have to [00:25:00] decide. There's a lot more that you have to figure out, a lot more choices you have to make.
And you know that can be difficult, but. Certainly in terms of skill capacity building I think it's essential. If you're only following orders then there's a lot that you're not learning and there's gonna come a point where there's no order that's sitting there for you to follow and you're gonna have to solve some problem.
And if you're not used to doing that in the absence of an order or a structure it's gonna be really hard for you to tackle that.
Elliot Felix: Yeah that's incredibly well said. We've talked a little bit about, as we're wrapping up here, we've talked about how in order to enable experiential learning where students are taking ownership and they're playing an active role. You have to focus on the student. You have to change the incentives.
You have to reset expectations among [00:26:00] students and faculty. You have to the training while are in grad school and while they're in the role. I'd love to pull on those, some of these threads a little bit more. What role do you think new incentives could play?
Is that things like, course development grants for courses that engage companies in the community? Is that requiring community engagement to graduate? What are you thinking
Brian Rosenberg: There are lots of different ways to approach this. Early in my time at McAllister I did try because McAllister is unusual in being located in an urban area. I did try to add a community engagement component to general education, and it unsurprisingly failed at a faculty meeting.
So I, I tried the other method, which is incentives. So I did offer, in fact, presidential discretionary grants for any faculty member who wanted to create a course or revise a course that would include a significant community [00:27:00] engagement component. And that dramatically increased the number of those courses without forcing anybody to do anything.
Generally what I found is carrots work better than sticks. And beginning with the people who believe in something. Is much easier than trying to convince people who don't believe in it. So if you can find the people who believe in a good idea and give them some runway whether it's some time, some funding, just some encouragement and say, go with it.
You'll find that sometimes they will be really successful and then others will look at them and say, you have all these students in your class or students are saying such good things about your class, what are you doing anyway? And things can spread that way in many cases, more effectively than by requiring them.
We're long overdue in looking at what kind of [00:28:00] quote unquote scholarship. We reward when faculty do it. We are heavily biased toward very disciplined specific scholarship. We value publishing as in a scholarly journal that a dozen people might read more highly than publishing in an op-ed in a newspaper that a hundred thousand people might read.
Or work that is done with a community organization and isn't published. So I think we really need to broaden our definition at places where scholarship or research is part of the evaluation process. We need to broaden that to include more experiential things and more public facing things as opposed to things simply that are very narrowly disciplinary.
Elliot Felix: I think that's such good advice. Focus more on the carrot and the stick, the grants rather than the requirements. Begin with your [00:29:00] believers. and accelerate the kind of diffusion of these good ideas among peers. Obviously faculty are gonna learn most and be most influenced by each other. And then look at the scholarship. And look for impact rather than specificity.
Where I see experiential learning often get tripped up is who's managing the relationships let's say you're doing a class project for a local company. That can happen as a one-off, right? And it often does, somebody in the business school knows in town every year their marketing class does a campaign for them. And that's great. But what happens when try and do that at scale and you have the alumni office wants to own the relationship with the various companies where [00:30:00] alumni work, then the Center for Teaching and Learning to reach out to these companies. And then, the faculty have their own relationships. I see folks getting stuck with that a lot, and I wonder if you have any special sauce for that.
Brian Rosenberg: No special sauce, but it's pretty, pretty obvious to see why it happens. Part of it is just, and you've touched on this, the incredibly fragmented and siloed nature of the contemporary university. It's divided into an almost innumerable number of departments and divisions and parts and they don't always work very well together.
And so when it comes to something like experiential learning, it does in one way or another fall into the responsibilities of lots of different groups, and there's often very little coordination among them. And sometimes there's even competition. The other thing I would just point to is, budgets are expressions of values and priorities and we just [00:31:00] haven't made budgeting for something like managing these relationships a high priority.
And if we're gonna do this at scale there needs to be the supportive structure. That would allow you to do this at scale. And there may be a college university in the country at which that exists, but I don't know of it. And so if we're serious about reaching out to these communities, and I think we absolutely need to be given the way higher education is seen we need to create a.
A structure that will allow that relationship to be managed. 'cause the only thing worse than not reaching out is reaching out and screwing it up. And without,
Elliot Felix: have two have competing classes and we offer competing things to the same
Brian Rosenberg: or, you have a relationship with a local employer and then the students aren't responsible and the employer says, I'm never doing that again. The expectations need to be made clear. So [00:32:00] these things need to be. Very carefully managed and generally they're not, sometimes they work out well, sometimes they don't.
But it's more a question of the individual office or faculty member than institutional oversight.
Elliot Felix: Final words of advice on experiential learning happen and overcoming resistance to change?
Brian Rosenberg: Another saying at the African Leadership University is constraint drives innovation. A higher education right now is facing all kinds of constraints and challenges, and my hope is that will push more change. The only way for the public to see higher education more positively is to connect in more positive ways with the public, which means in part experiential learning.
So I'm hoping that we could make lemonade out of a grove of lemons that we are [00:33:00] facing and that helps accelerate the embrace of experiential learning. I,
Elliot Felix: Thanks for the the sage advice. appreciate it.
Brian Rosenberg: I'm not, how se sure how sage it is, but it's my pleasure.
Elliot Felix: Or I guess apropos of earlier, thanks for the guide on the side
Brian Rosenberg: you're very welcome.
Elliot Felix: Thanks for listening to the connected college podcast. Subscribe to my Connected College Newsletter at ElliotFelix. com for insights and excerpts from my upcoming book, tools you can download, and special offers.
You can also find more information about talks I've given, articles I've written, and upcoming events there, and please support the podcast by rating and reviewing it wherever you're listening. Let's create connected colleges where students will succeed.
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