DOMINANT COALITIONS AND DOMINANT GENERAL MANAGEMENT LOGIC: A CASE STUDY OF COMMUNITY COLLEGE DEGREE COMPLETION By  Lucian Anthony Leone          A DISSERTATION  Submitted to  Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements  for a degree of  Higher Education Administration  Doctor of Philosophy 2016         ABSTRACT DOMINANT COALITIONS AND DOMINANT GENERAL MANAGEMENT LOGIC: A CASE STUDY OF COMMUNITY COLLEGE DEGREE COMPLETION By Lucian Anthony Leone   Community colleges in the United States are faced with several challenges, one of which is increasing the percentage of students that earn an associate degree.  Research (American Association of Community Colleges, 2012; Amey, 2005; Eddy, 2010; Roueche, 2008) suggests that community college administrators need to think, act, manage, and lead in ways not required or expected in earlier generations.  Significantly increasing the percentage of community college students that earn an associate degree may require a change in the dominant general management logic (Bettis & Prahalad, 1986) of American community colleges.   The dominant coalition is the group that creates and revises an This study described the shared mental models of members of the dominant coalition at one community college, and the relationship between those earn an associate degree.  The research explored the relationships between the ddegree completion.    The research found that the Foundations Studies Committee, a group comprised of faculty, staff, and senior leaders at the College, had a leading role in determining what the College would do to improve the associate degree completion rate.  This group has many of the attributes of a Professional Learning Community (Lenning, et. al, 2013).   Understanding the influence of Professional Learning Communities on organizational development may be helpful as community college work to improve performance on a range of outcomes metrics.          iii            I would like to dedicate this to my wife, Bernadette.  Her support, encouragement and understanding since I began my doctoral studies so many years ago have made this possible.  Our daughter Leah has or writing this dissertation.  For Dominic, Joseph, Gina, Leah, Angela, Kevin, JoJo, Luca, Gianna, Emma and Abby: rust in the Lord, and  I would also like to dedicate this to Angelo and Mary Grace Leone.  My father was an amazing example of faithfulness and commitment - to God, his family, and his work.  My mother instilled in me a deep belief that I could accomplish anything I put my mind to.   Thanks mom and dad.   You are in my prayers.   Finally, I also dedicate this to fellow trekkers everywhere: ss, Frodo, going out of your door," he used to say. "You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing w Bilbo Baggins  The Lord of the Rings   iv  Acknowledgements  I could not have completed this process without the guidance and support of my faculty advisor, Dr. Marilyn Amey.   Thank you for sticking with me over the course of this journey.    I would also like to acknowledge my committee members for their commitment of time and interest in my study.  I would also like to acknowledge all of the faculty I have interacted with throughout the program for making this a valuable learning experience.  I would also like to acknowledge my colleagues at Lansing Community College and Ferris State University who have provided both professional support and personal encouragement.   I deeply appreciate everything you have done. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the participants in this study.   I cannot thank them enough for their time, interest, and insightful responses for this study.  v  Table of Contents  LIST OF TABLES  ............................................................................................................................................ vii  LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................................................... viii  CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION  ................................................................................................................... 1 Purpose of the Study  ....................................................................................................................... 5 Definition of Terms  ......................................................................................................................... 6 Dominant Coalition  ............................................................................................................ 6 Dominant General Management Logic  .............................................................................. 6 Learning Communities  ....................................................................................................... 7 Tags  .................................................................................................................................... 7  CHAPTER TWO: REVIEW OF LITERATURE  ..................................................................................................... 8 Leadership  ....................................................................................................................................... 9 Organizational and Cognitive Frames of Reference ...................................................................... 16 Mental Models  .............................................................................................................................. 19 Dominant Logic  ............................................................................................................................. 22  CHAPTER THREE: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY  ........................................................................................... 30 Selection of Case  ........................................................................................................................... 31 Data Collection   ............................................................................................................................. 31 Analysis  ......................................................................................................................................... 34 Validity   ......................................................................................................................................... 35 Reliability   ...................................................................................................................................... 35 Limitations  ..................................................................................................................................... 36  CHAPTER FOUR: RESEARCH FINDINGS  ....................................................................................................... 37 The Research Questions  ................................................................................................................ 37 Great Lakes College  ....................................................................................................................... 37 Interview Participants  ................................................................................................................... 38 Leadership Council participants  ....................................................................................... 38 Faculty participants  ..............................................................................................................  Administrator participants  ............................................................................................... 40 The Dominant Coalition at Great Lakes College  ........................................................................... 40 Leadership at Great Lakes College  ................................................................................... 41 The Foundations Studies Committee as a key element in the dominant coalition .......... 43 The Shared Mental Models of the Dominant Coalition  ................................................................ 45 Total commitment to student success  ............................................................................. 45 Commitment to developmental and at-risk students  ..................................................... 49 Relationships, not just transactions  ................................................................................. 55 The importance of the Foundations Studies Committee ................................................. 60 Commitment to faculty and staff development  .............................................................. 61 Curricular revisions to improve student success and completion  ................................... 65 Data-driven decision-making, planning and accountability ............................................. 67 vi  Improving completion rates is complex  ........................................................................... 70 Other themes expressed by some study participants  ..................................................... 72 Getting the right people on the bus and in the right seats  ................................ 72 Revisions to program and faculty review processes have been significant  ....... 73 Students supporting students to improve completion  ....................................... 74  ........................................... 75 Summary of Findings: Conclusion  ................................................................................................. 76  CHAPTER FIVE: DISCUSSION ........................................................................................................................ 78 The Dominant Coalition at Great Lakes College  ........................................................................... 79 The Shared Mental Model of the Dominant Coalition at Great Lakes College  ............................. 81 Complexity Theory and the dominant logic at Great Lakes College  ................................ 85 Organizational learning and degree completion .............................................................. 88 The shared mental model of the leadership team at Great Lakes College ...................... 91 The dominant coalition as a Professional Learning Community  ..................................... 92 Constructive-developmental leadership theory at Great Lakes College  ......................... 94 performance with respect to associate degree completion at Great Lakes College   ................... 95 Implications for future research  ................................................................................................. 101  APPENDICES  ............................................................................................................................................. 104 Appendix A: Research Participant Information and Informed Consent Form  ............................ 105 Appendix B: Interview Guide ....................................................................................................... 108 Appendix C:  Mission, Vision, Statement of Beliefs and Values of Great Lakes College .............. 110 REFERENCES  ............................................................................................................................................. 112     vii  LIST OF TABLES  Table 1. Summary of fundamental complexity propositions and their  general implications for leadership     12  Table 2.  Three functions of presidential teams      13 Table 3.  Single, Double, and Triple-loop learning      21 Table 4.  Summary of themes at Great Lakes College    45 Table 5.  Proposed community college dominant logics matrix   103   viii  LIST OF FIGURES  Figure 1. The dominant logic       4 Figure 2.  The dominant coalition at Great Lakes College    41 Figure 3. Percentage of Students Earning a Degree or Transferring After 6 years 76 Figure 4.  As-Environment-Outputs (I-E-O) model   98 Figure 5. s learning cycle        100    1  Chapter One: Introduction   Degree completion rates are important to the vitality and competitiveness of the U.S. economy.  While it is projected that over 60% of the jobs in the U.S. economy will require a relevant post-secondary degree (associate degree or higher) by 2018, based on current trends, less than 50% of working-aged Americans will have a post-secondary degree by 2025 (Carnevale, Smith & Strohl, 2010; Hussar & Bailey, 2011; Lumina Foundation for Education, 2009).  These projections suggest the gap between the educational demands of the U.S. workforce and the educational levels of that workforce is significant and growing.    The Obama administration has sought to focus national attention and federal policy on community college degree completion through a series of proposals in an effort to close this gap.  In  (2009) (Retrieved from: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Investing-in-Education-The-American-Graduation-Initiative/).   In August 2013, the President annousystem.  The intent of this system was to bring greater transparency to the value of a degree from any college or university, public or private, which receives federal support.  The key performance indicators in the proposed system included degree completion rates, average student debt of graduates, job placement rates for graduates, starting salaries for graduates, and how accessible the institutions are with respect to admitting a diverse student population (Retrieved from http://www.whitehouse.gov/ the_press_office/Remarks-of-President-Barack-Obama-Address-to-Joint-Session-of-Congress).  In January 2015, the president announced his proposal to make two years of community college free for students attending at least half-time who maintained a 2.5 grade point average (2015) (Retrieved from: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog /2015/01/08/president-proposes-make-community-college-free-responsible-students-2-years).  In lieu of a college rating system, the Obama administration launched 2  the College Scorecard website in September of 2015.  This site provides information on completion rates, graduate salaries, and cost of attendance for most of the country (www.collegescorecard.ed.gov).   In an effort to focus U.S. community colleges on degree completion, state governments are establishing performance-based funding models (PBF).  Performance funding is based on the belief that (Dougherty & Reddy, 2011, p. 2).  I would suggest that a fundamental problem with performance funding is the often indirect connection to the place where the student experience is most significantly impacted  in the classroom, with faculty.  Incentive systems which do not directly connect to what is going on in the classroom are likely to be ineffective in improving community college associate degree completion rates.  For significant change to occur, faculty and staff may need to be involved and engaged in learning communities focused specifically on course completion as well as degree completion (CCSSE, 2014; Dougherty & Reddy, 2011; Driscoll & Wood, 2007; Lenning, et al., 2013; Sorcinelli, et al., 2006).  Though federal and state-level policy initiatives may have value, research suggests that significant improvement in associate degree completion rates is not likely to occur unless and until community college leaders, managers and faculty think differently with respect to their mission and vision, and how they must function in an increasingly complex environment (Alfred, Shults, Jaquette, & Strickland, 2009; American Association of Community Colleges, 2012; Amey, 2005; Bailey, Jaggars, & Jenkins, 2015; Eddy, 2010; Roueche, et al., 2008). Research from the business management literature suggests the need for a revised dominant general management logic (or dominant logic) (Prahalad & Bettis, 1986).    Initially proposed to help explain corporate diversification strategy, dominant general management logic propositions that have developed  3  logics are shaped by the dominant coalition in the organization, which includes the senior executives responsible for developing strategic priorities and direction.  The dominant logic permits managers and staff throughout the organization appropriate action (including doing nothing), and to do so rapidly and often Bettis, 1986, p. 490).   The dominant logic can be understood as the As data come into the organization, the dominant general management logic determines what data are worth review and potential action, and what data can be ignored.  As the organization determines what data are important and worth attention, the dominant logic then determines how those data are processed in the organization, and how the organization will respond (Prahalad & Bettis, 1986). The concept of dominant logic has been applied to higher education in the United Kingdom (Smith, Gidney, Barclay & Rosenfeld, 2002), but does not appear to have been studied in relation to the American community college system.   Examining the implications of this concept in an American community college context may be helpful in enhancing our understanding of the factors that need to be addressed if we are going to improve degree completion rates at community colleges in the United States.    The dominant logic in place in most community colleges focuses on student access - making it as easy as possible to begin a college program.  Research suggests community colleges need to revise their dominant logic from a focus on student access to a focus on student access and success (American Association of Community Colleges, 2012; Bailey, Jaggars, & Jenkins, 2015).  The dominant logic needs to shift from a focus on beginning a degree program to a focus on beginning and completing the program.  It seems reasonable to conclude that significant improvement in degree completion rates will not occur 4  unless community colleges, including senior leadership, administration, faculty and staff embrace degree completion as a primary focus and make the necessary changes so that greater numbers of students earn a degree.  Though addressing the funding models may be helpful, changing the dominant  logic in community colleges will require community colleges to embrace a new paradigm from within.  Doing so may require functioning more like a learning organization (Torres & Preskill, 2001) where  (Jenkins, 2011; Kerrigan, 2010; as cited in Dougherty & Reddy, 2011, pp. 50-51).  to understand how senior administrators, faculty and staff in the college see the world, and make sense of it for themselves and for others (Amey, 1992; Bolman & Deal, 2003; Eddy, 2003; Fairhurst & Sarr, 1996; Kuhnert & Lewis, 1987; Smircich & Morgan, 1982; Weick, 1995).   We need to understand the shared , faculty and staff (Porac, et. al., 1989).  Bolman and Deal (1984,  5  2013) consolidated the key themes of organizational thought into four perspectives, which they labeled  organizational and psychological literature  -sets, schema, and cognitive lenses, to name Bolman & Deal, 1984,  (p. 12); they can Frames have both a cognitive element and a behavioral element.  As Eddy (2003) suggests, community college leaders first frame events for themselves, so they can then frame events for others.  and how those frames relate to each other may be important in understandindominant logic is developed and maintained.    Purpose of the Study Community colleges in the United States are faced with several challenges, one of which is increasing the percentage of students that earn an associate degree.   Research suggests that community college administrators need to think, act, manage, and lead in ways not required or expected in earlier generations (American Association of Community Colleges, 2012; Amey, 2005; Eddy, 2010; Roueche, 2008).  Significantly increasing the percentage of community college students that earn an associate degree may require a change in the dominant general management logics (Prahalad & Bettis, 1986) of many American community colleges.  dominant logic, it is important to begin by understanding the group that shapes the dominant logic - the dominant coalition.  Prahalad and Bettis (1986) suggested that the dominant coalition included senior-level executives.  In a community college context, the dominant coalition may include faculty and/or administrators who are not a part of the senior leadership group.  This study described the shared mental models of members of the dominant coalition at one community college, and the relationship between those shared mental models and the collegeperformance as measured by the percentage of 6  students who earn an associate degree.  The research explored the relationships between the dominant associate degree completion.   The research questions guiding this research were: 1) associate degree completion rate?   2) What are the shared mental models of the dominant coalition?  3) What is the relationship between the performance with respect to associate degree completion?  Definition of Terms  Several terms are helpful in pursuing this research. Dominant coalition.  A collection of individuals (top managers or senior administrators) who have significant influence on the way the firm is managed.  The dominant coalition determines the strategic direction and priorities of the firm.  In a diversified firm these would be the corporate-level senior executives, as opposed to the business unit leaders (Prahalad & Bettis, 1986).  The dominant coalition is the group that creates and maintains   Dominant General Management Logic.   The dominant general management logic (or dominant logic) is a shared mental model developed in an organization that influences how the organization thinks about and makes sense of the environment in inant (Prahalad & Bettis, 1986, p. 491).  work on scientific paradigms.  Allison (1971) characterized a paradigm as a set of assumptions, concepts, and propositions that constitute a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them.    7   Learning Communities.  exists to promote and maximize the shared learning of its members (p. 7).   The authors propose three types of learning communities in higher education:  1) Student Learning Communities (structurally and process-wise) for student-student, student-faculty, and student-curriculum  (p. 7).  2) Professional Learning Communities small study, planning and implementation groups for collaboration on developing and implementing strategies for contributing to  3) structural entity therein) succeeds in organizing itself  including the organization-wide culture, leadership and a preponderance of its members throughout  in ways that authentically learning in relation to one or more dimension of knowledge (p. 8).   Tags.  A concept in complexity theory that describes any structure or information which enables or speeds up certain social behaviors.  A tag can include a new technology, an idea, a symbol (such as a flag), a symbolic act, a group myth or a belief.  A tag can also be a leader.  Leadership tags emerge out of, and owe their existence to, interactive dynamics.  That is, they rarely (possibly never) create an interactive dynamic themselves; rather they are produced by the dynamic: Martin Luther King did not create the civil rights movement, rather he catalyzed its development.  Churchill did not win the Battle over Great Britain, but he symbolized British courage.  Nonetheless tags are of significant importance in the development and nourishment of emergent dynamics, and they demonstrate how leaders can be, and often are, involved in autocatalysis.  (Marion & Uhl-Bein, 2001, p. 398).   8  Chapter Two: Review of the Literature The literature review includes four sections:  Leadership; Organizational and Cognitive Frames; Mental Models; and Dominant Logics.  Research suggests that new conceptions of leadership will be necessary if community colleges are going to significantly improve outcomes with fixed or reduced resources (Bailey, Jaggars & Jenkins, 2015; Eddy, 2010).  The most widely used leadership models today are rooted in fairly hierarchical, bureaucratic models which are not well-suited for the current environment (Eddy, 2010). Given the growing range of issues which community colleges are being required to address, it is important that senior administrators understand how to be effective leaders in increasingly complex environments (Eddy, 2010).  Several authors (Bergquist & Pawlak, 2008; Eddy & Lawrence, 2012) suggest that technological advancement and the internet have great potential to create more relevant and rich learning environments for students, faculty and staff.  These same factors, however, add to the complexity in the higher education environment.  Given this growing complexity, community college senior administrators need to have the ability to frame strategic issues from multiple perspectives to effectively engage faculty and staff in their work to positively influence degree completion (Eddy, 2010).  Senior administrators need to not only understand their own mental models, they need to understand the mental models of their colleagues, as well as the mental models of those groups or teams developed to address important issues, such as degree completion (Jones, Ross, Lynam, Perez, & Leitch, 2011).  These teams need to be able to think as a team, use data to appropriately inform their recommendations, and then develop and implement strategies and tactics that will improve organizational performance (Bensimon, 1991; Bensimon & Neumann, 1993). Research suggests that community colleges need to focus on becoming learning organizations (Lenning, et. al., 2013; Senge, 1990; Torres & Preskill, 2001) if they hope to be successful in improving degree completion rates while providing educational opportunity to an increasingly diverse student population.  Understanding how a  (Prahalad & Bettis, 1986) is developed and transformed may be  9  important for community college senior administrators working to improve the associate degree completion rate at their institution.   Leadership Twombly (1995) reviewed four distinct eras of community college leadership in the 20th century.   an independent leader with a strong vision and the ability to inspire others to follow that vision.  In the 1940s and 1950s, community college leaders sought independence from secondary schools and began to create a more distinct identity.  The 1960s and 1970s were a period of significant growth in the community college sector as the baby boomers entered higher education.  This era was one in which strong, dominant leaders were needed to give the community college movement a clear voice in the higher education sector.  In the last twenty years of the century, community college leaders began to seriously wrestle with the challenges of limited resources and how those resources would be allocated between the multiple missions of the colleges (Roueche, et al., 1989).  In the 21st century, community colleges are attempting to serve several distinct, and, at times, conflicting roles, including career training in grey collar professions (allied health, law enforcement, technology, etc.), transfer education, developmental education for students not prepared for college-level work, and life-long and continuing education.  At the same time, they are expected to fulfill these responsibilities with little or no additional resources.   Government funding is being tied to performance as opposed to enrollment as evidenced by the fact that community colleges are increasingly funded based on their ability to achieve outcomes (Dougherty & Reddy, 2011).  Given these changes with respect to mission, performance, and funding, researchers are suggesting that community colleges are best understood as complex organizations in a complex environment (Amey, 2005; Eddy, 2010).  As environments become more complex, organizations need to adopt more shared or team-based approaches to leadership (Allen & Cherrey, 2000; Amey, 2005; Bennis, 1989; Colvill, Brown & Pye, 10  2012; Eddy, 2010; Heifetz, 1994; Katz & Kahn, 1978 Rost, 1993; Schneider & Somers, 2006; Wheatley, 1999). Given that the dominant logic is a shared mental model among top managers, understanding how senior administrators share information and work together is important. Several scholars (Allen & Cherrey, 2000; Bennis, 1989; Colvill, Brown & Pye, 2012; Heifetz, 1994; Katz & Kahn, 1978 Rost, 1993; Schneider & Somers, 2006; Uhl-Bein, Marion & McKelvey, 2007; Wheatley, 1999) noted that society has shifted to a knowledge-based, networked world and new approaches to leading, learning and influencing change are necessary.   These scholars argue that organizations have many of the attributes of complex systems and we can enhance our understanding of organizations and leadership if we view them through the lens of complexity theory (Marion, 1999; Marion & Uhl-Bien, 2001; Schneider & Somers, 2006).  Given the growing number of issues that community college senior administrators need to address (Amey, 2005; Eddy, 2010), understanding leadership from a complexity perspective may provide some insight into the issues and challenges faced by community college senior administrators in the second decade of the 21st century.    Complexity Leadership Theory (CLT) is based on four important ideas: - Organizational systems and leadership are socially constructed;  - There is a distinction between leaders and leadership;  - A focus on adaptive leadership which occurs in emergent, informal dynamics throughout the organization;  - Leadership in the Knowledge Era occurs in the face of adaptive challenges rather than technical problems. (Uhl-Bien, Marion & McKelvey, 2007)   A key assumption of complexity theory is that some events are unknowable until the event occurs (Eve, Horsfall, & Lee, 1997).  From a complex systems perspective, organizational strategy is not, fundamentally, the result of deliberate planning (Porter, 1985), but tends to emerge over time (Mintzberg, 1991) as the organization and the environment interact.   Leadership is seen as an indirect  11  process which influences organizational Dutton, 2000, p. 13).  In this context leaders serve as tags and influence other persons and processes (Holland, 1995; Marion, 1999, 2002; Marion & Uhl-Bien, 2001).  Tags are associated with action and outcomes, not necessarily with individuals or positions.  Tags serve as change agents in a given context or about a particular issue.  These researchers, therefore, prefer to use the trather than  often implies that organizational position determines who will lead (Schneider & Somers, 2006).  This is relevant for this study in that it suggests that the dominant coalition in a complex organization may include members who are not senior administrators.   It may be the case that faculty and staff in the community college outside of the executive leadership team assume leadership roles in creating a culture that is focused on improving degree completion rates.   Given the significance of tags (other key players and potential change agents) and their impact on organizational adaptation, it may be important for community college presidents to understand how to identify and leverage tags in their college if they hope to impact institutional performance related to degree completion, or any other important outcome.  Tags are not necessarily determined by senior leadership team (Holland, 1995; Marion, 1999, 2002; Marion & Uhl-Bien, 2001), and they may not be in positions of traditional authority in a given setting. Marion and Uhl-Bein (2001, p. 395) have proposed three fundamental complexity propositions and their general implications for leadership (see Table 1 below).   In complex environments, leaders do not exercise direct control over the actions and outcomes of the organization.   Leadership has a more indirect influence on organizational activity by facilitating the development of teams that have internalized the djust their behaviors to realize that mission.  If community colleges are operating in an increasingly complex environment and are going to successfully pursue multiple missions, then we would expect to see community college senior leaders facilitating the development of teams of faculty and staff that are focused on student success and completion.    12  Fundamental complexity proposition General Implications Practical Implications Specific Leader Behaviors The behaviors of ensembles should be analyzed as products of the interactions of independent variables and of the interaction within and among ensembles Effective leadership is learning to capitalize on interactive dynamics (correlation, randomness, interaction) among and with ensembles (i.e., individuals, departments, work groups, with common interrelationships) Leaders cannot predict future behavior of ensembles, nor can they closely control futures with current interventions; leaders must foster interactive conditions that enable a productive future. Complex leaders cultivate largely undirected interactions; focus on global interactions rather than controlling local events.  Correlation is the emergence of common understanding in interacting systems; it leads to a degree of dynamic stability. With correlation comes a level of predictability and this provides statistical researchers with some measure of success in efforts to identity patterns in organizational behavior  Leaders can have a limited foreseeable and controllable impact on organizations because of correlation (this may be more so in some types of organizations than others).  Complex leaders foster interaction to enable correlation; enable people/work groups to work through conflicting constraints that inhibit their need preferences.  Unpredictability is a strong and pervasive element of interactive systems Complex systems are subject to periodic surprises and their futures are ultimately unpredictable Leaders cannot determine or control the ultimate futures of complex organizations Complex leaders develop skills that enable productive surprises.   Table 1.  Summary of fundamental complexity propositions and their general implications for leadership In his seminal work on the importance of metaphors in understanding organizations, Morgan proposes  2006).  Managers and leaders are encouraged to reimagine what is meant by organization, especially the nature of hierarchy and control (Morgan, 2006).  More team-based, decentralized leadership models are outcomes.    Despite evidence from the business environment that teamwork leads to creative solutions and high levels of commitment, colleges and universities lag behind in using a team approach to institutional administration (Eddy & VanDerLinden, 2006; Frost & Gillespie, 1998, p.10).  Though shared or team leadership approaches seem to be an essential element of effective leadership in complex environments and organizations, a 2006 study of community college leaders showed that only 1.9% of the  13  administrators surveyed talked about team leadership in their responses (Eddy & VanDerLinden, 2006).  This may suggest that community college senior administrators have not fully embraced the notion of team leadership as integral to organizational performance and effectiveness.   One of the most cited studies of presidential teams wa1993) research in which they studied presidential leadership teams at fifteen colleges and universities.  One of the significant findings of their research was that presidents who are effective team builders think in complex ways about their leadership teams.  Bensimon and Neumann (1993) identified three functions of presidential teams: a utilitarian function, an expressive function, and a cognitive function.  These functions are summarized in table 2 (Bensimon & Neumann, 1993, p. 34).  Team Function  Image Purpose Behavior Activities Utilitarian Formal Help president maintain a sense of rationality and maintain control over institutional functioning Task Related Deliver information, coordinate and plan, make decisions Expressive Social  Help reinforce a sense of groupness or connectedness among individual involved in a joint venture Integrative, associative Provide mutual support, provide counsel to the president  Cognitive   Sensemaking Enlarge span of intelligence of individual team members, enable the group to behave as a creative system, and also a corrective system Intellective, dialogical  View problems from multiple perspectives; question, challenge, argue; act as a monitor and feedback system Table 2.  Three functions of presidential teams   Through this study, Bensimon and Neumann (1993) determined there were two basic types of presidential leadership teams:  real teams and illusory teams.  They considered a leadership team to be real if, when the president was describing the team, she or he indicated that the team performed at least one activity in each of the functional domains.  That is to say, presidents with real teams thought of 14  their teams in complex ways.  Illusory teams, on the other hand, tended to focus their time and energy on the utilitarian function; it was largely the case that illusory teams lacked both the expressive and cognitive team functions.  Of the three functions, the cognitive function is the most difficult for presidents to understand and realize (Bensimon & Neumann, 1993).   This would suggest that community colleges that are improving student completion rates have leadership teams which exhibit all three team functions.   They would be particularly focused on and exhibit the cognitive team function.   Community college senior administrators team among the senior leaders, they need to also be able to create real teams among those faculty and staff committed to addressing a strategic issue, such as degree completion.    With the new millennium, several scholars suggest a new era for community college leaders has begun (Alfred, et al., 2009; Amey, 2005; Bailey, Jaggars, & Jenkins, 2015; Eddy, 2010; Hockaday & Puyear, 2008; Roueche, et al., 2008): leaders as learners in a sector in transition.  As the demands on community colleges have increased, there is increased understanding that more team-focused models of leadership are important. The ways in which individuals construct their own understanding of leadership (Amey, 1992, 2005) have placed greater focus on leadership as learning.  Amey (2005) argued that community college leaders must be lifelong learners who must also facilitate learning among others in the institution.  They must also be able to think in complex ways and use multiple frames of reference to understand a situation and aid others in understanding it (Bergquist & Pawlak, 2008; Eddy, 2003, 2010).  From this perspective, leadership is a responsibility shared among senior administrators and with managers and faculty throughout the institution.   The concept of shared leadership is distinct from team leadership.  In an executive leadership team, for example, team leadership implies that the president actively engages the other members of the leadership team in all three leadership functions (Bensimon & Neumann, 1993).  Shared leadership is the process through which individuals in groups influence one another to achieve group or  15  organizational goals or both (Gratton, 1993; Pearce & Conger, 2003).  More than one person provides significant leadership for the group.   Various authors have used different names to describe shared leadership - collective, collaborative, participatory, cooperative, democratic, fluid, inclusive, distributed, relational and post-heroic - as noted in Allen and Cherry (2000).  Though the terms highlight different aspects of shared leadership, they share a common core concept  leadership can best be understood as a group dynamic and process that focuses on the relationships between individuals as opposed to the individuals themselves.  For the purpose of this study, the essential relationships to understand are the relationships among all those who are a part of the dominant coalition.   As both the mission of community colleges, and the environment in which they operate become more complex, it is important to understand how managers, faculty and staff at community colleges develop their abilities to make sense of all of the data that is available to them, and determine what data will be attended to, and what data can be ignored or put aside.  Constructive-developmental leadership theory may be helpful in understanding how these stakeholder groups develop their abilities to understand issues of student completion and success.   Constructive-developmental theorists believe that the systems by which people make meaning grow and change over time (downloaded from web, October 12, 2015, http://www.shiftingthinking.org/?page_id=449; Kegan, 1994).  Constructive developmental theory differs from traditional leadership theories in that it focuses on the mindsets of individuals and not specific traits or characteristics.  Constructive developmental theory has its origins in  symbolic Hunter, Lewis, Ritter-Gooder, 2011, p. 1804).  Constructive -developmental theoristheir life course aHunter, Lewis, Ritter-Gooder, 2011, p. 1804).    16  From a constructive-developmental perspective, adult development occurs in two basic dimensions  what we know (typically represented as horizontal growth), and how we know what we know (visually represented as vertical growth).   This vertical development involves transformations of consciousness, seeing the world through new eyes, and changes in interpretations of experience and view of reality (Baxter-Magolda, 1999; Hunter, Lewis, Ritter-Gooder, 2011, Kegan, 1994).  Vertical development is illustrated as an ever-widening evolutionary spiral of the stages of lived experience and how the individual makes sense of those experiences.  Vertical development moves from simple to complex with an increase in autonomy, flexibility, tolerance for differences and ambiguity, and a decrease in defenses (Baxter-Magolda, 1999; Hunter, Lewis, Ritter-Gooder, 2011, Kegan, 1994).   If community colleges are going to transition from an access-focused dominant logic to one more directly focused on student completion, vertical development for faculty, staff, and leaders may be essential.  Most developmental psychologists agree that what differentiates leaders is not so much their philosophy of leadership, their personality, or their style of management.  Rather, it is their stage of vertical development that impacts how they interpret their surroundings and react when their power or safety is challenged (Kegan, 1994; Rooke & Torbert, 2005).  Leaders in the highest constructive-developmental stage are acutely aware of the complexity involved in meaning-making in the social relationships in the organization and work to create personal and organizational transformations (Hunter, Lewis, Ritter-Gooder, 2011).    Organizational and Cognitive Frames of Reference  If community college senior administrators are going to lead and manage differently, they will need to think differently.  How we think is, to a degree, a function of how and what we see (Weick, 1995).  It is important, therefore, to review the literature related to how leaders and managers see the world, and how they respond to what they see with a specific emphasis on organizational and cognitive frames.     17  Bolman and Deal (2003) consolidated the key themes of organizational thought into four perconcepts in the organizational and psychological literature  -sets, schema, 13). That is to say, frames have both an interpretive dimension, influencing what an individual sees, and a behavioral dimension, influencing how an individual chooses to communicate and act. Skillful leaders are able to reframe situations and experiences to communicate their vision so others are able to see the world from a new perspective (Eddy, 2003; Smircich & Morgan, 1982).  Bolman and Deal (2003) and others (Bensimon, et. al., 1989; Bergquist, 1993; Bergquist & Pawlak, 2008) also suggest that effective leaders are able to see the world through multiple frames ; Fairhurst & Sarr, 1996; Smircich & Morgan, 1982) important issues and strategic challenges which confront the organization in ways that result in positive outcomes.   Eddy) study of two community college presidents concluded that one of the presidents used visionary framing, the other used operational framing to facilitate organizational change on their campuses.  The president who used visionary framing,  make connections between the future vision of the college and every day campus of problems to solve using step-by-step procedures to aid campus members in obtaining short-term  This would suggest that community college leaders need to develop their skills in reframing if community colleges are going to improve outcomes related to both access and success.    and proposed four cognitive frames for higher education.  Administrators who see their role through a 18  bureaucratic frame tend to focus on the institutionadministration emphasizes setting priorities, making sound decisions, and communicating through established lines of authority.  Administrators who see their role through the collegial frame emphasize goal attainment through collective action.  These administrators attempt to develop consensus, develop teams to solve problems, instill loyalty and commitment to the organization, and lead by example.  Administrators who use the political frame tend to focus on monitoring the internal and external environments, and use influence to attract resources.   These administrators make it a priority to build relationships with important stakeholders, develop coalitions of support, negotiate compromises, and communicate effectively.  Administrators who use the symbolic frame focus on the management of Symbolic leaders use language, myths, stories and rituals to foster shared perceptions and beliefs (Birnbaum, 1992, pg. 63-64).  The ability to view the institution from multiple perspectives and interpret events in a variety of ways is becoming increasingly important given the range of issues administrators are attempting to address (Bergquist & Pawlak, 2008; Bolman & Deal, 1984, 2003).  Community college administrators have many roles, and those who can think, learn and act by using multiple frames are more likely to  should that be their intention (Bergquist & Pawlak, 2008; Eddy, 2010).    Building on the work of Bolman and Deal (1984, 2003) and others (Fairhurst & Sarr, 1988; Smircich & Morgan, 1982), Eddy (2003) studied two community colleges to better understand how presidents used  framing as it relates to interpersonal communication.  Eddy found that one president used visionary framing to portray the college as an outstanding college of technology while the other used operational framing which broke the change initiative down into a series of problems to be solved.  In both cases, leader cognition played  19  a critical role in how change was presented to campus stakeholders.  Eddy (2003) argues that leaders cannot frame for others until they have first framed for themselves.  It is essential that we understand a that leader will frame a situation  either for her or himself or for others.    Mental Models   There is a strong connection between how we see the world, what we decide to attend to as important, and what we think (Weick, 1995).  How we make sense of what we see is significantly influenced by our mental models, which Senge (1990) core leadership requirement to do because they affect what we seeeir espoused theories (what they say), they do behave congruently with their theories-in-mental models through interviews, Argyris and Schön (1978) suggest it is more important to observe what people do than to record what those people may say.   It is likely the case that most community college senior administrators will indicate, when asked, that degree completion rates are an important institutional priority.  Developing an understanding of what they are, in fact doing and have done to improve degree completion is of greater importance if we want to understand their theories-in-use.   Research on mental models and cognitive maps comes from several disciplines, including cognitive psychology, social psychology, organizational behavior, decision science, and communication.  The Nature of Explanation (1943) provides a conceptual foundation for much of this writing and research:  -within its head, it is able to try out various alternatives, conclude which is the best of them, 20  react to future situations before they arise, utilize the knowledge of past events in dealing with the present and the future, and in every way to react in a much fuller, safer, and more competent manner to the emergencies which face it. (Craik, 1943, Ch. 5. p. 61)   Though early research on mental models focused on the individual, it has been shown that groups of individuals, and even groups of firms in an industry, can develop shared mental models that significantly influence how the firms compete and collaborate.   For example, in a study of the Scottish knitwear industry, Porac, Thomas, and Baden-group-level and firm-level competitive phenomena are the mental models used by key decision makers to interpret the task ensimilarities and differences in the organizational mental models of firms competing in the Scottish knitwear industry.  Porac, et al. (1989) suggest that human behavior can best be understood as a process of subjective interpretation of objective events which over time, leads to a socially-reinforced view of the world, or shared mental model.  Among their conclusions the authors found that the shared mental models among competitive firms had a stabilizing influence on the transactions between the firms and their suppliers.  Though they were not involved in overt collusion, each of the firms could operate with a high level of confidence regarding the actions of other firms in their competitive space.   findings suggest that the process through which industries exhibit the characteristics of an oligarchy finds its roots in the shared mental models of managers in multiple firms in the industry.  If firms in a competitive industry such as Scottish knitwear develop shared mental models, then it seems reasonable to believe that a less competitive, more cooperative sector such as community colleges would be even more inclined to develop shared mental models.   Though these shared mental models may be useful in promoting efficient operations, they may be a significant barrier when fundamentally changing those models, or triple loop learning (Argyris & Schön, 1978; Swieringa & Wierdsma, 1992) is required.    21  Argryis and Schön (1978) suggested that the depth of organizational learning can be understood through learning loops.  Single loop learning involves a revision of organizational rules and may not normally require a change in dominant logic (though this relationship has not been studied).  Double and triple loop learning (Argyris & Schön, 1978; Swieringa & Wierdsma, 1992) involve changing more fundamental organizational insights and principles, and would likely require a revision of the dominant general management logic. It may be the case that the shift from a focus largely on student access to a focus that balances access and completion is an example of triple loop learning and will require s dominant logic for this transformation to occur.   Learning Loop Learning Area Learning Level Learning Result Single Rules Obligation and Permission Improvement Double Insights Knowledge and Understanding Renewal Triple Principles Courage and will Development Table 3.  Single, double, and triple-loop learning  When attempting to describe or understand the shared mental models of groups, it is important to differentiate between team thinking and groupthink (Bensimon & Neumann, 1993; Janis, 1972).  Groupthink can occur when shared mental models are not clearly differentiated between members of the team or group.  With groupthink, the team members suppress or ignore their individual beliefs and convictions so that a single group position is developed (Bensimon & Neumann, 1993; Janis, 1972).  Team thinking assumes that individuals have distinctive mental models, and process information differently. Team members are required to develop their distinctive cognitive abilities and express their beliefs and opinions to other team members openly and freely (Bensimon & Neumann, 1993; Cannon-Bowers, Salas & Converse, 1993).  Conversely, team members are required to listen to, and respect the views and insights of other team members.   Every team member must learn to not only listen, but truly hear what other team members express, even if it is a perspective markedly different from their own 22  (Bensimon & Neumann, 1993).  It is reasonable to assume that community colleges with dominant coalitions that exhibit team thinking (as opposed to groupthink) will be more effective at improving associate degree completion rates if this objective is part of their shared mental model.  This study is informative in either supporting or refuting this assumption.    In an interdisciplinary synthesis of the literature related to mental models (Jones, Ross, Lynam, Perez, & Leitch, 2011), the authors define mental models as representations of external reality which are cognitive, dynamic, inaccurate and incomplete. They suggest that the differences between mental models and cognitive schemata are that mental models are more dynamic (Rutherford & Wilson, 2004), more flexible (Holland, et al., 1986, p. 13), and more specific (Brewer, 1987).  Bolman and Deal (2003) do not draw clear distinctions between organizational frames, cognitive schema and mental models, and since this study relies on Bolman and Deal, I did not do so either but acknowledge that some authors make more fine distinctions.  This study focuses on the behaviors of the members of the dominant coalition that positively influence degree completion.  By understanding the behaviors of this coalition (i.e., their theories-in-use), and how they talk about their actions with respect to degree completion, I drew some useful inferences with respect to the shared mental models/cognitive frames of reference / cognitive schemata of the dominant coalition.  Dominant Logic The concept of dominant logic (also referred to as dominant general management logic) was first proposed by Prahalad and Bettis in 1986.  Dominant logic is a shared mental model developed in an organization that influences how the organization thinks about and makes sense of the environment in  the dominant (Prahalad & Bettis, 1986, p. 491).  work on scientific paradigms.  Allison (1971) characterized a paradigm as a set of assumptions, concepts, and propositions that constitute a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them.    23  Prahalad and Bettis (1986) were interested in understanding why some firms were able to successfully diversify by acquiring other businesses, and other firms were not as successful.  They found that prevalent models of organizational performance related to firm diversification were able to explain less than 40% of the variance in performance after the acquisition of a firm from a distinct business segment (Prahalad & Bettis, 1986).  They propimportant, and understudied, element in explaining firm performance after diversification had occurred.  nce is pervasive. It permeates the organization, yet it is invisible.  It predisposes the firm to certain kinds of strategic problems and often interacts with organizational systems and structures in a complex way in lad, 1995, p. 8-9).  It is important not to take the genetic code does not typically change easily or quickly, it can be changed.   In an earlier study focusing on organizational outliers, Bettis, Hall and Prahalad (1978) concluded that the quality of management was as important as any factor in explaining performance in a diversified firm.  Prahalad and Bettis (1986) suggested that managers process events through pre-existing knowledge systems known as schemas (Norman & Shallice, 1980).  Schemas, shared mental models and cognitive frames  (Prahalad & Bettis, 1986, p. 489) permitting They can be somewhat inaccurate simplifications of the world, and tend to reflect past experiences, and may not accurately reflect current realities (Kiesler & Sproul, 1982).  The concept of dominant logic has clear implications beyond its ability to help explain the connection between firm diversity and performance.  The authors suggest that the concept of dominant logic is useful in understanding strategic change in 24  complex organizations of all kinds (Bettis & Prahalad, 1995) and that as firms diversify, they become increasingly complex.  The senior leaders, therefore, need to learn how to successfully manage and lead increasingly complex organizations if the diversification strategy will result in improved financial performance over time.   From a community college perspective, increased complexity may be the consequence of the need to balance multiple missions and achieve multiple outcomes, including improving the percentage of students who complete a degree, transfer successfully, or get a job in their field.  This study focuses on associate degree completion, while recognizing that community college dominant logic also contributes to how other (and likely competing) priorities are understood.    Several authors (Argyris & Schön, 1978; Hedburg, 1981; Nystrom & Starbuck, 1984; Starbuck & Hedburg, 1977) suggest that an organization cannot effectively modify organizational behavior and improve organizational performance until the organization has developed the capacity to unlearn.   The importance of unlearning as a precondition for learning may help explain why new competitors often displace experienced incumbents when major structural change occurs in an industry or sector (Bettis & Prahalad, 1985): the new competitors do not have to unlearn before they are able to learn.   Incumbents that have experienced success doing things a certain way may have difficulty accepting that what worked before is not necessarily relevant in a new environment.  This appears to be the case with American community colleges.  Community colleges have provided access to higher education to a significant percentage of the American working population since the middle of the 20th century.  Developing dominant logics that include a strong focus on degree completion in addition to providing access requires community college senior administrators to think, manage, and lead in ways not required of those who mentored them (Eddy, 2010).  Community colleges may need to unlearn many of the behaviors which were essential to their growth and success in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.   Several authors (Arnould, 2007; Tokman & Beitelspacher, 2011; Vargo & Lusch, 2004) argue that the dominant logic in the corporate sector has evolved from one focused on the exchange of goods to  25  intangibles, specialized skills and knowledge, and processes -2).  This new dominant logic is referred to as the Service-Dominant Logic (or S-D logic).  The Service-Dominant logic views supply chains as value co-creation networks (Tokman & Beitelspacher, 2011).  A fundamental shift in this emerging dominant logic is a focus on operant resources as opposed to operand resources.   Operand resources are resources on which an operation or act is performed to produce an effect; they are the material and processes required to produce a product.  Conversely, operant resources are resources that produce effects (Constantin & Lusch, 1994); they are the stakeholders who will both produce and use the product.  This This shift from operand resources to operant resources could be more simply described as a shift from a focus on production to a focus on relationships and service.  In the industrial age, the value of the product was largely determined by the costs of the raw materials required and the costs to transform those materials into finished products.  In the knowledge economy, value is largely a function of the perception of quality and utility as defined by the consumer.  -reinforcing value s a set of activities that an organization carries out to create value for its customers and the value chain model is based on the premise that value is added in each step in the production process.  The more value an organization creates, the more profitable it is likely to be (Porter, 1985).  The value cycles model is based on systems thinking (Forrester, 1968; Senge, 1990).  The firm and customer are engaged in a relationship in which the product or service is continually revised as the customer uses the product and provides feedback and input regarding her or his experience.  The value chain model places a heavy emphasis on the product being produced; the value cycles model places greater emphasis on the values of the people involved in both making and p26  production, and far more determined by the perceptions and values of the customer.   As the global economy transitioned from the Industrial Age of the 19th and 20th centuries to the Information Age of the 21st century, organizational dominant logics adapted to this shift by transitioning from a production focus to a focus on the needs and desires of the consumer. Haeckel (1999) explained this emerging dominstrategy.   In higher education in the United States, the importance of focusing on outcomes (one of which is degree completion) as opposed to inputs has been discussed for the last twenty years.  In their and Tagg suggest that a paradigm shift has begun, and needs to continue, if the United States hopes to keep pace with the emerging knowledge economy.  They did not argue for a focus on degree completion, per se; their focus was on student learning.  I suggest that a focus on degree completion is one element in developing a more outcomes-focused approach to higher education in general.   From is (or should be) producing than the percentage of students who earn a degree, in both cases the focus is on the achievements of the student  what they know, what they can do, and what they have successfully been able to complete.  For institutions that embrace the learning paradigm as their dominant logic, the implications envisions the institution itself as the learner  over time, it continuously learns how to produce more learning with each graduating class, with each elearning paradigm, continuous learning is occurring at all levels  for students, for faculty, in programs, departments and colleges, and institutionally.  For the institution to become learning-centered, senior administrators must also commit to on-going learning  individually and collectively (Alfred, Shults,  27  Jaquette, & Strickland, 2009; Amey, 2005; Bensimon & Neumann, 1993; Driscoll & Wood, 2007; Sorcinelli, et al., 2006).  It would be reasonable to conclude that a community college that has successfully and significantly improved performance with respect to degree completion has a visible commitment to the ongoing personal and professional development of faculty and staff throughout the institution.   Jacquette & Strickland, 2009), the authors propose three community college archetypes in the United States.   These archetypes are based on two conceptual pillars  chieved by an organization when its resources are leveraged beyond a colleges will be a time of both turbulence and opportunity.   The relationship between these three community college archetypes and general management dominant logics may be significant in order to understand and improve associate degree completion in community colleges in the United States.   The three archetypes identified by Alfred, et al., have some clear parallels with the three dominant logics identified in Further Education Colleges in England (Smith, Gidney, Barclay & Rosenfeld) in 2002.   Further Education Colleges (or FE Colleges) are the British equivalent of a community college.   Similar to an American community college, students may attend an FE college for workforce training in a broad range of skills, to begin a program that requires transferring to a university to complete the degree, and for personal enrichment.  Smith, et al. (2002) studied the dominant logics of strategy in Further Education Colleges using interviews with principals, governors, and Senior Management Team (SMT) members in 25 FE colleges.  Their study addressed two questions:  what are the dominant strategic management logics of FE colleges and what implications do these have for the management of 28  change in those colleges?  Three sets of dominant logics became apparent from their data, which they labeled stability optimizing, market optimizing and resource optimizing (Smith, et al., 2002).    The focus of the senior administrators at the stability optimizing colleges was operational efficiency.  Senior managers believed it was the role of the funders and stakeholders outside of the college to develop strategic direction while the role of the senior managers was to operationalize that direction as effectively as possible (Smith, et al., 2002).  In short, the senior administrators saw themselves fundamentally as managers, not leaders.   The senior administrators at the market optimizing colleges saw the college as a business that needed to do as much as possible to improve financial performance.  They focused on meeting the demands of the markets they served.  These managers were sometimes criticized for putting financial performance ahead of the needs of students (Smith, et al., 2002).  The resource-optimizing colleges had a supply-led orientation.  The senior administrators saw the college as a set of educational resources and capabilities.  These colleges do not ignore the markets, but are not fundamentally market-driven.  They tend to embrace a participatory, bottom- up management philosophy and have a culture that  (Smith, et al., 2002, p. 54).  The resource-optimizing colleges tend to be more student and learning-focused than the stability and market-optimizing colleges.  The authors suggest that more than one logic tends to operate in most further education colleges.  There may be other logics that appear to dominate in some colleges, but these three present themselves consistently, and other logics can normally be understood as a variation of one of these three (Smith, et al., 2002).    A limitation of the Smith, et al., (2002) study was its focus on senior managers, principals and important to understand how faculty and mid-level managers process information and determine what information is valued in the organization.  Capturing the reflections and behaviors of the senior  29   is important to interview faculty and staff who are not a part of the senior leadership team.   Organizational performance in a community college is largely determined by the day-to-day operational decisions being made by faculty and staff in the classroom and in the administrative departments and programs in the institution.   It is therefore important to understand if the responses of the senior leaders are aligned with the responses of mid-level managers, supervisors, faculty and staff.   There is a growing understanding that the United States needs to increase the percentage of the workforce with a college degree if this country is going to maintain a globally competitive workforce (OECD, 2011).  The dominant general management logic in American community colleges may be focused more on institutional enrollment levels and access to education than on degree completion. If significant improvement in community college degree completion rates is going to occur, we need to develop our understanding of the shared mental models of those faculty and staff actively working to of access and completion.   We need to understand how these faculty and staff work together in what have become increasingly complex environments  both within their community colleges and nationally.  Understanding the shared mental model of the dominant coalition at one community college and the influence of that shared mental model on ts community college leaders, managers and faculty attempt to address this issue on their campus.    30  Chapter Three: Research Methodology Selecting an appropriate methodological approach is critical to the success of a study. For this particular study, both qualitative and quantitative approaches were considered in light of their ability to contribute to the primary research questions. The decision to move ahead with a qualitative design was driven by an intent to study, interpret and make sense of a complex phenomenon that plays out in a particular context (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005).  The environment in which community colleges must function is increasingly complex (Eddy, 2010).  The range of outcomes senior administrators are held accountable to accomplish, coupled with the range of factors that may influence degree completion suggest the use of a qualitative approach, in that it allows for a deeper, richer interpretation of the phenomenon of dominant general management logic and its influence on completion rates than would be possible with a quantitative study (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005).   Merriam (1988, pp. 11  12) identifies four characteristics that are essential in a qualitative case study: 1) particularistic, meaning that the case study focuses on a particular situation, event, program or phenomenon; 2) descriptive, phenomenon studied; 3) heuristic, meaning that the case study will enhance understanding of the phenomenon under study; and 4) inductive, meaning that the case study relies on inductive reasoning.  This study focuses on the phenomenon of dominant general management logic in a community college context .  Interviews with senior administrators, faculty and staff identified as important stakeholders with respect to degree completion, meeting observations, and review of relevant documentation (e.g., strategic planning information, degree completion task force meeting notes, etc.), provided sufficient data to develop a thick description of the phenomenon of dominant logics at the college being studied.  The study is inductive in that I draw conclusions from the data gathered which can, hopefully, be helpful in understanding dominant logics in community colleges and the influences they may have on community college degree  31  completion.   I used a single site case study because the phenomenon of dominant logic in a community college context is not well understood, nor is how the dominant coalition emerges at a community college.   Developing a deeper understanding of dominant coalition formation and dominant logic transformation can best be accomplished by devoting as much time as is available at one site.    Selection of Case Given that the focus of this study is associate degree completion, it was important to identify a rate.  Great Lakes College (GLC; a pseudonym) has been a member of Achieving the Dream since 2007.  A primary goal of Achieving the Dream is improving community college associate degree completion rates.  In my initial discussion with the provost of Great Lakes College, she indicated that improving the  rate has been a focus at the College for many years, pre-dating her arrival in 2009.  Faculty and staff confirmed that GLC has a long-standing commitment to improving student success and degree completion.  Several study participants indicated that student success generally and degree completion specifically have been key strategic priorities at Great Lakes College for at least a decade.   Data Collection  Once the appropriate research approvals were secured, I contacted the Provost at Great Lakes College to confirm their willingness to participate in this study.  I indicated to the Provost that I would like to interview twelve to fifteen faculty and staff, including senior leaders, faculty, and mid-level administrators.  I requested that at least one faculty member who was a member of the Strategic Planning Council be included.  The Provost sent an email to fourteen faculty and staff members she believed would be appropriate participants for this study.  Based on the comments of some of those interviewed, I scheduled two additional interviews  one with the lead faculty member for the First Year Seminar, and one with the director of Institutional Research.  The case study included interviews with 32  fourteen senior leaders, faculty and staff at Great Lakes Community College.  Twelve of the interviewees were identified by the provost as key faculty and staff involved in degree completion.  These twelve and the relevant committees or councils they are on included:  - English faculty member: member of the Foundations Studies Committee - Lead faculty for the Reading program: member of the Foundations Studies Committee - Director of the Center for Student Success: member of the Foundations Studies Committee - Business faculty member: Strategic Planning Council member - Assistant Dean of Student Services - Vice-President for Student Services and Extended Learning: Leadership Council member / Strategic Planning Council member  - Department Chair for Foundation Studies Department:  Co-chair of the Foundation Studies Committee - Title III Director: Co-chair of Foundation Studies Committee - Dean of Occupational Studies: member of the Foundations Studies Committee - Dean of Literature and the Arts: Strategic Planning Council member / member of the Foundations Studies Committee  - Provost: member of the Foundations Studies Committee / Leadership Council member / Strategic Planning Council member  - Vice-President of Administration and Human Resources: Leadership Council member / Strategic Planning Council member The two additional participants I interviewed based on participant comments were:  - Lead faculty for the First Year Seminar: member of the Foundations Studies Committee - Director of Institutional Research: Strategic Planning Council member    33  The interview guide was designed to give participants some initial prompting with respect to the issues this research addressed, but at the same time to give them the freedom to express their beliefs and convictions beyond the specific questions in the guide.  It was important that participants were comfortable expressing what they really believe as opposed to expressing what they thought I wanted to hear.  The interviews were scheduled for 60 to 90 minutes.  Most were completed in an hour and took place either  location of their choosing.   At the beginning of each interview I provided some context for the study, and a short explanation of dominant general management logic.  Interviews were audio-recorded with participant permission and field notes taken during the interviews.  The interviews occurred on-site at Great Lakes College (GLC) and appropriate human subjects and research permission was obtained from GLC, the study participants, and Michigan State University.  The participant consent form is included as Appendix A.  In addition to the interviews, I reviewed dpriorities and degree completion.  This documentation included the Co report on degree completion, publications intended to be read by community members, the  I identified three meetings to observe:  the Foundations Studies Committee, the Leadership Council meeting, and the Strategic Planning Committee.   The Foundations Study Committee was important because several interview participants indicated that this was the group of faculty and staff most directly focused on degree completion at Great Lakes College.   This meeting lasted about 90 minutes.   It was important to observe a meeting of the Leadership Council in order to develop some understanding of leadership team dynamics - team?   Did they think as a team or did their behaviors sPresident give other Leadership Council members the opportunity and permission to express divergent opinions?   This meeting began at 9:00 a.m., had a 30-minute break for lunch, a 90-minute break for a 34  meeting of the Strategic Planning Committee from 1:00 p.m.  2:30, and then resumed from 3:00 until about 4:30 p.m.    Analysis Though it is important to understand what the dominant coalition members say about degree completion (their espoused theories), it is also important to understand what they have done to positively impact degree completion (their theories-in-use).  As noted, fourteen individual interviews were completed for this study.  This included three members of the Leadership Council (the provost and two vice-presidents), six mid-level administrators (two academic deans, one associate dean, and three directors) and five faculty (all full-time).  The interviews were transcribed verbatim following the interviews, generating 110 pages of single-spaced transcript.   A copy of the interview transcript was sent to each of the interviewees for the purpose of member checking, and any resulting changes were incorporated into the transcripts.  After reviewing all of the transcriptions, a set of themes were developed.  I then went through each transcription and coded all comments, based on the key themes. Once the individual transcriptions were coded, I then reviewed all of the coding based on the three interview groups  senior leaders, administrators, and faculty.   Finally, I compared the key themes for each group to determine which themes were significant for more than one group.  Table 3 in Chapter 4 summarizes the key themes identified through the interviews.  Eight themes were identified as significant for all three groups.    espoused Argyris & Schön, 1978) of the dominant coalition at Great Lakes College, as well as their -in-sed theories can be identified by coding what the study participants said about the importance of degree completion at Great Lakes College.  Theories-in-use can be determined by the behaviors and actions of the dominant coalition. The commitment of resourc-in-use.    35  Validity Given that the study participants were initially identified by the Provost, and only a small percentage of faculty and administrators were interviewed, the comments of the participants are not necessarily representative of the perspectives of other faculty and staff working and teaching at GLC.   s dominant coalition.   Faculty and staff who are not a part of the dominant coalition may have a significantly different perspective.   In a qualitative study such as this, in which participants are reflecting on actions over the course of several years, hindsight bias (Gary, 1998; Roese & Vohs, 2012) is to be expected. Hindsight bias refers to the tendency of people to view events as being more predictable than they really are. Combining multiple interviews and data helped triangulate the data and reduce the likelihood of individual biases or interpretations skewing the overall finding (Cho & Trent, 2006).   Interviews were transcribed and sent to all of interview participants for their review and to give them an opportunity to confirm accuracy.  In addition, I spent sufficient time with the data to be able to provide a rich and deep description of the factors that emerge as most salient. When conducting the interviews, I paid attention to both verbal and non-verbal forms of communication and cues so that I could develop a full understanding of their responses.    Reliability  To aid in the reliability of this study, the interview protocol was documented to ensure consistency within the study.  Semi-structured interview questions were established and piloted in advance of the study to ensure that they were clear and relevant to gaining an understanding of the  See Appendix B for the Interview Guide.  Using this set of initial questions consistently was intended to guide the interviews without restricting open responses. Recording interviews and taking notes helped to ensure that both the verbal and non-verbal cues were captured accurately.   36  It is incumbent upon the researcher to establish trust and rapport with the respondents in order to elicit accurate data.  Part of establishing trust is adherence to a high standard of ethics when conducting interviews. In addition to assuring respondents of confidentiality in their responses, consistent research processes were followed including tape recording interviews, taking field notes, properly storing data, and adhering to the rules and procedures established by the Institutional Review Board of Michigan State University.   The interviews were transcribed verbatim and themes were developed.   All data were held as confidential and were shared only with the individual participant and researcher.  Limitations  The use of a single case study is expected to provide insight into the dominant logic at a community college and its influence on degree completion.   Findings from a single site case study can help leaders, faculty and staff at other colleges interested in improving the degree completion rate at their institution, yet these findings are not necessarily generalizable.  Whether the same factors would emerge as most salient in other colleges is uncertain.     Another limitation is that time and access to participants limited the number of contributors to the study.  The selected participants provide a fairly clear picture of how the dominant coalition at the college influences degree completion.   Participants may not recall all the relevant details when being interviewed.   It is possible that for personal or professional reasons participants may reframe past events in a way that is not an accurate depiction of what actually occurred.   Furthermore, it was possible that some factors or perspectives were underrepresented based on the limited number of individuals involved.  There was degree completion rate were no longer available to participate in this study.      37  Chapter Four: Research Findings  The data for this study came from three sources: 1) interviews with faculty, staff and leadership at Great Lakes College; 2) observations of three meetings at the College which included a meeting of the Leadership Council, the Strategic Planning Council and the Foundations Studies Committee; and 3) review of dowhat had been done to improve completion rates over the 2014-2015 academic yearStrategic Enrollment Management Plan, and two PowerPoint presentations  one was a presentation at a Board of Trustees meeting in the summer of 2015 on student retention and completion, and the other was a conference presentation which explained the Foundations Studies Committee at the College.  The fourteen participants in the study included three members of the Leadership Council, six administrators and five faculty members.  A key finding of this research is that the dominant coalition at the college includes, but is not limited to, the Leadership Council.  The Foundations Studies Committee is an important part of the dominant coalition at the College.    The Research Questions   The research questions are: 1. Who are the members of the cassociate degree completion rate?   2. What are the shared mental models of the dominant coalition?  3. What is the relationship between the shared mental models of the dominant coalition and the colle Great Lakes College  Great Lakes College was founded in 1928 as Great Lakes Junior College, initially sharing lab and library facilities with the local high school.  In 2013, in light of the co38  development of two bachelor degree programs and increased focus on international studies, the college d became Great Lakes College.  Great Lakes College enrollment is between 5,000 and 10,000 students.   The college has a general annual operating budget between $40 and $50 million, with tuition accounting for about 55% of the budget, and state appropriations accounting for approximately 28%.   The remaining 17% comes from the local millage plus income from student housing.  largely rural counties with a total population  In the fall of 2014 Great Lakes College opened an Early College.   Over the last decade, Early Colleges have opened on community college campuses around the country.  Early Colleges are programs for high school students in which the students enrolled are able to earn both high school and college credit.  Early College students graduate from the program with a significant number of college credits, sometimes including both a high school diploma and an associate degree.  This can significantly reduce degree. Interview Participants Fourteen interviews were completed over the summer of 2015.  The names used in this study are pseudonyms.    Leadership Council participants.  The Leadership Council includes seven members.   The Leadership Council includes the president, the provost, four vice-presidents and the chief of staff.   All of the members of the Leadership Council have assumed their positions on the Council through the approval of President Jones. For this study, three of the seven leadership council members were interviewed:   Provost (Rachel):  Has been with the college for six years.  She began as the Special Assistant to the President, then became the Dean of Arts and Sciences, and moved into her current position as Provost about two years ago.    39   Vice-President for Enrollment, Student Services and Extension Education (Samantha): Has been at the college for three years and in her current position for a year.   She was the assistant dean at one of the he Vice-President.  Before coming to Great Lakes College, she was the Dean of Student Services at a private, liberal arts college.    Vice-President of Administration and Human Resources (Susan):  Has been with the College for thirty-five years.  Susan was initially hired by the college to manage its performing arts center.  Her responsibilities have grown steadily over the course of her career at the College.   Faculty participants.  Great Lakes College has about 80 full-time and about 200 adjunct faculty members.  For this study, five full-time faculty members were interviewed.  They were identified by the Provost as faculty interested and involved in student success and degree completion:   English Faculty Member (Mary):  Has been at the college for thirty-four years.  Her first fourteen years were as an adjunct faculty member; her last twenty years as a full-time faculty member.  She teaches composition, literature, world literature, and creative writing.  She also serves as the faculty advisor for the coll, Phi Theta Kappa.    Lead Faculty for the Reading Program (Sarah):  Has been with the college for fifteen years.  Her first nine years were as an adjunct instructor and she has been a full-time faculty member for five years.  Prior to becoming a full-time faculty member, she served as the assistant director for   Department Chair  Foundation Studies Department (Fred):  Has been at the college for thirteen years.  He was initially hired as lead faculty for developmental reading and also serves as co-chair of the Foundations Studies Committee.    Lead Faculty for First Year Seminar (Jim):  Has been with the college for eight years.  Jim was initially hired to teach FYS as an adjunct and has been its lead faculty for five years.  40   Lead Faculty for Entrepreneurship Program (Don): Has been at the College for four years.  Don spent over twenty years in management positions in the private sector before making a career change into teaching.   Administrator participants.  Six administrators were interviewed for this study, including the two academic deans at Great Lakes College and four department chairs:     Director for the Student Success Center (Julie): Has been with the College for fourteen years and director of the Center for Student Success for one year.     Assistant Dean of Student Services (John):  Has been at the college for eight months.  His previous experience was at a large, research-intensive, public university.    Title III Director (Abigail):  Has been at the college for thirty-five years.  She began as adjunct instructor and lab assistant, and became technical staff in 1990.  Abigail served as Dean of Student Services and Dean of Foundations Studies.  She has served as Title III Director since 2011 and also is the co-chair of the Foundations Studies Committee.  Director of Institutional Research (Joseph):  Has been with the college for less than a year.  Before coming to GLC, Joseph completed his doctorate in higher education administration and worked as an institutional researcher at a large research-intensive university.    Dean of Occupational Studies (Thomas):  Has been with the College for four and a half years.  His first two years were as the Associate Dean of Instruction.    Dean of Arts and Sciences (Arthur):  Has been with the College for five years.  Arthur was initially hired as the lead faculty for the First Year Seminar.  He has served as the Dean of Arts and Sciences for four years.   The Dominant Coalition at Great Lakes College  Tdominant coalition, as they are the individuals and/or groups of individuals who most likely shape a  41  Though in a corporate setting, the dominant coalition includes the senior executives involved in developing the strategic direction and priorities for the firm, the data for this study suggest that the dominant coalition at Great Lakes College includes the Leadership Council, the Foundations Studies Committee and possibly a few other individuals at the College.  The next sections discuss leadership at the College and the role of the Foundation Studies Committee as the two key groups which comprise ition.  Figure 2 is a visual interpretation of the dominant coalition at Great Lakes College:   Figure 2.  The dominant coalition at Great Lakes College Leadership at Great Lakes College.  Dr. Frank Jones has been the President of Great Lakes College for over a decade.  Prior to his tenure at the College, he served in several executive positions in community colleges in other states.   He has a reputation for moving quickly, and expects those around him to do the same.  As the Vice-President of Administration and Human Resources, Susan, commented,  Sometimes I will talk to him, Frank, people have their tongues hanging out. They are exhausted. Leadership CouncilOthersFoundation Studies Committee42  accountability matrix, here is the pipeline from the high schools, blah, blah, blah.  What can I   Rachel, the Provost, believes that the reason the faculty and staff are willing to work so hard is because they see that the College will commit resources to projects which are successful, and will not continue to fund projects which are not achieving results:  I mean certainly, here and there we will say that, oh my gosh, we need to slow down, or we just need to wait, to delay that.  Well, I think, because we are, we are not phenomenal at it, but we are pretty good at, if something is not working, we are going to stop it.  So I think because people see we are continuing to do the right things that the data show are working for students, going to be great for our students.  But they also know if it is not working we are not going to keep doing it if it is a waste of time.  We are going to refocus and do something that will work, you know.    College campus.   Several new buildings have been built and several existing buildings have been remodeled during his tenure.  Most recently, student housing has been added and a former community center has been converted into a student center to provide a meeting and learning space primarily for the students living in the new dormitories.   In January of 2014, during faculty contract negotiations, the faculty and support staff unions passed a vote of no confidence in Dr. Jones.   annual performance review in August of 2014, the Board of Trustees demonstrated strong support for the President, giving him close to a perfect score.  On his 2015 review, his score was even closer to the highest score possible.   These ratings would suggest some meeting observed for this study, President Jones indicated his objective to position the college as a - 43  top 10% of community college in the country on certain metrics for community colleges.   The metrics used are a combination of Key Performance Indicators from the Voluntary Framework of Accountability, the Continuous Quality Improvement Network (CQIN), and other sources.   The metrics include degree completion rates, the average earnings of graduates of Great Lakes College, and the average student debt of graduates. Faculty, staff and leadership council members generally expressed agreement that Dr. Jones has a great deal of energy and initiates a significant number of projects at the College.  The vote of no confidence may suggest some faculty believe there is more going on than the faculty, staff, and leadership can effectively manage.   The Leadership Council includes the president, the provost, the vice-president of administration, the vice-president of finance, the vice-president of student services and enrollment management, the vice-president of development, and the chief of staff.  The Vice-President of Administration and Human Resources is the only member of the Leadership Council who has been with the College longer than Dr. Jones.  The other Leadership Council members have worked at Great Lakes College for two to six years. The Foundations Studies Committee as a key element in the dominant coalition.   Arthur, the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Great Lakes College, has been at the College for five years.  His first position at the College was as the Lead Faculty for the First Year Seminar at GLC.  His initial impressions as a new faculty member at the college provide insight into the culture at the college when he came five years ago: I was immediately met with an institution that was not just talking the talk, but was really doing a lot of work; a tremendous amount of self-examination, a tremendous amount of work, of preparation.  The very first thing I was told was, you started.  Started, constantly having meetings with the Foundations Studies Committee.  The Foundation Studies Committee at the time did not have institutional recognition.  I bet back then it was a group of fifty people who would show up on a Friday afternoon to talk about student success initiatives.  It was sort of the communist party of the place, you know, they were constantly trying to invert systems and disrupt things, and how do we change this and 44  tant, and I said to people, when I first came here it felt like I was walking into this one big think tank, and the thoughts were always the same, it was always about student success.  And I had never been in a culture like that before.  It was just completely different than anything I had seen.  Lots of professional out the research on what institutions are doing with upper level chem classes.   All of our professional development dollars were going toward how do we get folks in the door who are underprepared, and make them successful?  Now, there are large pockets of this place that are still largely immune to that.  It is still a work in progress.  But I have never been at a place that is as committed, not just in word, but constantly in what we are doing, what animates our conversations, what attracts our attention, and where dollars are funded, again and again and again, student success.   The Foundations Studies Committee is the nexus, both structurally and culturally, where those faculty and staff committed to improving student success at the College come together to discuss what they are currently doing to improve student success, assess those initiatives, and discuss what more could be done that is not currently being considered or piloted.  Though it has (or at least once had) a willing to invest resources in pursuing the initiatives and professional development opportunities recommended by the Committee.  An understanding of student success (of which degree completion is a part) at Great Lakes Colleges requires an understanding of the Foundation Studies Committee.  The co-chairs of the committee, Fred and Abigail, provided some background: In 1983, the College started a developmental education department (similar to the current Foundation Studies department), that included faculty-counselors, reading and writing instructors, tutoring, special needs, placement assessment, etc.   In 1996, that department was merged into Student Services, which was renamed to Student Development. This was the point that a cross-functional team emerged.  The faculty, mostly from LL&A (reading, writing) but also math, business/computers, etc. formed a Student Readiness and Success Committee as one of the academic integrity committees to continue work on placement, learning labs and developmental education. In about 2002, the Foundation Studies department was formed as a separate area from Student Development, then renamed to Student Services. Foundation Studies resumed all the work of the old D.E. (Developmental Education) department, but reading/writing faculty remained in the other departments so Foundation Studies started the Center for Student Success with all those services (tutoring, special needs etc.). The staff joined the faculty committee of Student  45  Readiness and Success, which mostly worked on Project Success Day (one day in the fall and one day in the winter with lots of great workshops and a keynote for students). Meanwhile, we joined Achieving the Dream in 2007. Our Core Team and our Data Team included lots of the people also on the Student Readiness and Success Committee. As we wound down the ATD grant years, we institutionalized/scaled up the Core Team by merging it with the SRSC and everyone who wanted to come work on student success. This was the Foundation Studies Work Group. Membership jumped. Soon, faculty teaching mostly D.E. were invited to form an academic department (Foundation Studies) and the work group became an Academic Integrity Committee. Open to all, but we make sure we have specifically invited faculty from each department, all who teach DE/gateway, and student services people such as from TRIO, advising, housing, the ombudsman, and so forth.  The Shared Mental Models of the Dominant Coalition  Eleven themes were identified through review and analysis of the data.  Table 4 below provides a summary of these themes, and indicates which of the organizational groups expressed each theme as significant.  Eight of the themes were raised by interview participants from all three groups.  The data would suggest that these eight themes are central to the dominant logic at Great Lakes College:   Theme Senior Leaders Faculty Administrators Total Commitment to Student Success x x x Commitment to developmental and at-risk students x x x Relationships, not just transactions x x x The importance of the Foundations Studies Committee x x x Commitment to faculty and staff development x x x Curriculum revisions are important  x x x Data-driven decision-making, planning and accountability x x x Improving completion rates is complex x x x Getting the right people on the bus and in the right seats x   x Revising program review and faculty review processes were significant     x Students supporting students to improve completion    x   Table 4. Summary of themes at Great Lakes College Total Commitment to Student Success.  Great Lakes College has a fairly well-developed strategic planning process.  The strategic plan clearly identifies the Key Performance Areas (KPAs) of the College, the leader responsible for each KPA, and the plans and goals for each KPA.  The six Key 46   2017 strategic plan are: (1) Student Learning (Provost is the identified advocate); (2) Stakeholder-focused (Vice-President of Student Services is the identified advocate); (3) Financial and Operational Sustainability (the Chief Financial Officer is the identified advocate); (4) Valuing People (Vice-President of Administration and Human Resources is the identified advocate); (5) Measuring Effectiveness (Executive Director of Institutional Research is the identified advocate); (6) Leading and Communicating (the President and the Chief of Staff are the identified advocates). key to success going forward will be determined more by the culture on the GLC campus than by the level of detail in the C adapt to a changing environment or potentially become irrelevant (and not financially sustainable):   Change is unrelenting in approach and it demand upon organizations and people.  To completely ignore it is to reduce our relevancy to the consumer.  The more crucial focus for us is to determine, how do we position our organization to respond to change?  We must be open to new possibilities and consider opportunities for innovation in the way we do our work.  The larger question is, how do we prepare for and facilitate change in our College?  I think in large measure, the College enjoys a reputation of being innovative and change-oriented, that as new things come along, we have the ability to respond.  (Great Lakes College publication, 2015)  The importance of student success as a core value at Great Lakes College was clearly expressed by leadership, faculty and staff.  In the Leadership Council meeting, President Jones indicated that his -sSamantha, the Vice-President of Student Services, indicated that Great Lakes College leadership had a very clear focus on student success:  Completion, and what we have labelled as TCS2, as a leadership team, we really are focused on TCS2, which is Total Commitment to Student Success.  That, of course, is driven by some of the new regulations that are coming out, federally, and state-wide, that really are moving us, as you said, not just access, but access and completion.  It is interesting, because I come from private higher ed, where you can screen on the front end.  And now, you are essentially being held to  47  the same standards, or close to it, with no screening on the front end, so it gets tricky.  So the college is focusing on a total commitment to student success.  That includes retention and completion.  And I would say they are parallel tracks, right, because you want to keep them, but  kept them, we kept them, but they are not completing.   The Provost, Rachel, made it clear that Total Commitment to Student Success is not a new initiative; rather, it is a plan to assure that all of the student-success related initiatives being pursued by the College are appropriately integrated:   What our focus has been in the last year or so is to try and bring those all together into a comprehensive plan.  For the last year, maybe a little more than a year, I now also have responsibility for Student Services.  It is not going to last forever; it was a short-term willingness to take it on, but I think it is helping to bring all of the pieces together into a comprehensive, cohesive plan.  You know there is always that typical right hand not speaking to the left hand; student services, they have their perspective and their focus as well as academics, but, in general, at the end of the day, we are all focused on the success of our students.  I think I had talked to you last time about the Pathways work we are doing.  And we really feel like that is going to be the strategy that is going to help us bring everything together.  So instead of all these small different initiatives, small groups, perhaps large groups that students will be able to benefit from, everything is going to be either embedded into a plan or designed in a way that mandatory already, but a lot more things will be embedded.  And we are putting requirements in place, you know, Kay McClot more things, if you hit this trigger you have to partake in this type of whatever, strategy, to help you be successful.  So it is really just focused now on trying to bring all the pieces together.  will come up, here and there.  It feels like we are doing all the pieces and parts, we just need to bring them together now into a plan that makes sense.   The administrators interviewed also indicated that Great Lakes College has been focused on student success and degree completion for several years.   Abigail, the Title III Director, has been with the College for thirty-five years and has worked as both a faculty member and an administrator:  Yes, completion and the branding of total commitment to student success is huge.  Like number one in the strategic plan is about student learning.  And the focus definitely is on success and completion.  It has been there a long time.  It has been there since Frank came.   And even closely at completion.  The attitude was, are they transferring or getting the core knowledge for their jobs?  Before Frank came and before the recessions and things, it was a little different in so far as the nature of the student.  More night students, more adult learners, probably, are they getting what they need?  We had a bigger continuing ed. program.   We are talking in the 90s.  48  But it was still, are they succeeding in their classes?  And for the full time students are they persisting?  Since Frank has come on board we certainly have shifted that emphasis to completion, along with the rest of the country.  If the Feds are pouring in gobs of federal aid, they would like a return on their investment.   I mean, follow the money.   And persisting is an indicator of completion.   The Director of the Center for Student Success, Julie, commented:  In my history here, they (student success and completion) have always been a priority.  And, as of late the State has placed more emphasis on that being an incentive, in terms of completion and awarding of degrees and certificates, so I think that we are participating in certain initiatives were within a certain number of credits of earning a degree.  So it is an outreach to see if they can complete a certificate or degree.  So I think as of late, it is even more of a priority in terms of completion for our students.  But we have a five-year strategic plan, we have AQIP; that has always been in the Top 10 I would say, of where the college is looking to go.   I feel that the State is almost incentivizing, so we are kind of jumping through those hoops, but it has always been, in my opinion, and if you look at any of our strategic plans, a part of our culture, anyway, to get them through to completion.  In our minds, graduating or completing also means transferring, I think.  Transferring successfully to (a state university) or a college in Colorado so that is disappointing sometimes because that is not taken into consideration.  So like I said, we are participating in that program, our registrar is heading that up.  But, for the most part I feel it has always been a priority.   John, the Assistant Dean of Student Services who has been at the College for eight months, was equally  time, but the ultimate goal is that, so we have thirteen key beliefs here.  And the number one belief (they are not rank ordered), but it is always at the top, is that the success of our students is always our first priority.   Thomas, the Dean of Occupational Studies, believes that the college has an ethical responsibility to improve retention and completion rates:    Yeah, you hear it everywhere, student success.  And success means completion.  We want access, but everything we do, is about being responsible.  And being responsible means we have to build an opportunity for students not just to have access but to be successful, and success -edged sword, we want to open the door, best position tterms of developmental ed, and areas of student support, even how we are building curriculum  get them in those areas quickly, before they take developmental classes so they get excited and enthused  49  about an area.  We are looking to do contextualized math and reading and occupational, not because of access but because of success.  So everything we do, it is always about that.  If you  Art has been the Dean of Arts and Sciences for four years.  He was initially hired at the College to be the lead faculty for the First Year Seminar:    big think tank, and the thoughts were always the same, it was always about student success.  And I had never been in a culture like that before.  It was just completely different than anything  institutions are doing with upper level chem classes.  All of our professional development dollars were going toward how do we get folks in the door who are underprepared, and make them successful?   And so, institutionally I know that is there.  Now, there are large pockets of this place that are still largely immune to that.  It is still a work in progress.  But I have never been at a place that is as committed, not just in word, but constantly in what we are doing, what animates our conversations, what attracts our attention, and where dollars are funded, again and again and again, student success.   Commitment to developmental and at-risk students.  Almost 80% of new students at Great Lakes College test below college freshman levels with regard to Math, Reading and/or Writing.  This is higher than the national data that indicates between 60% and 70% of community college freshmen need to be enrolled in developmental courses.   Over the course of the last thirteen years, a group of over thirty faculty and staff at Great Lakes College have worked to improve the outcomes for students who are admitted to the college and do not have the required skills in Math, Reading and/or Writing.  The Student Readiness and Success Committee, and, more recently, the Foundations Studies Committee have met regularly to discuss what is working, what is not working, and what new initiatives could be considered to improve the outcomes for these students.   Some of these initiatives, such as the development of the Center for Student Success and the use of supplemental instructors, have proven successful.   Other initiatives, such as Learning Communities, did not result in improvements in student outcomes sufficient to offset the resources required to offer them.  At Great Lakes College, Learning Communities typically involved two instructors, one from English and one from Math, teaching three 50  classes together to a group of students.  The three classes were developmental composition, developmental math, and the First Year Seminar.  Art explained:  What normally happened was the English teacher would often take the lead on FYS, but they doing in math and everything they talked about in compositicontent everywhere, and both instructors were talking about it.   Though both the faculty who taught in the Learning Communities and the students who were a part of the Learning Communities appeared to develop very positive, learning-centered relationships, student persistence rates and grade point averages were not demonstrably higher than students not in Learning Communities.  The Foundations Studies Committee has piloted a range of initiatives over the years to improve retention and completion rates for those students coming to the college in need of developmental support.  Fred indicated that many of the faculty involved with the Foundations Studies Committee are willing to experiment and have learned a great deal about what works and what does not:   Largely through trial and error, my thinking has shifted: the idea that we can create these preparatory classes to anticipate the skills and knowledge and mindsets and all that they are going to need when they become full college students is not the best way to go about it.  So all of the approaches we take try to look at it a little differently, and most effective, from what I have been involved with, is doing accelerated developmental classes.  It worked really well with the ALP (Accelerated Learning Program) model that came out of Baltimore: students take their developmental and college level at the same time with the same instructor, and the developmental class, besides working on the fundamentals the students need, more directly is how do we get these students to do what they need to do for that college level class?  It is ed that these are skills they need.  They want them because they are writing this essay that has to be done.  We then applied that started with Psychology 140 which is our Intro to Psychology, and embed into a 40 student Psychology class 16 students who are reading students.  They were supposed to have developed those skills before taking the Psychology class, but instead they go into that Psych class, then they have a one hour break for lunch, and then they have the Reading class, and the text for the Reading class is the Psych text.    51  Fred, who currently serves as the department chair for Developmental Studies, started his career at GLC in 2002 as the lead faculty for the Reading program: I came in without a lot of background in developmental education.  I had taught junior high and high school English, and then ESL overseas, I was in Japan for fourteen years, kind of a TESOL background there.  My thing is educational reform.  Everywhere I have gone I have tried to get involved in doing whatever we are doing better.  And so as the lead faculty for the Reading program, and more broadly the Chair of the Student Readiness and Success Committee, I knew we had to address the horrendous track record we had of students coming in underprepared and then falling to the wayside too quickly and so that became my interest really early on.  What can we change to make our developmental program more effective, or change it entirely?   If , then what changes can we make to have better results?   pmental students.  She believes that faculty have a great deal of influence regarding whether or not developmental students will persist and succeed or not:    Generally speaking, Foundation Studies students are one negative event from walking out the door.  Literally, they will walk out the door.  from what I have seen is students from first generation, marginalized, underserved populations are bringing behaviors with them in the door that they felt may have been appropriate in high school, or in their neighborhoods, or in their culture, and the faculty are reading that as an affront, some type of disrespect that they are exhibiting in the classroom, and I keep telling faculty it is not about that at all.  When I have talked to administrabecause no teacher wants to hear it is their problem, but it is my belief that is it their problem.  So if they have a student who blows an emotional fuse in their class, I think it is more about the  Several faculty members interviewed discussed the importance of having a passion for student learning and success as a basic requirement to become an effective instructor for students needing developmental support.  Sarah, the lead faculty member for reading, commented:   Just to add to the conversation, when I started here, our data was 50% of the reading students in the winter would drop.   50%.  Our classes are capped at 20 so that meant in the winter term you were likely to have 10 students persist to the end of the semester. In the fall I think it was our I.R. department to get that.  I know for myself, I might lose two students out of every class.  And that is with me kicking and screaming while they are going down.  But for me, again, what 52  fuels my passion, what gets me out of bed, is they will come to my class even when they know they are failing.   There is no chance for redemption and they will still come.  And I think the reason is for this; and I tell my adjuncts, here is what you need to say to them.   If you are in the sixth week and it is not going well, in any class, math, whatever, and you think, I am just going to drop out. And you quit and you think I am going to need to retake it next semester.  When you walk in you are at square one again.  But if you keep going, all the way to the end, even if you them, not only in my class, stay in your math class.  Especially the math, you know the data on ut. All three of the Leadership Council to improving outcomes for those students who are most at risk to drop out of college before completing a degree.  Samantha, the Vice-President of Student Services commented:  We, in my opinion, we need to beef up our retention plan, academic success plan, whatever you want to call it, for our housing students.  We are one of a few community colleges that offer residential living.  So we will have 500 residents in the fall.  We are an open access institution. For the most part, open access, as far as academics anyway. So we have some students that come into housing, a lot of students that are very ill-prepared.  Not terribly different than our general student population; 70% of our housing students come from (large, urban county in the state).  So they are moving far away from home for the first time without transportation, and we are finding that the skills that they need not only in the classroom but out of the classroom to be successful are really lacking.  And so two years ago we started a program (for housing students who were not college-of (this program).  Unfortunately, e dumb kid in the dorms and fo-year college, right, so if it goes away for two years, it is brand new all of a sudden.  This is one of the beauties of a community college.   We need something to of that is, I think, a monetary investment, a resource investment.  Right now it feels to the kids like a mandated, you have to do study hall, how do I get out of that? The implications for standpoint is a greater impact on us.  Financially, those studentsthrough, if they are full financial aid, Pell eligible, they can get by without student loans.  They may take them out, but they can get by without them.  Housing students cannot get by without student loans.   So the percentage of students in housing that take out student loans, compared default.  So we have seen our default rate climb.  The administrators interviewed are keenly aware of the fact that close to 80% of the students coming to the College have developmental gaps in math, reading and/or writing.  They understand that,  53  if the college is going to make any significant progress in retention and completion rates, new approaches and models for students in need of developmental education are essential.  Art, the Dean of Arts and Sciences, believes that the College has made significant progress over the last several years, but there is still much work that needs to be done:   There are days when I am just really, really frustrated.   There are days when I feel, seriously, we are still talking about this? Wsausage-making and remind yourself that there really have been some big moves, some big changes.  A part of what we are trying to do is break down this notion that developmental You know, 78% of our students are developmental students.  But when you talk to the folks in the nursing programthat pipeline.  When you talk to folks in the Sciences, you know, those are not our students. So we are trying to get that ownership across the board. It is still very, very much a work in progress.  I think one place where they have done a much better job at embracing it is the Math department.  If you know anything about community college, you know this is the black hole.  This is what sucks everybody into oblivion.  Same math everybody else is doing, across the country.  If you start two levels below college level math, you have a 10% chance of completing your graduation requirements.   By necessity they had to figure out a way to begin retooling their programs and we are still deep in that process.  We have made some huge gains, huge  The change is massive, and yet it is not enough.  I say to our folks all of the time, what you are at this, so when we moved to Rapid Review Math, we immediately switched to about a 55% success rate of getting folks moved up right away out of one whole developmental level in math, and what they told us was, okay, that is fine, but they are all going to tank in the next class because tbackside of it was once we left all of these folks behind in the lowest level math class, right, here ks in one room, and they understand, I am looking at myself and my buddy and my hand aa dumb question, it was the exact thing I should have been asking in that class, but I always felt I uys had a much better success rate.   So there were successes on the front end, there was not just a lack of a terrible thing on the back end, there was actually better success on the back end, so we have done this huge piece we are getting people in the 54  tremendous amount of work ahead of us.  What we are working on right now is quantitative reasoning.  We are trying to get the people into the Calculus pathway, the Algebra pathway, that need to be in that, and we are trying to get the other people into pathways that are actually constantly telling me this is Math for Poets, and they made a good point, they are laughing at me, when I look at this quantitative reasoning class, it is not Math for Poets, this is a great piece, and it is usable, and it going to help people to begin thinking mathematically, to begin to conceptualize.  Because when you look at our associate degree outcomessay, ADO 3 is about becoming competent in algebra.  It is learning to think conceptually about math and quantitative reasoning. That is what we are doing, and that is still what we are doing.  is still a work in progress.  When I came here, the math department was incredibly focused on this boogey man that lives forty miles down the road at if flagship university) then I have failed as a math instructor.  And we were finding that 90% of our students never got through.   Abigail, the Title III Director and co-chair of the Foundations Studies Committee, believes that, for many of these students who do not test at college levels, the issues that need to be addressed have little to do with their academic abilities.   Many do not come from high schools, families, or communities that have prepared them to study and learn at a college level: Because when yogreat experience in high school as far as actually learning something and developing an internal way of approaching material, and grit, and the latest stuff with that.  So when they come here it is the same looking structure  there are classes, there are walls, there is a teacher up front, there is that same sort of environment.  They are going to default into high school behavior, whatever they did to get through high school.  What our teachers are challenged to do is to bring them into academia of critical thought, of doing reading beyond the immediate need of the class, of asking questions, of full participation, so it is a leap; can they not just pass the test but how they approach learning.  So the faculty get to tackle that, and also keep them up with resiliency.  We have had students if they get a B, which is another thing, because we use numbers, not grades, so we have to make that leap for them, but if they get a B in a class, they are ready to leave.  I can always tell when a math class has had an exam because we would have a little parade of people trying to drop their math.  So then it was talking them into staying, they would have a W.  So there is an  (2009) is doing on fear, so our faculty have to do that, so it is more than just teaching the content of the courses, but it is how to work with the content, how to think about the content, and how to persist within the class.  And they would tell you that the students who attend and complete, do fine.  The people who are skipping, who are not coming, who are not turning in stuff, there is our failure.  So that is the meat of the problem.    55  Relationships, not just transactions.  Don has taught entrepreneurship at Great Lakes College for four years.  In his experience, many students at the College do not have a strong network of friends or family who provide support, encouragement, and mentoring for the students.  These students will not likely persist unless the College can fill that role: They brought in this consultant over the last couple of years.   I was in a meeting in which he gave a summary, and I thought he hit it right on the head in that we are very transactional and we need to be more relational.  Teaching business I find this to be the case and building relationships is more important.  You are able to share information more effectively if you have the relationship.  One thing that (the retention consultant) said to me, that really stuck with me, complete because they leave and we there anything common among them?  100% of the time, it is someone who cared about them.  They had a mentor or family member or someone so that when times got tough, they had someone to lean on.  So we are inferring, and there is some data to support, the people who through tough times gotta have this informal board of directors you can ask for advice, shoulders to cry on, that is so .  In fact, the guy I was talking with for an hour and a half before you came in; I am probably going to hire him as an adjunct; great, great story.  He grew up in a really broken home, and you were actually stigmatized if you got higher education because you were being viewed as you think you are so much better than the rest of us.  And he talked about one of his cousins who had all the support, stay-at-home mom, dad who was supportive, versus other cousins, completely absentee, who ended up in prison, and him, who had a little bit of both, for much of his life, much later in life he went back and now he has two masters degrees, and he wants to teach in a community college;  dude, you are perfect, so many students can relate to your story, and they I can say, get through it, but I had a silver spoon in my mouth.  My college was paid for.  He can say, I know what you are feeling, I have been there.  And he is a testimony to that.  So I really think that is where we need to go as a college.  We need to be supportive of these students, we have to have people who are advising them both as faculty as and formal advisors, who understand some of these non-transactional issues, that greatly affect the transaction of whether they are going to finish their degree and pay their tuition, pay off their loan and have a successful life  The faculty interviewed expressed a belief that a key to improving student success and completion at the College is improving the quality of the relationships between faculty and students.   Sarah, the lead 56  faculty member for Reading, referenced a survey that was done a few years earlier indicating that 84% of students believed the instructor did not care about them as people:  are, or it matters very little, what supports we have on campus, if the bus runs at 10:00 p.m. at night. If what is going on in the classroom is not comfortable and productive and respectful, they are going to leave anyway.   Sarah believes that many of the faculty do, in fact, care about their students, but they do not know how to teach in a way that communicates that care, particularly given the social and economic backgrounds of many Great Lakes College Students.   To address this issue, Sarah has provided workshops for faculty for the last five years to help them better understand their students and how to effectively engage s is hiring the adjunct faculty who teach Reading at the College.  She is very purposeful in her work with these instructors.  She believes that Reading faculty (and all faculty at the College) need to be skilled not only in their discipline, but in effectively engaging students and facilitating their development as adult learners.  Many students at Great Lakes College are first generation college students.  In many of their families, a college degree is not perceived as valuable and/or attainable.   Their high school education did not adequately prepare them to be successful college students.  Sarah believes that virtually every student can be successful, if the faculty are committed to understanding where the students are developmentally and willing to take the time and make the effort to engage them and provide an environment that respects them as students and allows them to learn: I should also mention here is one place we have seen concrete evidence.  You know this idea that talking to the faculty, just the reading faculty, about their responsibility for retention.  They have to retain the student.  I am seeing solid data to prove that is working.  Because not only am se it sounds bad, but another way to describe it would be workshops that teach faculty strategies to work with underserved, marginalized students.  In our reading classes our largest population is often first gen, underprepared, marginalized students, often from poverty, urban areas, students who have not had good experiences K-12. Those are the people who are in our classes; who are in the Foundations Studies area.  So I facilitate these workshops to give instructors who are not prepared, I might add, to w 57  that I know of that are offering that type of instruction in how to work with that population.  But I have been facilitating these workshops for quite some time.  I want my reading instructors to attend; strongly encouraging them to attend.  But I also include reminders in emails throughout the semester which might say something like, and this would be the retention piece, okay, we know the pivotal exit points, we have already looked into it as an institution.   They are most likely to go at the sixth week; that is a high exit point.  They are most likely to go, believe it or not, at the twelfth week; we also know that males tend to leave earlier, they bail quicker, where females might go right near when the class is going to end, and then they go.  So I will say to my you need to keep reminding them or the value and benefit of staying here, and here are some about you are almost there, you are three weeks away from the semester finishing; I want you to think about what it is going to look like you cross the graduation stage and Dr. Jones hands you your diploma.  Your family and friends are going to be watching you, visualize it, make it happen, those types of things.  That is crucial, they have to do that.  And in the workshops we talk about things, because conflict in the classroom and walk out.   students.  It also includes the relationship between advising staff and students.  John, the Assistant Dean of Student Services, indicated that the reason the College was transitioning from six advisors to eighteen Student Success Navigators was to transition from a transactional model of advising to a model that was based on stronger, goal-oriented relationships between the Navigators and the students on their caseloads: We are jumping that number up to eighteen total, across our satellites and everything.  Fourteen of which will be here.  The whole point of that is there was a complaint when we consulted with (consulting firm) that some of the key things we are falling behind some of our comparable counterparts were that our student services was lacking.  And where it was lacking was called too transactional.  When you have a ratio of over 1000 or 1500, again as high as 2000 relationships with students.  And the ultimate goal of this, as our president likes to say, and I believe it, is that we want someone at this institution to know the name of every student we me, but someone on this of having that ratio down.  And what that does for us is we are going to be doing a lot more proactive or intrusive advising.   58  Julie, the Director of the Center for Student Success, expressed her conviction that the key to improving retention and completion rates at the College was developing a relationship triad which included faculty, staff, and students:   Because of what I do and who I am as a person, it is about the connection.  If you can get on this up, but I am telling you, you will see them to completion.  They will do what they need to stay in school.  There is one kid that I had in the HASP (Housing Academic Student Progress) program, and I asked, what are you going to be when you grow up?  I am going to own a zoo and I am going to run it like Walt Disney.   They have such big hopes and dreams.  If you can find that connection.  I am a vigorous note taker, so that when that student in the HASP program you find that connection with that student.  And they realize you are not a phony, and that you really do care.  I am telling you, they will stick with you, they will listen to what you tell them to do.   If a faculty member is teaching psych, teaching five sections of Psychology 140, they have like 400 students.  But listening to those students so they can connect them with the resources.  The better relationship I have with faculty, the better.  Because they are my direct pipeline to the students.  If I have a good relationship with (faculty member) who teaches all those C.I.S. sections, then I know, if she has a troubled student, she is going to contact me.  And that is going to help me get in contact with the student and get the resources so they complete that C.I.S. course, and they complete the semester.  And if they complete the semester, then they communication piece, if they are with it, and they can read their classroom.   I have some great faculty that, right away they will call me, someone is on the autism spectrum, and I will say, man, they are good, and they will come in and sure enough, they had an IEP in high school and they just need a little time on test.  If I can get the information, I can explain to his or her instructors, this is why they are not making eye contact, and it just opens the door.   Susan also expressed a conviction that a key to improving student completion rates is assuring that students have a positive relationship with at least one GLC faculty or staff member:   in class today? You missed something really important.   You better get someone in class to get Obviously, tons of data, if the student feels there is at least one person on campus that knows my name; that engages with me; that is keeping track of me; that cares; that success rate is going to go up significantly.   59  Hiring additional Student Success Navigators is another initiative being implemented at the time ege believes that one approach to improve student retention and completion is to improve the quality of the relationships between academic advisors (now being called Student Success Navigators) and the students they serve.   Great Lakes College received approval from its Board of Trustees in the spring of 2015 to transition from a team of six academic advisors to one of eighteen Student Success Navigators. The decision to increase the size of the advising staff was initiated by a recommendation from a retention consultant hired by the College, according to Samantha, the Vice-President of Student Services:     And then, we contracted about eighteen months ago with (a higher ed. consulting firm) on the recruitment and retention side.  On the retention side, they did a student satisfaction Inventory.  And there are seven items that came back in particular, as lower than average for community colleges.  Almost all of them, at least six out of the seven, were directly related to advising.  The last one had to do with scheduling, which is more an academic scheduling issue, but it falls into advising, because it gets blamed on the person who tells you yes or no.  So for whatever it is  want to numbers were about 1416 to 1.   And we keep hearing, we are not relational, we are relational at that ratio, and so we started looking at best practices as a leadership team, what can we do, what are the implications for that, especially budget-ask someone to produce relational results, and case management results at that ratio, so sometime around the end of March (of 2015) we decided we were going to the Board, and here in my cubicle and wait for you to come see me; I am going to give you, what I call the that we want to be counselors, I am looking to do, you know, mental health therapy with people, but d this person get off  they may not have transportation, you need to ask that question, what does that mean in terms of the classes we schedule for them?   Using predictive analytics, based on both cognitive and non-cognitive variables, the Student Success Navigators will identify those students most likely will benefit from additional support.  The Student Success Navigators will coordinate the implementation of communications plans to the 60  a student may need additional support, the Student Success Navigator will be responsible to communicate with the student and encourage the student to take advantage of whatever support services may be appropriate  counseling, tutoring, or a workshop or seminar, for example.   There is a improved retention, transfer, and associate degree completion rates for the College.   The Importance of the Foundations Studies Committee.  The Provost, along with several faculty and administrators, indicated that the Foundations Studies Committee is the group at Great Lakes College most directly focused on student success.  Though the name of the committee suggests that the focus is on faculty and students in the Foundations Studies Department, the committee includes many faculty and staff from outside Foundations Studies.   The committee is where faculty, leadership, and staff come together to consider and discuss what can be done at the College to improve student success.   From the perspective of the committee, student success is defined quite broadly.  The committee serves as a forum where faculty and staff can discuss initiatives they have pursued to improve student success, the results of those initiatives, and possible future initiatives to improve student success.  The committee has existed at the College for over a dozen years and has become one -chartered committees in the last three years.   For many years it was a somewhat informal meeting of faculty and staff who were committed to improving student success and working with other faculty and staff who shared their commitment.   The co-chairs of the committee, Fred and Abigail, are committed to fostering a spirit of change and improvement on the committee, which faculty experience as both challenging and supportive.   Comments of several study participants suggest they have been successful.    Though the committee is open to all who would like to participate, making sure that the right faculty and staff are involved is a key priority.  Fred described what they look for in committee members:    61  We try, first of all, to make sure it is people who are workers; visionaries; get the people who are doers together, and then we really want to have a really good representation of faculty.   We do have adjuncts, we do have people from all the campuses.  Faculty and staff are equally  Mary, who teaches English and composition at the College, believes that the Foundation Studies Committee has been significant in creating a team of faculty and staff working together to address important issues related to student success:   Foundations studies invites many, many eyes.  All of those people are at the same table, so we might be working to solve the problem, for example alcohol in the dorms, or whatever the problem might be.  Rather than these being discrete, siloed projects, they become large in scope because we are all at the same table at the same time.   Faculty, staff, and administrators, are working together in Foundations Studies.   Commitment to faculty and staff development.  The Leadership Council believes that transforming organizational culture requires more than simply hiring good people that fit the culture the College is working to create.  It also includes a commitment to faculty and staff development.  In the last six months, the college has implemented a week-long on-boarding process for all new staff and full time faculty.  Susan explained:  So we bring them on board and then we do a week long orientation with our new employees, because we want to indoctrinate them into our culture.  Not to say that everybody here is perfect, including me, but we have some people that are just stellar when it comes to their passion.  And so, when you set up the week for them, first of all you set it up, because one of   it is like going back to middle school or something.  So you set up their lunches.  We block.  And we take them all the way through the mission, vision, values, beliefs. We have a board member come in and have lunch with them one day. They have lunch with the leadership team one day.  And then we take them to (locations of learning centers throughout service area) so they know the other locations; so they know what they are talking about when they are time, I   At the request of the Provost, Sarah, the lead faculty for Reading, offers workshops for GLC  to assist the 62  faculty in developing their skills and abilities in working with these students so that a greater percentage of these students successfully complete their courses and programs and earn a degree.  Rachel believes that if the College is going to significantly improve degree completion, the faculty and staff need to deepen their understanding of the lives, values, and belief systems of those students coming to the  of professional development opportunities for faculty and staff with the goal of improving their knowledge and skills in working with these students: Through Title III we were able to bring On Course on campus every year for the last five years, just trying to build more pedagogical strategies into not just D.E. classes but everything, not just stand there and lecture, and we also brought in one or two years ago, brought in Ruby Payne and a lot of that was in direct response to so many students arriving here from (large urban) them understand the culture of poverty.  For some, we thought, oh my gosh, this is phenomenal; I thought it was amazing, her presentation, and others, of course, critical of with Sarah (lead Reading faculty)?  Who, I think, walks on water, she is just phenomenal.  And trying to get her to teach others what she can do.   She is all about relationship and respect and she just has a heart for these kids. Some folks, you know, if somebody is just arrogant and kind ir colleagues, and start to see some differences in their classroom, hopefully that will help.  Fred, the Department Chair for Foundations Studies, is very pleased with the commitment to professional development made by the College.  He believes that even more professional development will be important if the College is going to successfully implement Guided Pathways.  From his perspective, the Guided Pathways model represents a fairly fundamental shift in how the faculty and students think about curriculum.   Both faculty and students are going to need time and support in making this shift.  I asked Fred if he could do whatever he would like to improve student success, what would it be?  His response:    Rachel asked me that in 2009.   My answer was the same then as it is now, and it is to provide professional development for faculty and staff in key strategic areas.   So what we have focused on in the past are the principles in our FYS class  On Course.   So we have had 300 faculty and  63  staff go through the On Course Workshop, which is a two or three-day workshop which is all about engaging learners, student-centered teaching, and those inner principles or traits which are leading people to making choices leading to success.   The other was to help students read materials in their content areas.  So we got a Title III grant to provide both of those types of training for our faculty and staff.   So I would like to keep that going.   It is a five-year program and we had one or more of those trainings every year.   The way we set it up was five different departments.  So we focused on one department each year.   More than half the full time faculty have gone through this training.  I like that model of changing a culture, because you have a common theme or principles you are trying to inculcate and then everyone is doing that together, and then when we have our Student Success Council meeting, then we are talking about those as our organizing principles.   So I think that is really important, that the whole College has a chance to learn together, and have a common vocabulary.  And we really need to make the pathways initiative work.   So, if I could wave a magic wand, I would have significant training and workshops and support to get the pathways work done.  It is a paradigm shift in how students experience college. It is not easy to make it happen.  Over the course of the last four years, 300 faculty and staff at Great Lakes College have taken accepting personal responsibility, discovering self-motivation, mastering self-management, employing interdependence, gaining self-awareness, adopting life-long learning, and developing emotional intelligence.  Several of the faculty and staff interviewed ot only important for the embed these principles throughout the curriculum as they believe appropriate.   Jim is the lead faculty for the First Year Seminar (FYS).  He has been with the College for eight years, first as an adjunct faculty member teaching the First Year Seminar, and for the last four years as the lead faculty for the First Year Seminar.   Jim does not consider himself a teacher.  He considers was often not particularly relevant for older adults who were married with children.  Jim believed the 64  course needed to focus much more directly on goal setting and understanding the skills and abilities needed to accomplish those goals.  The students responded positively to his approach, indicated by persistence and retention rates of his students that were significantly higher than for other instructors teaching the course.  Jim believes that some First Year Seminars focus too heavily on issues like developing good study skills.  His focus is to help students understand the skills the abilities they will need to be successful in their desired career, and to develop those skills while in college: up for -taking skills to people who never open their ow up forty minutes late.   I of problems with students who choose not to study.   Helping students gain insight into their personal and professional goals and what is required to achieve  My philosophy about this, in every course that you take, whether it is a business course of FYS, ; now so what, big deal; what am I going to do with it?  There are about sixty adjunct faculty trained to teach the First Year Seminar, with about forty faculty teaching the course in a typical fall semester.  There are three primary learning outcomes for the Seminar.  They are: (1) critical thinking at a college level; (2) working productively with others; (3) practicing the personal skills of self-management to accomplish your goals.  Personal reflection is a significant part of the course.  Students are asked to reflect on the choices they have made in life, their goals for the future, and what will be required to accomplish those goals.   Jim believes that the culture at Great Lakes College is increasingly focusing on issues around student success and completion, and the First Year Seminar is one piece in creating that culture for faculty, staff, and students.  He understands addressed.  Over the years, Jim has seen that for these students to be successful, they need assistance  65  understanding the importance of earning a college degree as a part of creating a successful and productive life.   But here is the deal; we have to teach the students who come to us, and not the ones we wish here.  We are helping everyday people get to a better place in life.  That is the measure of success, so we have just got to keep focused on that.   I am looking for somebody who has not been a professional student and gotten As in everything they do.  I am looking for somebody who has had a variety of different jobs and understands the purpose of transferable skills.  Someone who has struggled a little bit in their life.  Do they have a passion for this type of material, a passion for personal success?  Do they care? Can I see the care and love in their eyes?  Those are the things I look for.  People who have had to go out and solve problems in the workplace, rather than the pointer out of problems.   ople who really care and will self-disclose about how they did things in their life which may not have worked so well.  And what scripts caused them to stumble; how personal board of directors.   Curricular revisions to improve student success and completion.  commitment to student success, the Leadership Council decided to implement Guided Pathways (Bailey, Jaggars & Jenkins, 2015) at the end of 2014.   In the Guided Pathways model, community college students are required to select a career pathway (or meta-major) in their first semester.   Based on their meta-major, students have significantly less discretion regarding the courses they will take in a given semester.   The college will offer the classes that are needed by students, based on their pathway.  Great Lakes College decided to adopt the Guided Pathways model in the spring of 2015 and identified an implementation team as a first step.  Working in collaboration with a consultant, this team developed and is implementing a plan to transition to a Guided Pathways approach in the 2015/2016 and 2016/2017 academic years.    Most of the study participants believe that Guided Pathways, as well as a completion rate over the course of the next two to three years.   66  The Provost believes that Guided Pathways is going to have a significant impact on student completion once fully implemented. But she expects implementation of Pathways to present some challenges.  For example, individual faculty will have less discretion to teach their classes as they would like. The faculty will determine together, based on data, how programs and classes should be structured and organized.  Rachel believes that the implementation of Guided Pathways combined with the significant increase in the number of Student Success Navigators will result in improved retention and completion rates at the College. And now with Pathways, we feel like we have stumbled upon models that really work, for successes in different courses, so no longer is it going to be the faculty who want to do that model, it is going to be that is the only model we are going to offer; that is what is working; that is going to be the way we do it from here on out, and now because we are going to have default course schedules for students,  so we will have, this is what you are going to take, so all those million options are going to go away.  With Guided Pathways, there will be a lot more your schedule, this is what you are doing, this is what you taking, this is the model of instruction that you are going to go through, as well as that, more hands on with their Navigators, I think that is going to make a big difference for them.   Art, the Dean of Arts and Sciences, believes that Guided Pathways will be successful because of the academic path the students need to travel to earn their degree:   I would say the bigger bang for the buck is going to come on the back end with Pathways.  I will create an analogy for you.   I would say if I were creating this car and I could really work on the engine, not working on all cylinders, not even running.  I get the car running.   Which is going to create me more miles?  Spending all my time working on the engine and getting it to 370 horsepower, and go from red light, to red light, to red light?  Or working on a 150 horsepower engine that is put on a freeway.  You gotta have both  you have to get these engines  completion, do success instead of just  have said maybe we should have done Phaving the same conversations in Pathways right now if we  67  -heads against walls, and all these things, the work we are doing in Pathways would not be the horsepower engines.  to get out and run.    Yeah, and this Pathways thing it just feels like it will be one of those overnight successes, right, where the guy has been playing in a bar for ten years and gets discovered and they say, oh, he is Pollyannish, but I feel like once we get the bugs worked out of this, once we get through the implementation initiative, I feel like we are going to be an overnight success.  We are going to  Data-Driven decision-making, planning and accountability. There was largely agreement among those interviewed that the College practices data-driven decision-making, plans effectively, and is building a culture that expects faculty, staff, leaders and students to be accountable for their actions and responsibilities. Thomas, the Dean of Occupational Studies, commented: Everything we talk about has to have some data.  There is no shooting from the hip.  Every one of these processes start with the data filled out for you so you can spend your time analyzing the data, not making gut decisions, innuendos, it is based on data.  When we talk about prereqs now, are trying to pull data.  Two years ago, the Math department was just mad.  We are having calculus at (a local) high school, these students are dual-testing process.  We want to make a rule that says dual-enrolled students have to go through enrolled were at 85% retention, completing these classes, they were outperforming our native instructor could have a bad bunch of students and assume all the high school students were ; we use data almost for everything.  In curriculum you  John, the Assistant Dean of Student Services, believes that one of his primary responsibilities is building a culture in the department that understands how to use data effectively to improve student success:  I think my life is going to revolve around data for the rest of my career, and it is not just data with increasing persistence rates, it is data in every way, shape or form. What I mean by that in our (retention information) system we have retention predictors, so utilizing data on those students that are at risk, so we can see who we should be targeting our outreach to, I think that is going to be key.  Outside of our general touchpoints, I looked at the data comparing how that first cohort.  And I looked at how this group who did not persist answer a question, and I 68  was looking to find if there was anything that was statistically significant based on the surveys they were taking in our first year seminar class.  And I found three different factors I identified about how they answered those questions.  Most of them were what you would intuitively imagine they would be, like, motivation, self-esteem, and one thing that is great, that (consulting firm) does, they ask a question to hopefully identify grit; as most people know, their propensity to pursue long term goals and perseverance and things like that.  Grit was one, self-esteem was one, motivation was one.  Once those scores come in from our FYS class, from a data perspective, I am going to run that about who answered a question a certain way, and proactively outreach to those students.  And hopefully catch those students before they get to a have data after the fact, and then try to make decisions after they are done. I think a lot of sthave already lost the game.  It is my goal to use these tools we were given, and Great Lakes College has put a lot of resources in to, and tie that into our FYS class, because again, it is at the it.   My goal with the data we are using is to be as proactive as we possibly can be.    Though John clearly values relationships, he also believes that one important element in improving retention and completion rates is increasing the efficiency of transactions the students have with the staff in Student Services: We now do what is called Student Services Satisfaction Inventory so we are also utilizing some of those key factors I mentioned earlier, on our satisfaction survey we did, where we did not meet very high for student services, where it said we were transactional.  I use those same questions in our student services satisfaction inventory to see how we are growing as time goes on is broken down individually by Student Success Navigator so we can identify by the data who is providing better service, who is hitting these touch points, and then with our retention timeline information with the corresponding dashboards, we are tracking everything, so we can see and we can hold accountable the Student Success Navigators, from a case management perspective, students?  And then you identify, this person has done all these additional outreaches where this person has done the bare minimum, or not even the bare minimum, in hitting those numbers.   Data will again, I think, rule my position until the end of time.   Samantha, the Vice-President of Student Services, believes the Leadership Council has a strong commitment to data-driven decision-making:  As a leadership team, we meet every Wednesday. We are constantly looking at data, where are we doing well, where are we lacking, what can we improve upon? A part of it is just continuous quality improvement.  We are a part of CQIN (Continuous Quality Improvement Network).  We go down as a leadership team every year.  We are always finding a book we can read together; how can we improve upon different things; how can we improve as a leadership team.  And so,  69  since day one we have been committed to students and their success.  How that has been defined, I would say, has been worked out, I would say since February, probably.  Late February, early March is when we said, we are going with this Pathways model on the academic side of the house, but we also need to beef up what we are doing on the Student Services side of the house. -driven institution that is becoming proficient in the use of predictive analytics to improve student retention and completion rates:  We are a data-driven institution.  One of the things the retention committee is constantly looking at is when are students signing up for classes. We have completely redone the structure for when students can sign up because it used to be that we would let them leave here at the end of spring fall.  Get them before they leave!  You know, that is what all the data says, so we have done some things there. The other piece of it is the retention predictor, which actually takes our first time, full time students that take an assessment in their FYS class.  So again, it is a bit of a sub-population. It is first time, full time, in a D.E. class, which is the trigger to have to take FYS.   That retention predictor gives them a score, it color-categorizes them, and it shows us the likelihood of retaining them. So those second admit nursing students, I am being somewhat presumptuous, they are going to knock it out of the park, they are just going to get it done.  And themiddle, and, from all of our data, that has really shown us where we are going to get the most bang for the buck.  And that retention predictor shows us who those students are and how to target them.   Samantha is working to develop a culture in Student Services that is focused on planning, data analytics, and accountability.  The college has experienced over a 25% reduction in enrollment between 2010 and 2014.  Samantha understands that the most cost-effective approach to increasing enrollment is to  Great Lakes College, when I got here, did not have an admissions team.  If you want to come here, you come here, but we are not going to really reach out to you.  Or it was a secondary to a secondary assignment that nobody ever really got to.  So we implemented an admissions office, hired administrators, hired staff, sent them on the road, and every year, every semester, we have hit our admissions goals for billing contact hours.  Where we lacked was in the retention contact hours.  Admissions actually went over and above, and so it balanced out.  And that set recruitment, nthe extent of the amount of billing contact hours, volume-wise, to retain, I would say that is my priority.  It is obviously much easier to keep them, than to get new students, so it is a priority, 70  and then the manpower we are bringing on board to retain these students.  Academic recovery plans, intervention plans, the software we are working with; the retention predictors, so then, all of those tools we are using, how are they becoming part of the bigger system, who is using them, who is keeping folks accountable for using them, who is tracking that data, there is a lot out there.    The Provost indicated that the College values data in the decision-making process.  She believes it is important to distinguish between data-driven decision-making and data-informed decision-making.  She believes the Leadership Council uses data to inform their decisions:   I would absolutely say that we do (use data in our decision-making), but we have to be realists in that, you know, your data might say something, your politics, somebody on the board, maybe an influential community member, you have to delay the right decision, or massage it or whatever, so we say we are data-informed.  We are very intentional about what data we want to look at to make decisions as a group, on a regular basis, we have the Balanced Scorecard, on a college level, and that is how Frank, as a part of his evaluation by the Board, if he achieves those or not.   Susan agreed that the College uses data to inform the decision-making process, not to drive it:  There are some people in the data accounting world, it is very black and white to them: in the world of the community college, we are the community. There is a board of trustees, there are community members. It is not quite that simple, so I would say we are more data-shut down the flight program because we have this many students because the community is going to be mad, you know. You always are going to have that, but we are informed, and sometimes it helps at least to be able to have the bigger conversations with other people, other partners, or whatever, about that.   Improving completion rates is complex.  Several study participants expressed a belief it is challenging to understand the issues that influence degree completion.  Students come to the College with a broad range of goals and interests; earning an associate or baccalaureate degree is often not a priority.  Susan commented:   Well, it is kind of, definitely, our number one mantra, which is, student success is our entire focus at this institution.  Completion is obviously a very important part of it, but as you because he wants to learn some Spanish for travelling, they have completed their goal, but it es our students will start somewhere else, and again, can complete an associate degree.  I think the concept is incredibly important, when it comes to completion, and it certainly is our ultimate goal, I mean commencement is our favorite time of the year; to see someone walk across the stage, with a certificate or associate, and to celebrate  71  their successes, because there are a lot of first generation college students that come to community colleges, especially here. months and believes that College leadership is committed to improving the degree completion rate.  He also appreciates the multitude of factors that prevent students from accomplishing their academic goals: We value tracking completion rates, however the completion rate as it is computed for the State, for IPEDS and for those private interests, private companies that we partner with, they are all different. They are based off of different cohorts, so they all have different parameters . So yes, we value completion, but when we talk about it, when I say lip service, term in sort of a derogatory way, but one way you can think about it as being a little bit get up ther-year completion rate that is really what we are metric, across the board, and he also means the corollaries of completion  he wants to see those go up, and he probably wants to see the very specific drivers of completion go up as well.  So there is a whole nest of metrics, figures, trends that are all buried in the language that is being used by the leadership to talk about completion, as if it were one number but really it is a nest of things.  And you talked about drivers of completion and you talked about benchmarks that might affect completion, those are all lumped, and we are not very explicit, even in our meetings, in how we can improve our data systems, or prepare for our upcoming accreditation, about the causal model that we are working off of.  And the specific metrics that connect to various aspects of those models, like what exact outcomes are we going to track?  We often try to hit that.  What exact drivers are there, sometimes that is a topic of conversation that often does not have metrics attached.  So there is a disconnect, is what I am saying, between the metrics that we value, on sort of a broad level, and the metrics we are actually using, which are often driven by, well, what is convenient, what do we report on; what is timely, so if we just produced a neto the State, maybe that is the data we report to our provost if she is asking for something very specific, because it is more recent.  And often we just throw the kitchen sink of completion data at our leadership if they ask for something completion-related, and so our Provost produces a Completion Monitoring Report for our Board of Trustees.  Joseph hopes that, over the course of time, faculty and staff at the College will think of data differently than they do at the time of this interview:   just, you know, static measurements of your appearance, but instead were the grist of the mill 72  of conversation, I think that would be a real achievement.  Right now, we constantly use data as if they are a perfect representation of what we value  completion rate  no, you are talking about the two-year completion rate for full time students.   That applies to one fifth of your student body.   If we can use data not as perfect reflections of the concept or value we are talking about and incorporate them more into our conversations about our work, we would be in a much better place.  That has a chance of actually affecting completion rates.  Tracking by itself, the choice of metrics, no.  The profusion of dashboards throughout the institution  not even.  You can make all the dashboards you want with all the metrics that are click and drop, benchmarked or not benchmarked, but until you get people thinking about those data as being the food for thought, rather than static measurements that are uncontestable and unchanging e much.   Other Themes Expressed by Some Study Participants Getting the right people on the bus and in the right seats. Both the Provost, Rachel, and the Vice-President of Administration and Finance, Susan, commented on the importance of hiring the right people that fit the culture the College is working to develop.  Rachel spoke at length of the connection between hiring the right people, organizational change, and creating a culture that is focused on student success at the college:   We absolutely believe that we absolutely have to have the right people on the bus, and that was this thing that we changed last year, and it is a huge amount of work, but it has made, I believe, a huge impact.  But we feel like the leadership team is the keeper of the culture here at the institution, so we know, every full time employee, faculty member -- not part-time employee -- even coaches, have to go through a final interview with the leadership team before they are hired.  And those that are on the staff side, they have a six-month probation period, and before the end of that six months they have to come back to the leadership team to do another review to see if we are going to keep them.  At the end of the day, if you have the right people, you can accomplish anything.     Good to Great (Collins, 2001), which is one of the books the leadership council has read and discussed.   There appears to be consensus among the leadership council that the leadership philosophies outlined in Good to Great are fundamental to the culture of student success they are striving to create at the College.  main principles is that great organizations have talented, motivated people doing work that matches  73  their skills and interests.   Susan, the Vice-President of Administration and Human Resources, echoed  I think one of the most important things we have done in the last six months is that the most important thing we can do to effect students is hire the right people.  We have to hire people that will automatically go above and beyond, what it is going to take, to make sure that the barriers in front of a student, help them succeed.    She expressed a clear commitment to hiring faculty and staff who understand and believe in servant leadership (Greenleaf, 1977):   You have been vetted, but now we are trying to determine if you fit our culture, so we want to know about you, what makes you tick, at the end of the day, what do you want to be known for, remembered for?  What do you want people to say about you?  And I can tell you, hands down, it is the people that say, I want to leave this place a better place.  I want to help people.  I am who we want.    Revisions to program and faculty review processes have been significant.  According to Thomas, the Dean of Occupational Studies, over the last two years the College significantly revised both the program review process and the faculty review process to focus much more directly on retention and completion rates:   Two years ago, we redid our program review process.  Every program has to go through it.  And there is tons of data.  And we had the faculty involved and we said, look, what can we do to make this process better?  It is every five years and it was a ton of work.  They spent tons of time chasing data and filling the form out.  And it was not getting anything done.  So we sat down and we talked with them about important data points.  We all agreed.  And the biggest are completers  that is a huge score, completers, success all of that.  And what we did was, in that conversation, the data form, which we changed, and it was a little of a duh moment, I.R. populates everything.  So once we all agreed on these data points, all around, mostly student success, completers, your grading averages, what are you doing different, why are on-line better, everything was populated, so now the faculty could sit and analyze, so they know about every five years, or even more, because they are getting this data constantly, your score card is highest score is completers.  Now in program review it is the individual faculty looking at completers, all the way down to certificates.  It is now a part of their normal thing that I am APRP, Annual Performance Review Process.  On that is their completions in their classes, so 74  every point, the individual class level, the instructors and I are looking at their grades, on the program level every five years you are being judged, and you actually get a score on it, and then it goes all the way up to the institution.  At every level, we are looking at it, so the program changing the students, but the faculty know how important it is. It is part of their normal conversation.  So it really is the beginning of that culture change you are talking about.  They know this is normally a part of what they are being looked at.  Faculty used to just turn in grades.  And who knew what happened or who knew how their grades were.  But again, every year, I sit down with every one of my faculty for an hour once a year, and they have to fill this huge form out, all their grades are populated.  I see all the grades they gave.  And there are charts and patterns, and we discuss their success rates; what success rate? Was this just a weird anomaly?  Then in the program review, it is how many completers did you have, and the institutional scorecard.  So the Program Review process was the biggest, and the faculty review process, we just started meeting with them this year, and we just started giving them their grades, and us looking at them. This is the first time ever.  It connects all the way up and correlates.   Students supporting students to improve completion.  In addition to her role as an English faculty member, Mary also serves as the faculty advisor for Phi Theta Kappa at Great Lakes College.  Phi Theta Kappa is the national honor society for community college students.   national initiatives is Community College Completion Corps, or C4 (http://www.cccompletioncorps.org/).  As a part of this initiative, Phi Theta Kappa students at GLC went into many Foundations Studies classes to discuss with the students the importance of earning their associate degree.   Because of this program, many students at Great Lakes College made a pledge to complete their associate degree.   Though it is difficult to determine the impact of this pledge on student retention and completion rates, the program and the pledge provide awareness to many students about the importance of completing an associate degree or certificate.   The student pledge is:  I accept the responsibility for my commitment to complete a college credential; I understand its importance to my future success; and I pledge to help one other student make and honor the same commitment.     Sign Pledge:    From Commit to Complete website:  http://www.cccompletioncorps.org/.      75   African-American students, many of whom come from a large city about eighty miles from the GLC campus.   These two organizations, one for men and one for women, include second year student mentors building positive relationships with the first year students in the group.   The retention and completion rates for the students in these peer mentoring groups are significantly higher than for those students who choose not to join these groups.    ompletion   The data suggest that, over the last ten to twelve years, many faculty, staff and leaders at Great Lakes College have been focused on improving the percentage of students that earn an associate degree.  The College s completion rate, including the establishment of the Foundations Studies department and the Foundations Studies Committee, Learning Communities, supplemental advising, a First Year Seminar, and Blended Communities.  Though the results have not been as significant as most at the College would like, this work has resulted in very real increases in the percentage of students who either earn a degree or transfer to a bachelor degree-granting school within six years of starting at Great Lakes College (see figure 3 below).   community colleges in the state where it is located, it is difficult to suggest that the performance of the College with respect to that the work of the Foundations Studies Committee, the Leadership Council, the Student Services staff, the Guided Pathways implementation team, the retention team and others is having a positive impact on the percentage of students that earn a degree.  That impact, however, has not been significant enough to position Great Lakes College in the upper quartile with regard to associate degree completion.   76    Figure 3.  Percentage of Students Earning a Degree or Transferring After 6 Years  Summary of Findings: Conclusion  The dominant coalition at Great Lakes College includes both the Leadership Council and the Foundation Studies Committee.  The data suggest that Great Lakes College is, and has been for several years, committed to student success.  One indicator of student success that the College strives to improve is the percentage of students who earn an associate degree.  There is an understanding at the College that improving the quality of the relationships between faculty, staff and students at the College is a critical issue in improving the CollImproving the quality of the relationships is not, however, sufficient.  The leadership, faculty and staff understand that revising the curricula and giving students fewer options and more direct, completion-focused academic pathways is equally important.  Given that close to 80% of the new students at the College need developmental education, the dominant coalition understands that, if the College is going to improve the associate degree completion rate, it is essential to develop new approaches for those students who come to the College not academically prepared to work at a college level.  The issues which need to be addressed so that significantly more students persist and earn a degree are complex and interrelated.   Effectively 38%45%47%52%57%57%59%0%10%20%30%40%50%60%70%80%90%100%2002200320042005200620072008Percent of StudentsEarning a Degree or Transfering After 6 Years 77  addressing these issues will require faculty, leaders, and administrators to think differently about the college experience on multiple levels.  Significantly improving associate degree completion rates may require a fundamental redesign of the community college experience.   78  Chapter Five: Discussion The goal of this study is to enhance our understanding of the dominant logic and the dominant coalition at a community college, and how that dominant coalition and dominant logic influence associate degree completion at the college.  Specifically, this study attempts to address three questions:   1. associate degree completion rate?   2. What are the shared mental models of the dominant coalition?  3. What is the relationship between the dominant logic of the dominant coalition and the  Prahalad and Bettis (1986) proposed that an organizmodel in the organization.  This shared mental model serves as a kind of data filter in an organization and determines what information is most valued and acted upon.  The dominant coalition includes those indiviBettis also posited that the dominant coalition in a diversified firm is comprised of the senior managers of the firm.  The current study suggests that, at Great Lakes College, the dominant coalition may include faculty and staff who are not senior executives at the College.  It may include faculty and mid-level administrators (deans, assistant deans, directors and managers).   If true, then to understand a community one must first understand who is a part of the dominant coalition one can develop an nding the shared mental models of the members of the dominant coalition.   At Great Lakes College, in addition to the Leadership Council, the Foundations Studies Committee is a significant part of the dominant coalition and plays a central role in focusing     79  The Dominant Coalition at Great Lakes College   The data from this study suggest that, with respect to student success and completion, the dominant coalition at the College includes all or part of the Foundations Studies Committee, and may include a few other individuals.   In initially reviewing information about Great Lakes College, I identified three groups which were likely to be involved in strategic decision-making related to associate degree completion at the College: 1) the Leadership Council; 2) the Foundations Studies Committee; and 3) the Strategic Planning Council.  The Provost indicated that the Foundation Studies Committee was the main group on campus with the most direct influence on what was happening at GLC with regard to associate degree completion.   In discussing with the Provost who should be invited to participate in this study, I requested that the invitees include senior leaders, mid-level administrators, and faculty.  I also asked that those invited to participate in the study who were not on the Leadership Council be involved in degree completion in some way, and/or be a member of the Foundations Studies Committee or Strategic Planning Council.   One of the invited participants, Don, is a faculty member who serves on the Strategic Planning Council and is not a member of the Foundations Studies Committee.  I asked Don to talk about how the Strategic Planning Council works together to identify strategic issues and address them.  He did not believe the Strategic Planning Council was a very effective group.  For example, meetings were often cancelled within forty-eight hours of the scheduled meeting time.  Don indicated that he believed that the College was committed to improving the percentage of students earning an associate degree but he did not believe the Strategic Planning Council played a significant role in informing or advancing degree completion as a strategic priority.   He believed that the President and the Provost were committed to improving student success at the College.   participants suggested that the Strategic Planning Council was significant with regard to 80  efforts to improve associate degree completion, suggest the Strategic Planning Council is not a part of the dominant coalition at Great Lakes College.     There may be other members of the dominant coalition not interviewed for this study.  For example, Susan, the Vice-President of Administration and Human Resources, spoke about the Director of the Multicultural Center and his work with African-American students on the GLC campus.  According to Susan this director played a central role in building relationships between the College and several high schools in a large city about eighty miles from the GLC campus that has resulted in the College now having about three hundred students attending from these high schools. GLC built dormitories to provide housing for these students and the Multicultural Center has developed peer mentoring programs with the goal of improving student retention and completion.  It may be the case that this be said, based on the data, is the dominant coalition at Great Lakes College includes the Foundations Studies Committee, the Leadership Council, and possibly a few other individuals, such as the Director of Multicultural Affairs and the Assistant Dean of Student Services.   Given that faculty and staff can choose to join the Foundations Studies Committee if they are interested, being a part of the dominant coalition at Great Lakes College has some level of fluidity; faculty and staff can choose to attend and participate, or not.  This is similar to a complex system (Marion & Uhl-Bein, 2001; Morgan, 2006) where the components of the system are in a state of flux.  It may be the case that dominant coalitions can best be understood as evolving systems and any studies intending to describe them need to appreciate that observations made in a given time frame may not be relevant in another time frame.  More research is required to understand more completely how the dominant coalition changes as members join and leave the coalition, and the impact of these changes     81  The Shared Mental Model of the Dominant Coalition at Great Lakes College Bolman and Deal (2003) suggested there are four cognitive frames, or shared mental models, that describe most organizations: the structural frame, the human resource frame, the political frame and the symbolic frame.  In most organizations, and complex organizations particularly, all of the frames operate.   At the time of the study, Great Lakes College had made two significant strategic decisions intended to improve associate degree completion:  1) implement Guided Pathways; and 2) increase the number of academic advisors from six to eighteen.  President Jones indicated that his goal was to -actions suggest he is a leader who understands the importance of using multiple frames to improve the    The Guided Pathways model is about curriculum design and simplified, goal-oriented academic program planning.  It is intended to address the structure of the academic experience for students by reducing the number of choices students need to make, and placing each student into the academic plan proven to be the most successful for other students with similar backgrounds and similar academic goals.  The Guided Pathways model is an initiative grounded in the structural frame.   The increase in the advising staff (now called Student Success Navigators) is intended to significantly reduce the number of students each advisor works with so that the Navigators can develop stronger relationships with the students on their caseloads.  Several participants indicated a belief that the quality of relationships between the Student Success Navigators and the students they advise cannot be improved without first addressing the number of students each advisor is expected to work with over the course of an academic year.  Several also expressed a belief that, by moving to a case management advising model, reducing caseloads by two-thirds, and with appropriate training, the Student Success Navigators will be able to work with students on a more personal basis, students will get advice tailored to their specific needs, and ultimately, student retention and completion rates will 82  improve.   In the caseload model being implemented at Great Lakes College, the Student Success Navigators are expected to be more proactive in developing relationships with students. As opposed to waiting for students to schedule an appointment, in the new model, the Student Success Navigators will be taking initiative to work with students identified as needing support.  There is research that supports the positive impact of case management advising on student retention and completion (www.nacada.ksu.edu).    relationships between college staff and students is an approach grounded in the human resources frame.   Though Dr. Jones appears to value a collegial leadership style, it is also apparent that he has a clear sense of how he believes the College needs to adapt to a changing set of expectations, and will move forward, at times, without support from faculty.  Though he appears to understand the importance of creating a real team (Bensimon & Neumann, 1993) with the Leadership Council, it is not evident that he seeks or values faculty input regarding some of the initiatives the College pursues.  He understands that the Board of Trustees is the group that directly controls his future at Great Lakes College, and he does not proceed with any major initiative without clear support from the Board.   From a political perspective (Bolman & Deal, 2003), the transition from advisors to Student Success Navigators could be interpreted as a way to give administrative staff greater control and influence on relationships with students, and to reduce the importance of the relationships between faculty and students.  There was general agreement among the study participants that anything that could be done to enhance relationships was positive, and hiring the Student Success Navigators was perceived by both faculty and staff as a positive initiative for the College.   Though faculty may have less influence on student behavior as the influence of the Student Success Navigators grows, there appears to be an understanding among faculty, senior leaders and administrators that the overall impact on student retention and completion will be positive.    83  It does not appear that the faculty were supportive of the Early College that opened in the fall of 2014.  The decision to pursue the Early College was identified by faculty as a reason for a vote of no confidence in early 2014.   None of the faculty interviewed mentioned the Early College, or expressed a lack of confidence in Dr. Jones.   If there was significant concern about this initiative, it seems to have dissipated in the time between this vote of no confidence and the time of this study, or the faculty who   It is important to note that this study focused on the shared mental models of the dominant coalition at Great Lakes College.  Most of those interviewed for this study were either members of the dominant coalition at Great Lakes College, or supportive of the dominant coalition.  The study participants did not include faculty, staff, or senior leaders who were not fundamentally supportive of President Frank Jones and/or the strategic priorities of the Leadership Council.  The vote of no confidence for Dr. Jones was supported by at least 90% of those who voted.  It is reasonable to conclude that those faculty and staff not supportive of the strategic priorities developed by Dr. Jones and the Leadership Council are not a part of the dominant coalition at the College.  The model proposed by Prahalad and Bettis (1986) assumes that the dominant coalition includes the senior-level executives in a firm.  These senior level leaders end up seeing the world from a particular perspective and develop a shared mental model that influences the level of profitability of the various business units within the firm.   Their model assumes a largely structural perspective with regard to dominant coalitions  that is to say, the dominant coalition can be identified by looking at the organizational chart for the firm.   What seems evident at Great Lakes College is a dominant coalition that is grounded more deeply in the political, human resources, and cultural frames.  An administrator or faculty member who is not a part of the Leadership Council can join the dominant coalition by participating in the Foundations Studies Committee.  It is reasonable to believe there were faculty and staff at the College who, at the time of this study, were not supportive of Dr. Jones.   It is also reasonable to believe that 84  none of these faculty was asked to participate in this study because participants were initially identified by the provost.   The shared mental models of those faculty and staff who actively opposed Dr. Jones is an interesting topic for investigation, but beyond the scope of this study.    The Provost, Rachel,  feel like the leadership team is the keeper of the culture Culture is one of the central concepts of the symbolic frame as are meaning, ceremony, and stories (Bolman and Deal, 2003).  One of the primary ways the Leadership Council maintains the culture is by interviewing all full-time faculty and staff candidates before the candidate is hired.  This gives the Leadership Council the opportunity to determine for themselves if candidates understand and embrace the Collalues (see Appendix C), and understand that, once hired, they will be evaluated based on performance relative to those beliefs and values. Another example of the way GLC reinforces its culture and works to develop a shared mental model among faculty and staff is commitment to an orientation program for all newly-campuses, and lunches with senior leaders and Board of Trustees members.   One primary goal of the orientation program is to clearly communicate the culture they are working to develop at the College  one focused on student success that values the importance of faculty and staff in building and sustaining that culture.    The data for this study suggests that the shared mental model of the dominant coalition at Great Lakes College is focused on student success.  The dominant coalition members shared an understanding that close to 80% of incoming students had developmental gaps in math, reading, and/or writing.  If the College is going to improve its associate degree completion rate, faculty, staff, and leadership need to develop a shared understanding regarding the most effective and efficient strategies to assist these students.      85  did not express any interest in moving away from both pillars of the mission of community colleges: access and success.   TheStudy participants did not generally express an interest in improving completion rates by raising admissions standards; most understood and embraced the fact that Great Lakes College needed to serve those students who would not be successful at a state university.   They also understood that improving associate degree completion was not simple or easy, and that there are a range of reasons - academic, financial, personal, social and developmental - why students do not complete degrees.  Significantly improving degree completion requires approaches that address all of these issues.   Complexity Theory and the dominant logic at Great Lakes College.  The missions of community colleges in the 21st century are becoming more complex (Eddy, 2010).  Though community colleges have always espoused a dual mission of access and success, funding in the 20th century was significantly determined by college enrollment, or the access element of the mission.  Retention and completion rates were not significant in determining state appropriations.  With performance-based funding becoming prevalent in many states in the last decade, the need to focus on both elements of the mission has taken on greater significance.  Associate degree completion rates are now an important metric in many state funding models (Dougherty & Reddy, 2011), and increasingly the case in the state where Great Lakes College is located.    Great Lakes College has worked to revise its dominant logic to appropriately focus on both access and success.  It developed structures and systems, such as the Foundations Studies Committee and the First Year Seminar to improve retention and completion rates.  It revised the program review process to focus more directly on program completion.  The Leadership Council, faculty, and staff understand that the College needs to improve all measures of student success, while maintaining a 86  commitment to access.  They also do not expect state or federal funding to increase, so they need to improve their outcomes with no expectation of additional resources.  The study participants understand that access and success are not mutually exclusive.  For the College to effectively serve its community, both must be supported and advanced.  suggest that Great Lakes College is developing systems, processes, and a culture intended to align with the requirements of an increasingly complex environment.   Given the need to improve multiple outcomes with fixed resources, the models and approaches of Complexity Theory (CT) (Marion, 1999; Marion & Uhl-Bien, 2001; Schneider & Somers, 2006) are increasingly relevant.  Data from the current study suggest that Great Lakes College has tacitly integrated some of the concepts advanced in Complexity Theory.   For example, any faculty or staff member who is interested can join the Foundations Studies Committee and become a part of the dominant coalition at Great Lakes College.  From a complexity theory perspective, organizations are understood to be in an on- 2006).  Though today the clearly defined role and charter, this was not always the case.  There was a time, perhaps a half dozen years ago, when it was a more informal group of faculty and a few administrators getting together to discuss student success  specifically, asking what could be done to improve the success of those students not ready for college-level course work.  t any faculty or staff member who wanted to participate could participate.    One of the fundamental propositions of complexity theory (Table 1, p. 13) is the emergence of common understanding in interacting systems.   The high level of congruence in the themes expressed by the senior leaders, faculty, and administrators who participated in the study suggests that the leadership (broadly defined) at Great Lakes College practices some of the behaviors required of leaders  87  in complex organizations.  The Leadership Council and the Foundations Studies Committee appear to -Bein, 2001, p. 395).    From a Complexity Theory perspective (Marion, 1999; Marion & Uhl-Bien, 2001; Schneider & Somers, 2006) there is a clear distinction between leaders and leadership.  Leaders are traditionally understood to be those with a position in an organization near the top of the organization chart. Leaculture is created that values leadership at all levels of the organization.  At least in the perspectives of participants in this study, the culture of Great Lakes College is like this.  A key concept in Complexity Theory is the notion of tags (Marion & Uhl-Bien, 2001).  A leadership tag is any structure or information that catalyzes (enables or speeds up) certain social behaviors.  A tag can include a new technology, an idea, a symbol (such as a flag), a symbolic act, a group myth or a belief; it can also be a leader.   The Foundations Studies Committee served as a tag with respect to student success.  The Committee has, for several years, provided a place for faculty and staff to think and learn together about student success, with a particular emphasis on students who test below college freshmen levels in math, reading and writing.    The Committee was not created because the president or another senior leader suggested such a committee would be helpful.  Rather, it began as an informal group of faculty and staff who decided to meet together because they believed they could do better in serving the needs  Committee now has a formal position in the quality that suggests the faculty and staff at Great Lakes College are committed to student success, and wilstudents.   88  There is also a belief, expressed by several of the study participants, that Great Lakes College is a truly exceptional community college that should be considered in the highest tier of community colleges in the country.   This belief is supported by the number of initiatives the College pursues in order to better serve its students.   It could reasonably be argued that a commitment to activity does not, by measures which would place Great Lakes College in the top quartile of community colleges in its home state.    the number of academic advisors also serves as a tag.  On a practical level, the addition of twelve new Student Success Navigators gives the College new capacity to develop more intentional, goal-focused r  Looking through the symbolic frame (Bolman & Deal, 2003), this initiative demonstrates clearly to the faculty and staff at Great Lakes College that college leadership places significant value on improving retention and completion rates.  The College is demonstrating a commitment to practice the values it espouses.    Organizational learning and degree completion.   Shifting from a focus on access to a dual focus on access and success suggests that community colleges may need to exhibit the attributes of a learning organization (Argyris & Schön, 1978; Lenning, et. al., 2013; Senge, 1990; Torres & Preskill, 2001) in order to adapt to a changing environment.   There was a shared belief among the study participants that fairly fundamental organizational development was required in order to improve the with respect to degree completion was acceptable. They talked about a commitment to continuous improvement, and a willingness to experiment and try new approaches to improve student success and degree completion at the College.  Several study participants expressed that, even though the College was making some progress, more progress demonstrated by significantly higher completion rates was possible, and it was incumbent on the College to improve.  This shared commitment to improvement  89  suggests an understanding of the need to change fundamental insights and principles, similar to what Argyris and Schön (1978) describe as double-loop learning.   Participants seem to understand that the  There is hope among parGuided Pathways, Student Success Navigators, Blended Communities, and revisions to the First Year ggest those in incorporate a much sharper focus on student success and degree completion.   It will require a few years to know how successful the sum total of all of these initiatives will be, not only in increasing the  Swieringa and Wierdsma (1992) in writing about organizational learning suggested that two metaphors represent most organizations  the Tourist metaphor and the Trekker metaphor.   The tourist metaphor is representative of organizations that focus on planning and management.  It is akin to the vacationer who has a clear agenda and schedule, and knows precisely what she will be doing each hour of a trip - where she will be visiting, eating, and sleeping, and what will be accomplished on the trip.  The trekker metaphor is the traveler with an extremely loose agenda.  The trekker does not know exactly how she will get from where she begins to her destination.   She prepares for the journey by packing a rucksack with some important provisions including a compass and a good map to assure she does not lose her way.   She has a goal in mind, but is much less clear on how she actually will reach her goal.  She knows the destination is on the other side of the mountain, so she starts her journey walking toward the mountains.  In the trekker model, what is learned along the journey is as significant as reaching the destination.  The trekker appreciates that the joy of the journey is understanding that she does not know precisely what she will be doing each hour of the day.   She is open to letting the journey itself 90  determine what she will learn and how and where she will travel each day.  The comments of several participants suggest they have embraced (at least to a degree) the trekker mindset.  They are committed    They also appreciate that getting from where they are today to that goal is going to involve a significant level of organizational learning.  They are going to need to experiment and be willing to accept that some experiments will not be successful.  There will be issues and obstacles along the way. I would suggest there are some parallels between these two metaphors for organizational change and the two sensemaking frames proposed by Eddy (2003).  The operational frame would be most helpful for individuregarding the daily events and activities.  The visionary frame would be more appropriate for those who  these individuals prefer not knowing the daily schedule, and would rather let the plan emerge (Mintzberg, 1991) as they begin the journey. The Foundations Studies Committee at Great Lakes College has, over the course of years, experiment, and they understand that some of the experiments will not be successful.    Over the course of the last decade this Committee has completed many pilot projects in an effort to improve student success.  Some were successful and have been institutionalized, others were not and have been discontinued. There seems to be a commitment at the College to address issues and overcome obstacles based on a shared understanding that the goal  improved student success - is worth the time and energy invested.  As Rachel commented when discussing all that was going on at the College:  Obviously next fall is going to be really clunky, I am sure, but after we get past it a year or so, I think this place is going to look completely different.  The Pathways group has said that this is fundamentally changing what we are doing and, across campus, it changes everything.  It changes admissions, it changes orientation, it changes the classes, it changes the instructors, it changes the support services.  So this is as clocollege experience).     91  The shared mental models of the leadership team at Great Lakes College.  If Great Lakes College is going to sharpen its focus on and commitment to associate degree completion, the Leadership Council at the College will need to function as a real team, and exhibit all three functions of real teams identified by Bensimon and Neumann (1993) in their extensive study of leadership teams: the utilitarian function, the expressive function and the cognitive function (see Table 2, p. 16).  what can be done to address those priorities.  Real teams are committed to thinking, planning, and acting as a team.  The data from this study suggest that the Leadership Council at Great Lakes College is a real team that exhibits all three of these functions.  At the meeting I attended, the agenda for the day was full, and time was allocated for discussion of all important agenda items.  President Jones encouraged the other Leadership Council members to provide their input and suggestions throughout the meeting.   Team thinking, as opposed to groupthink (Bensimon & Neumann, 1993; Janis, 1972) was observed in both the Leadership Council meeting and in the Foundations Studies Committee meeting.  In both meetings, the meeting facilitators (President Jones for the Leadership Council meeting, and Fred for the Foundations Studies Committee) encouraged divergent perspectives and sought to develop consensus on the discussion topics.   President Jones also appears committed to providing regular opportunities for the Leadership Council members to learn, think, and plan together.  This is evidenced by the books the Leadership Council reads and discusses together and their semi-annual planning retreats.  Though he appears to make shared leadership a priority, it is also evident that President Jones does not like to spend what he considers to be excessive time assuring that faculty and staff are committed to his priorities.   There are, I suggest, differences between working to achieve buy-developing shared priorities in the dominant coalition, and having shared understanding and 92  commitment throughout the College.   There was a shared understanding among the study participants that Great Lakes College has been committed over the last decade to improving student success generally, and associate degree completion specifically.   It is also clear that this commitment is not just Committee.   The number of initiatives pursued by the College intended to improve student success is significant.  Great Lakes College would likely qualify.  At the same time, the impact of these initiatives on degree completion has been modest.  The comments of the Provost and the Vice-President of Administration suggest that some initiatives and projects pursued at the College are largely the priorities of the President, and may not be deeply shared by other Leadership Council members and/or faculty and staff at the College.   The Provost, Rachel, is primarily responsible to assure there is sufficient support in the College to move forward on those initiatives which require support from faculty and staff.  She works closely with the two academic deans at the College, as well as with the co-chairs of the Foundations Studies Committee and others to assure that the vision and priorities of the President are communicated and understood.  There appears to be positive, trusting relationships between members of the Leadership Council and the Foundations Studies Committee, with the Provost as the primary link between these two groups.  The data suggest that she has played an important role in creating a dominant coalition at Great Lakes College that is committed to student success.    The dominant coalition as a Professional Learning Community.   The comments of the Provost and several study participants identified the Foundations Studies Committee as the group most directly responsible for improving student success and increasing the percentage of students that earn an associate degree.  The Foundations Studies committee is designed so that smaller sub-committees or work teams can develop and implement strategies intended to improve student outcomes.   The  93  outcomes they are working to address would include mean grade point average in developmental and gateway courses, course completion rates, course pass rates, student retention rates and associate degree completion rates.  The Foundations Studies Committee exhibits many attributes of a Professional staff, or both organized into small study, planning, and implementation groups for collaboration on developing and implementing strategies for optimal student learning (p. 7).    There are several reasons that may explain why the Foundations Studies Committee has been able to play a leading role in shaping a dominant logic at Great Lakes College focused on student success.  The Foundations Studies Committee includes a roughly equal mix of administrators and faculty.  Having faculty and administrators on the Foundations Studies Committee working together helps build relationships between the committee members, improves communication within the committee and with other groups on the GLC campus, develops a common understanding of those initiatives positively impacting student retention, persistence, and degree completion, as well as an understanding of those initiatives that are not effective and should be discontinued.  Working together, faculty, administrators and senior leaders develop a shared understanding of the issues that need to be addressed if Great Lakes College is going to improve its performance with respect to student success and the measures of student success.  There does not appear to be a lot of finger-pointing or assigning blame at Great Lakes College with regards to the associate degree completion rate at the College.   There is a shared commitment to understand what actually makes a difference with respect to student learning and degree completion, and to do what the data suggest will lead to improved performance.  The co-chairs of the Foundations Studies Committee have been with the College for many years (Fred for thirteen years, and Abigail for thirty-five years).   They share a commitment to improving the faculty member and an administrator.   Both Fred and Abigail are trusted by the faculty, administrative 94  staff, and leadership at the College.   Fred and Abigail share an understanding that the Foundations Studies Committee will only be effective if members of the Committee believe that their input matters, and the work of the Committee will be supported by college leadership.  The co-chairs work with the Committee to prioritize which projects or initiatives they will pursue.  In short, Fred and Abigail are talented team leaders who understand how to exercise leadership in a community college context.   Both the President and the Provost are a part of the Foundations Studies Committee.   Their membership on both the Leadership Council and the Foundations Studies Committee helps assure that the dominant coalition at Great Lakes College has a shared mental model, and the goals of the Leadership Council and the Foundations Studies Committee are consistently and appropriately aligned.    Constructive-developmental leadership theory and Great Lakes College.  About 300 faculty and help faculty and staff understand what they can do to assist students in learning to take greater personal responsibility for their lives and to help students develop academic and professional plans and goals they can follow and achieve.  The study participants expressed a conviction that improved completion rates were possible.   Some participants, such as Sarah, the lead faculty for Reading, believed that the most significant issue to address in order to improve completion rates was faculty behaviors not well suited to the needs of developmental students.  developed approaches that did not support persistence and completion.   A significant number of faculty were not skilled working with students who were not adequately prepared, academically or developmentally, for college level course work.  Faculty may have developed teaching styles effective with students who were well prepared in high school for college-level coursework, but these approaches did  students began college with developmental needs in math, reading and/or writing.   The faculty and staff interviewed generally expressed a belief that a high percentage of these students had the intellectual ability to be successful in  95  their college studies.  They came to the College, however, lacking in self-esteem, realistic goals, role models, and experience in a rigorous academic environment.   It seems that many of the students at GLC lack the requisite self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997) to be successful.  If GLC is going to significantly improve the graduation rate for these students, the data suggests that more will need to be done to appropriately equip both faculty and staff with relevant training and support.   Many of the faculty and staff would benefit from coaching or professional development focused on learning how to effectively engage students during their first semester and throughout their studies at the College that they might better assist students in developing not only the required academic skills to be successful, but also in academic goal setting and career planning.   The Relationship Between the Dominant Logic of the Dominant Coalition Performance with Respect to Associate Degree Completion at Great Lakes College Over the course of the last decade, Great Lakes College has improved the percentage of students that earn an associate degree at a rate of improvement consistent with trends in other community colleges in their state.  They developed a college culture that understands the importance of   They developed a dominant coalition that includes faculty, senior leaders, and administrators.  This coalition shares a commitment to improving the projects designed to improve this rate.   The study participants believe that improvement will require a fairly holistic redesign of the college experience that includes more directed placement of students into predetermined academic plans (the Guided Pathways model); strengthened relationships between students, faculty, advisors, and student support staff; and a clearer focus on supporting students in developing academic goals and plans that are well aligned with their skills, abilities, and strengths.  Those students not prepared to do college-level course work need more and better support.  This includes Blended Communities, a robust First Year Experience Course, and peer mentoring groups.  96  These peer mentoring groups are designed to serve as Student Learning Communities (Lenning, et al., 2013), in which the students support each other in achieving their academic and professional goals.  The study participants believe that the combined effect of all of these initiatives will, over time, transform the college experience so that a significantly higher percentage of students persist through their programs of study and earn an associate degree.  They are confident that they have, over the last decade, developed a fairly clear understanding of the changes they need to implement in order to improve the associate degree completion rate at Great Lakes College.   They are moving from a period of significant experimentation and learning into a period of implementation.  Though they know that organizational development and change is not easy, and there will be challenges along the way, participants in this study believe that the end result is worth the effort.    Great Lakes College is working to develop a dominant logic that is focused on both access and success.  There are a series of factors which help to explain why, over the last decade, the College faculty, leadership and administrative staff have worked to develop this dual focus.  Some of the external initiatives which have been important in the development of this dual focus would include performance-based funding, Achieving, The Dream, and, most recently, Guided Pathways.  Shifting a dominant logic, however, cannot be externally-driven.   Leaders, faculty and staff within the institution are the ones who determine how resources, time and attention will be focused.  The dominant coalition at Great Lakes College has developed, over the last several years, a shared mental model that embraces both access and success.     President Frank Jones expressed a commitment to creamean, student success ma- embraced some of the principles that have gained currency in the business literature, most specifically the writing of Jim Collins in (1994) .  flywheel.  Briefly, the idea is that organizations can struggle for many years attempting to initiate  97  change.  The results of significant effort can be difficult to discern.  Eventually, through continual work, the result of their effort is similar to a heavy flywheel beginning to turn.  At some point, the flywheel is turning at a high rate of speed.  It appears to be the case that the faculty, administrators, and leaders at Great Lakes College feel like they have been pushing a flywheel for several years in an effort to improve degree completion.   There is a belief that they have recently hit an inflection point in which their sustained effort is going to begin to yield tangible results in significantly improved completion rates.   The flywheel metaphor is used to underscore a fundamental inertia that can exist in organizations.  Great Lakes College has not experienced a high level of inertia over the last decade; both the Foundations Studies Committee and President Jones appear to have an action orientation though not always reflective.   This focus on action without appropriate reflection on the impact of some actions may help explain the vote of no confidence in early 2014.   A related issue may be the limited applicability of principles of business in a community college context.        that the public education system in the United States was not keeping pace with an increasingly globalized, knowledge-driven economy.  Though there are more students beginning college than was the case thirty years ago, the college completion rate has improved very slowly.   Near the core of this problem is the fact that about two-thirds of students coming to community colleges do not have the ability to begin their program of study with college-level courses because of remedial gaps in math, writing, and/or reading.  At Great Lakes College, this percentage is close to 80%.   understanding the dominant logic at Great Lakes College. In this model the college consists of three distinct components:  student outputs, student inputs, and the college environment:   98   Figure 4.  As-Environment-Outputs (I-E-O) model  In a meta-analysis of research on the impact of college on students, Astin (1970) concluded that much of the research did not appropriately take into account that the student populations at colleges and universities can vary significantly, so it is important to consider not only the impact of the environment on the student (relationship B), but also the differences in the students at individual institutions, and between different institutions, and how the environment will influence different types of students (relationships A shared understanding that the student body at Great Lakes College has some significant differences from student bodies at public universities and private colleges, and they have a shared commitment to creating a college experience designed to specifically meet the needs of these students.  With almost 80% of incoming freshmen needing developmental support, any strategies intended to improve degree completion must address the needs of these developmental students.  Though the dominant coalition has a shared understanding of the importance of improving success and completion rates for developmental students, it is not apparent that this commitment is widely shared beyond the dominant coalition.  The comments of several of the study participants suggest that there may be a significant cohort of faculty at Great Lakes College who believe the College has placed too great an emphasis on the needs of the developmental students.      99  The data are clear  the larger the developmental gap for the student, the smaller the probability that the student will earn a college degree.  Over the course of the last half century, most community colleges have established developmental education classes, programs or departments to help meet the needs of these students.  This approach focuses on the academic needs of these students.  It assumes that providing these students with appropriate remedial courses is a necessary and sufficient approach to address the problem.  The data from this study would suggest that the problem is more complex.   If community colleges are going to significantly improve degree completion rates, they must implement solutions that effectively address the needs of the students they are striving to serve.   This requires not only significant changes to the academic program planning process, (as outlined in the Guided Pathways model), significant improvement in the quality of relationships between faculty, advisors, and students, and significant revisions in First Year Seminars, it also requires leaders, administrators, faculty and staff to develop new habits of thinking and learning.  It will require more faculty to become like Sarah, the lead faculty for Reading at Great Lakes College, who has made it a priority to study reading instruction and is committed, not only to improving her own praxis as a reading instructor, but to do what she is can to assist other faculty in understanding the unique needs of their students, and how to effectively create learning environments in their classrooms.   The challenge at Great Lakes College (and at virtually all community colleges in the United States) is that full-time faculty have significant commitments beyond their teaLeadership Council, administrators, and advising staff at the College.  There is a need for senior leaders and administrators to become scholar-practitioners with regard to degree completion.  They need to create an environment that supports faculty and staff throughout the College becoming more reflective in their practice.  This can be extremely difficult to accomplish in an environment of stable or reduced resources coupled with increasing accountability for outcomes.    100  The dominant coalition at Great Lakes College includes faculty, senior leaders and administrators.  It exhibits many of the attributes of a Professional Learning Community (Lenning, et. al., 2013).   Community colleges may need to deepen their understanding of experiential learning (Kolb, 1984) and its implication for organizational development.  As Kolb posited (1984), experiential learning is a cyclical process that requires action, reflection, conceptualization, and experimentation.  Great Lakes College may be advised to shift some of its focus from the northwest quadrant of the Kolb Learning Cycle (focusing on active experimentation and concrete experience) to the southeast quadrant (focusing on reflective observation and abstract conceptualization).  As the College works to create a dual focus on student access and success, it will be critical that faculty, administrators and senior leaders learn to reflect, plan, and act as a team so that the initiatives which are pursued are able to achieve their desired outcomes.      Figure 5.  Kolycle  101   The findings of this study suggest that community colleges that are committed to developing a dominant logic that successfully achieves both access and success are advised to consider creating a dominant coalition that includes faculty, staff, and senior leaders.  It is also important that the dominant coalition understands that their role is not simply to learn together, but must lead and coordinate the implementation of initiatives which will accomplish the college dual missions.   Implications for Future Research  The findings from this study suggest that community college dominant coalitions may include faculty and mid-level administrators in addition to senior leaders.  More research is needed to determine the membership of dominant coalitions at other community colleges generally, and the  Dominant coalitions may best be understood not as static groups of a small number of individuals, but as groups that are fairly dynamic and fluid.  Dominant coalitions may change as membership changes and group learning occurs.   How changes in membership and group learning influence the shared mental model of the dominant coalition, and ultimate, is a question that requires additional research at multiple community colleges.    Research from the United Kingdom (Smith, et al., 2002) proposed three dominant logics in further education colleges: stability-optimizing, market-optimizing, and resource-optimizing. The findings of the current study suggest that the two most prevalent dominant logics in the United States could most simply be described as an access orientation and a student success orientation.  More research at multiple sites would be needed to determine if the three dominant logics identified in the United Kingdom are also prevalent in the United States.  In the second half of the 20th century, U.S. community colleges generally, and Great Lakes College specifically, had dominant logics that were focused on providing access to those students who could not easily access the state university system (Boggs, 2011).  Since the beginning of the 21st century, with the dawn of the knowledge economy, 102  community colleges generally, and Great Lakes College specifically, are being required to focus on improved performance on both student access and student success metrics (Dougherty, 2009).  (2003) research on community college sensemaking frames coupled with the access and/or success orientation, suggest possible dominant logics in U.S. community colleges.  More research is needed to determine if these are, in fact, the most helpful descriptors in understanding dominant logics in U.S. community colleges.   In the business sector, research has proposed a shift from a product-focused dominant logic to one focused on relationships (Arnould, 2007; Tokman & Beitelspacher, 2011; Vargo & Lusch, 2004).  The findings at Great Lakes College suggest that a similar shift is occurring as the College attempts to transition from a focus on enrollment and a broad selection of course offerings to a focus on goal-oriented relationships.   More research is needed to determine if the two prevalent dominant logics in U.S. community colleges could best be described as the transactional dominant logic and the relational dominant logic  If we accept that dominant coalitions may include faculty and staff in addition to senior leaders, then it is important to determine if the groups which are a part of the dominant coalition have shared mental models that are consistent and aligned, or if the mental models of these groups are in any ways inconsistent or incongruent.  It may be the case that community colleges that are able to effectively revise their dominant logic to focus on degree completion are those colleges which have well-aligned shared mental models within the dominant coalition.  More research is needed to understand this.    As Comer (1995) positedcan occur withoCommunity colleges committed to improving completion rates will likely be colleges that have committed to organizational renewal and development, or as Sweiringa and Wiersma e 21).      103  If organizational development requires triple loop learning, then community colleges that are successfully revising their dominant logic to focus on both access and success will have both Student Learning Communities and Professional Learning Communities that are real and engaged.   There will be a relationship between the presence of learning communities and the adaptive capacity of the community college.  The dominant general management logics matrix may look like table 5 (below).  Those community colleges most able to create cultures of student completion will be those colleges which are able to develop student and professional learning communities which are able to question their basic insights and principles, and create new principles focused jointly on issues of access and success.  In this perspective, adaptive community colleges are moving toward triple loop learning.   Learning Community Type None Single Double Triple Professional Learning Communities        Student Learning Communities        Learning Organization         Table 5. Proposed community college dominant logics matrix It is reasonable to conclude that those colleges that are able to shift their dominant logic to one that is Constructive-Developmental have dominant coalitions with a shared mental model focused on addressing the developmental issues in the lives of students, and creating a learning environment that facilitates self-authorship (Baxter-Magolda, 1999) among students, faculty and staff.  The dominant coalition likely exhibits the attributes of a Professional Learning Community (Lenning, et al., 2013).  The current research suggests that, if the associate degree completion rate at American community colleges is going to increase, community colleges may need to develop both Student Learning Communities and Professional Learning Communities (Lenning, et. al., 2013) that effectively engage students, faculty, mid-level administrators and senior leaders.  As these Learning Communities align and grow in collective efficacy (Bandura, 1997), community colleges will become Learning Organizations (Lenning, et. al., 2013; Senge, 1990; Torres & Preskill, 2001) with the capacity to adapt to a changing environment.    104                APPENDICES    105  Appendix A RESEARCH PARTICIPANT INFORMATION AND INFORMED CONSENT FORM  Study Title: Understanding the influence of dominant general management logic on community college degree completion rates   Principal Investigator:   Dr. Marilyn Amey, Professor  Department of Educational Administration, Michigan State University  418 Erickson Hall, East Lansing, MI 48224, (517) 432-1056, amey@msu.edu  Researcher: Lucian Leone  Michigan State University  (517) 706-9799, leoneluc@msu.edu.    PURPOSE OF RESEARCH:  The purpose of this research is in fulfillment of a dissertation requirement for the Ph.D. in higher, adult, and lifelong education.  The goal of this study is to understand how community college faculty and staff create institutional cultures which lead to improved degree completion rates.   PROCEDURES:      You will be asked to participate in two in-person interviews between July 2015 and November 2015 in which you would answer semi-structured, open-ended questions regarding your experiences as a faculty or staff member working to improve the three year associate degree completion rate at your community college.        The researcher will be observing several meetings in which a topic of discussion is degree completion. You may be participant in one or more of these meetings.   POTENTIAL BENEFITS:   Given that improving the percentage of students who earn an associate degree has a direct impact on the employability of graduates, you are contributing to enriching knowledge in this field.     It is possible that you may not benefit from participation in this study.  106  POTENTIAL RISKS AND DISCOMFORTS:   You may experience the following risks or discomforts: o There is a minimum risk for invasion of privacy since most of the communication between the researcher and you as the participant will occur in person.    o Several precautions will be taken to protect your confidentiality as a participant. For example, documents containing responses, such as interview transcripts, will be devoid of any identifiable markers.  Pseudonyms will be assigned or selected to maintain privacy of your identity.  Such information will only be used to contact you in case of an emergency.  o There may be unforeseen risks that are not known at the present time.  PRIVACY AND CONFIDENTIALITY:   Information produced by this study will be confidential and private to the maximum extent allowable by law.    Information and responses in the form of transcriptions will be recorded on a separate electronic document (Microsoft Word) without any personal identifying markers/names attached.  As the participant, you will have the option of using your real name or selecting a pseudonym.    All data will be stripped of identifiers to maintain confidentiality.   If the data are used for publication or for teaching purposes, only self-identified labels by subjects or assigned pseudonyms will be used.    Data in the form of survey results, transcriptions, and digital voice recording of the interview will be ssword protected PC for a minimum of 3 years after completion of the project. Signed consent forms and any paper records of data will be kept in a locked file cabinet y the project researchers and the IRB office will have access to the data. VOLUNTARY PARTICIPATION:   You are under no obligation to participate in this project.  Participation in this study is strictly voluntary.    By voluntarily entering this study, you do not waive any of your legal rights.   You may withdraw your participation at any time without prejudice. Any information gathered will be discarded at the time of withdrawal.    107   You can refuse to answer any particular question.   Total time commitment includes 60-90 minutes for an initial interview, and possibly an additional 30-60 minutes for a follow up interview if needed.   You may request a copy of the interview transcript or final report if you wish. COSTS & COMPENSATION:   You must have access to a telephone and/or email to initially set up a meeting with the researcher. There are no additional anticipated personal expenses for this study.     You will not receive money or any other form of compensation for participating in this study.  CONTACT INFORMATION FOR QUESTIONS AND CONCERNS:  If you have questions or concerns, you may contact Marilyn Amey, Principal Investigator at amey@msu.edu or (517) 432-1056.   If you have questions or concerns about your role and rights as a research participant, would like to obtain information or offer input, or would like to register a complaint about this study, you may contact, anonymously if you wish, the Michigan State University's Human Research Protection Program at 517-355-2180, Fax 517-432-4503, or e-mail irb@msu.edu or regular mail at 207 Olds Hall, MSU, East Lansing, MI 48824.  If you have concerns or questions about this study, such as scientific issues, how to do any part of it, or to report an injury (i.e. physical, psychological, social, financial, or otherwise), please contact the researcher: Marilyn Amey, Educational Administration, 418 Erickson Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, amey@msu.edu, (517) 432-1056.   INFORMED CONSENT AGREEMENT:  I voluntary agree to participate in this study by beginning this interview and signing this consent form.    _________________________________________   ___________________________ Signature       Date _________________________________________ Please Print Name  I agree to be audio recorded during this interview.  Initials ________  Date_______________   108  Appendix B Interview Guide Interviewee Information:   Date of Interview: Community College:   Name: Position: Years in position: Previous positions at this community college:  Years in those previous positions: Total number of years at this institution:  1.  what are they, who developed them, and how were they developed?   2. Please discuss how you came to be involved in working on degree completion.   3. How were team members identified or selected for this team?  4. like;[ Follow-up: are the meetings formal or informal, does leadership rotate, are the team members highly engaged; etc. ]   5. How does the committee or team use data to inform their recommendations and actions  what data is most important to the team, how frequently does the team monitor the colleperformance with respect to that data, what is the connection between the data and the actions pursued by the team? 6.  7. Do you believe the team has been as successful as it could be in improving degree completion? What would need to change to improve the effectiveness of this team?   8.   109  9. rate.   10. Please discuss how the work of this team has effected the culture here at the college; Follow up  would you say that the faculty and staff in the college are more aware of degree completion as an important college priority, or not really?      110  Appendix C  Mission, Vision, Statement of Beliefs and Values of Great Lakes College Mission Great Lakes College is an institution of higher education whose mission is to assist learners in identifying and achieving their educational goals. Vision Great Lakes College is a world-class institution of higher education where learners succeed and community needs are met. Statement of Beliefs As employees of Great Lakes College, We Believe:  The success of our students is always our first priority   We must perform our jobs admirably, giving our best service and support every day, for everyone  Teamwork is founded upon people bringing different gifts and perspectives   We provide educational opportunities for those who might otherwise not have them  In providing employees with a safe and fulfilling work environment, as well as an opportunity to grow and learn  Our progress must be validated by setting goals and measuring our achievements   We must make decisions that are best for the institution as a whole   Building and maintaining trusting relationships with each other is essential  Competence and innovation are essential means of sustaining our values in a competitive marketplace  We make a positive difference in the lives of our students, our employees, and our communities  In the principles of integrity, opportunity and fairness  We must prepare our students to be successful in a global environment   Our work matters  Values  Integrity - We demonstrate integrity through professional, ethical, transparent, and consistent behavior in both our decision-making and in our treatment of others; being accountable for our work and actions is the basis of trust.   Caring - We demonstrate caring through attentive and responsive action to the needs of students and others.  We listen with open minds, speak kindly, and foster relationships based on mutual respect and trust.   Collaboration - We demonstrate collaboration through the mutual commitment of individuals and organizations who come together for a common cause, encouraging self-reflection, teamwork, and respect for ourselves and others.   111   Quality - We demonstrate quality through innovation in the continuous improvement of all processes and services, encouraging students and others to become creative thinkers.   Inclusion - We demonstrate inclusion by seeking involvement and providing access for those with diverse backgrounds to work toward a culture of equality while maintaining differences in a respectful way.   Service - We demonstrate service by striving to make the communities we serve great places to live, work, and learn through our involvement, both as an organization and as individuals.   Leadership - We demonstrate leadership by nurturing the full development of those we serve, identifying and empowering individuals' greatest strengths.     112             REFERENCES       113  References  Albert, S., Ashforth, B. & Dutton, J. (2000). Organizational identity and identification: Charting new waters and building new bridges. Academy of Management Review, 25(1), 13-17.  Alfred, R., Shults, C., Jaquette, O. & Strickland, S. (2009). Community colleges on the horizon: Challenge, choice, or abundance. Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield Education.  Allen, K.E. & Cherry, C. (2000).  Systemic leadership: enriching the meaning of our work.  Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America.   Allison, G.T. (1971).  Essence of decision: Explaining the Cuban missile crisis.  Boston, MA: Little Brown.  American Association of Community Colleges (2012). Reclaiming the American Dream: A report from the 21st-Century Commission on the Future of Community Colleges.  Washington, D.C.   Amey, M.J. (1992, November). Cognitive constructions of leadership.  Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, Minneapolis, MN.    Amey, M.J. (2005).  Leadership as learning: Conceptualizing the process.  Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 29(9-10), 689  704.    Argyris, C. & Schön, D.  (1978). Organizational learning.  Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.  Arnould, E.J. (2007).  Service Dominant Logic and Resource Theory.  Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. 36(1). 21-24.  Astin, A. (1970).  The Methodology of Research on College Impact.  American Council on Education, Washington, D.C.  Portions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association, Minneapolis, MN, March 1970.   Bailey, T.R., Jaggars, S.S., & Jenkins, D. (2015).  path to student success.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.    Bandura, A. (1997).  The Exercise of Control. New York: Freeman.    Barr, R & Tagg, J. (1995). From teaching to learning: A new paradigm for undergraduate education.  Change, 27(6). 13-25.  Baxter-Magolda, M.B. (1999). Creating Contexts for Learning and Self-Authorship.  Vanderbilt, TN:  Vanderbilt University Press.  Bennis, W. (1989). On Becoming a Leader.  Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.    Bensimon, E.M. (1991).  The social processes through which faculty shape the image of a new president.  Journal of Higher Education 62(6):637-60.  114   Bensimon, E.M. & Neumann, A. (1993).  Redesigning Collegiate Leadership: Teams and Teamwork in Higher Education. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.    Bensimon, E.M., Neumann, A. & Birnbaum, R. (1989).  Making Sense of Administrative Leadership: The Washington, D. C.: ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Reports.   Bergquist, W.H. (1993). The postmodern organization: Mastering the art of irreversible change.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.  Bergquist, W.H. & Pawlak, K. (2008).  Engaging the Six Cultures of the Academy.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.  Bettis, R. & Prahalad, C.K. (1995). The Dominant Logic: retrospective and extension. Strategic Management Journal, 16(5  14).   Bettis, R.A., Hall, W.K., & Prahalad, C.K. (1978).  Diversity and performance in the multi-business firm.  National Proceedings of the American Institute for Decision Sciences, pp. 210-212.    Birnbaum, R. (1988).  How colleges work: the cybernetics of academic organization and leadership. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.   Birnbaum, R. (1992). How academic leadership works: Understanding success and failure in the college presidency. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.    Boggs, G.R. (2011). The American Community College: From Access to Success.  About Campus. Vol. 16. Issue 2, pp. 2  10.  Wiley On-line Library.    Bolman, L.G. & Deal, T. E. (1984). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership. (1st ed.). San Francisco: Jossey Bass.  Bolman, L.G. & Deal, T. E. (2003). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership. (5th ed.). San Francisco: Jossey Bass.  Brewer, W. F. (1987).  Schemas versus mental models in human memory.  In P. Morris (Ed.) Modelling cognition. (p. 187-197). Chichester, U.K.: John Willey and Sons.  Cannon-Bowers, J.A., Salas, E. & Converse, S.A. (1993).  Shared mental models in expert decision-making.  In N.J. Castellan Jr. (Eds.). Individual and group decision making: current issues.  (pp. 221-246).  Hillsdale, NJ, England: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.    Carnevale, A.P., Smith, N., & Strohl, J. (2010).  Help wanted: Projections for jobs and education requirements.  Washington, DC: Georgetown University, Center on Education and the Workforce.    CCSSE (2014). Community College Survey of Student Engagement.  Austin, TX: College of Education, University of Texas.     115  Cho, J. & Trent, A. (2006).  Qualitative Research.  Validity in qualitative research revisited. Volume 6(3), 319-340.  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.   Christensen, C. M. (1997).  Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.   Christensen, C.M. & Eyring, H.J. (2011).  The Innovative University: changing the DNA of higher education from the inside out. San Francisco, CA:  Jossey-Bass Publishing.    Collins, J. (1991).  Built to Last:  Successful habits of visionary companies.  New York: HarperCollins Publishers.    Collins, J. (2001).  Good to Great: Why some companies make the leapand others do.  New York: HarperCollins Publishers.  Colvill, I., Brown, A, & Pye, A. (2012). Simplexity: Sensmaking, organizing, and storytelling for our time.  Human Relations. January 2012, 65(1). 5-15. Sage Journals.  Comer, J. (1995).  Lecture Given at Education Service Center, Region IV, Houston TX.    Constantin, J. A. & Lusch R.F. (1994).  Understanding Resource Management. Oxford, OH: The Planning Forum.    Cox, R. D. (2009).  The College Fear Factor: how students and professors misunderstand one another.  Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.    Craik, K. J.W. (1943). The Nature of Explanation.  Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.    Day, G.S. (1999). Market driven strategy: Processes for creating value.  Tampa, FL: Free Press.    Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (2005).  Handbook of qualitative research, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.   Dougherty, K.J., Hare, R., & Natow, R.S. (2009).  Performance accountability systems for community colleges: Lessons for the Voluntary Framework of Accountability for community colleges.  Report to the College Board.  Community College Research Center.  Teachers College, Columbia University.    Dougherty, K.J. & Reddy, V. (2011).  The impacts of higher education performance funding systems on higher education institutions: research literature review and policy recommendations.  Community College Research Center. Teachers College, Columbia University.    Downing, S. (2014).  Boston MA: Wadsworth-Cengage Learning.  Driscoll, A. & Wood, S. (2007).  Developing outcomes-based assessment for learner-centered education: a faculty introduction. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.   116  Eddy, P.L. (2003). Sensemaking on campus: How community college presidents frame change. Community College Journal of Research and Practice. 27(6).  453-471.    Eddy, P.L. (2010).  Community College Leadership: A Multidimensional Model for Leading Change.  Sterling VA: Stylus Publishing.  Eddy, P.L. & Lawrence, A. (2012).  Wikis as Platforms for Authentic Assessment.  New York: Springer Science + Business Media.  Eddy, P.L. & VanDerLinden, K.E. (2006).  Emerging definitions of leadership in higher education: New   Community College Review. 34(1), 5-26.    Eve, R.A. Horsfall, S., & Lee, M.E. (1997).  Foreward: Chaos and social science.  In R.A. Eve, S. Horsfall, & M.E. Lee (Eds.), Chaos, complexity and sociology (pp. xi-xxvii).  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.    Fairhurst, G.T. & Sarr, R.A. (1996).  The Art of Framing: Managing the Language of Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.  Forrester, J.W. (1968).  Principles of Systems (2nd Ed.).   Waltham, MA: Pegasus Communications.   Frost, S. H., & Gillespie, T. W. (1998). Organizations, culture and teams: Links toward genuine change. New Directions for Institutional Research, 100, 5-15.  Gary, L. (1998). Cognitive Bias: Systematic Errors in Decision Making. Harvard Management Update, (April 1998).  Gratton, M. (1993).  Leadership in the Learning Organization.  New Directions for Community Colleges.  21 no. 4. (Winter, 1993): 93  103.    Greenleaf, R. K. (1977). Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness. New York: Paulist Press.  Haeckel, S.H. (1999).  Adaptive enterprise: Creating and leading sense and respond organizations.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press.    Hussar, W.H. & Bailey, T.M. (2011).  Projection of Education Statistics to 2020 (NCES 2011-026).  U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.    Hedburg, B. (1981).  How organizations learn and unlearn.  In Nystrom, P. & Starbuck, W. (eds) Handbook of organizational design.  Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.  Heifetz, R. (1994).  Leadership Without Easy Answers. Cambridge, MA: Bellknap Press.    Hockaday, J. & Puryear, D.E. (2008). Community college leadership in the new millennium.  Washington, D.C.: American Association of Community Colleges.     117  Holland, J.H. (1995).  Hidden order. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.  Holland, J.H., Holyoak, K.J., Nisbett, R.E. & Thagard, P.R.  (1986). Induction: processes of inference, learning, and discovery. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.  Hunter, A.M., Lewis, N.M. & Ritter-Gooder, P.K. (2011).  Constructive-Developmental Theory: An alternative approach to leadership.  Nutrition and Health Sciences, Faculty Publications.  Paper 17.  Digital Commons @ University of Nebraska-Lincoln.    Janis, I.L. (1972).  Victims of groupthink: A psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascoes.  Oxford, England: Houghton-Mifflin.    Jones, N.A., Ross, H., Lynam, T., Perez, P., & Leitch, A. (2011).  Mental models: an interdisciplinary synthesis of theory and methods.  Ecology and Society 16(1): 46. (on-line) URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol16/iss1/art46/.   Katz, D., & Kahn, R.L. (1978). The social psychology of organizations. New York: John Wiley & Sons.    Kegan, R. (1994).  In over our heads: The mental demands of modern life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.   Kiesler, S. &Sproul, L. (1982). Managerial response to changing environments: perspectives and problem sensing from social cognition.  Administrative Science Quarterly (37), 548-570.    Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development (Vol. 1). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.  Kuhn, Thomas S.  (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed.  Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.  Kuhnert, K.W. & Lewis, P. (1987).  Transactional and Transformational Leadership: A Constructive-Developmental Analysis.  The Academy of Management Review.  Vol. 12. No. 4.  Pp. 648  657.    Lenning, O.T., Hill, D.M., Saunders, K.P., Solan, A., & Stokes, A., (2013).  Powerful learning communities: A guide to developing student, faculty, and professional learning communities to improve student success and organizational effectiveness.  2nd revised ed. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.   Lumina Foundation for Education: Strategic Plan. (2009). http://www.luminafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Lumina_Strategic_Plan.pdf.   Retrieved from web site November 28, 2013.    Marion, R. (1999). The edge of chaos.  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.    Marion, R. (2002). Leadership in education: Organizational theory for the practitioner.  Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill Prentice Hall.    Marion, R., & Uhl-Bien, M. (2001).  Leadership in complex organizations.  The Leadership Quarterly, 12, 389-418.   118  Merriam, S.B. (1988).  Case study research in education: A qualitative approach.  San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.    Mintzberg, H. (1991).  Learning 1, Planning 0 (Reply to Igor Ansoff) is strategy making deliberate or emergent? Strategic Management Journal (12), (463  466).   Morgan, G. (2006). Images of Organization (updated edition).  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.  Norman, D.A. & Shallice, T. (1980).  Attention to Action: willed and automatic control of behavior.  Center for Human Information Processing.  LaJolla, CA:  University of California.     Nystrom. P.C.  & Starbuck, W.H. (1984). To avoid organizational crises, unlearn. In Organizational Dynamics (12) 4.  pp. 53-65.   Junior College Journal, 42, pp. 62, 64, 66  69.   A Learning College for the 21st Century.  Phoenix, AZ: The Oryx Press.    Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD: 2011).  Education at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators.    Pearce, C.L. & Conger, J.A. (2003).  Shared Leadership: Reframing the hows and whys of leadership.  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.   Porac, J.F., Thomas, H. & Baden-Fuller, C. (1989).  Competitive groups as cognitive communities: the case of the Scottish knitwear manufacturers.  Journal of Management Studies. 26 (4).    Porter, M. (1985).  Competitive advantage: Creating and sustaining superior performance.  New York, NY: Simon and Shuster.   Prahalad, C.K. & Bettis, R. (1986).  The Dominant Logic: a new linkage between diversity and performance.  Strategic Management Journal, 7, 485-501.    Roese, N. J., & Vohs, K. D. (2012). Hindsight Bias. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(5), 411426.doi:10.1177/174569161245430.   Rooke, D. & Torbert, W.R. (2005).  Seven Transformations of Leadership.  Harvard Business Review.   Cambridge, MA.    Rost, J.C. (1993).  Leadership for the 21st Century.  New York: Praeger.    Roueche, J.E., Baker III, G.A., & Rose, R.R. (1989). Shared Vision: Transformational Leadership in American Community Colleges.  Washington, D.C: The Community College Press.   Roueche, J.E., Richardson, M.M., Neal, P.W., & Roueche, S.D. (2008). The creative community college: leading change through innovation. Washington, D.C: Community College Press.   119  Rutherford, A. & Wilson, J.R. (2004).  Models of mental models: an ergonomist-psychologist dialogue.   Pp. 309-323.  In N. Moray (Ed.) Ergonomics major writings: psychological mechanisms and models in ergonomics. London, U.K: Taylor and Francis.   Schneider, M. & Somers, M. (2006). Organizations as Complex Adaptive Systems: Implications of Complexity Theory for Leadership Research.  The Leadership Quarterly 17, 361-365.     Senge, Peter (1990).  The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.  New York, NY: Doubleday Dell Publishing.   Smircich, L. & Morgan, G. (1982).  Leadership: the management of meaning.  The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 18 (3) Pp. 257  273.   Smith, C., Gidney, M., Barclay, N. & Rosenfeld, R. (2002).  Dominant logics of strategy in further education colleges.  Research in Post-compulsory Education, 7I(1).    Sorcinelli, M.D., Austin, A.E., Eddy, P.L., & Beach, A.L., (2006).  Creating the future of faculty development: learning from the past, creating the present.  Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing Co.   Starbuck, W. & Hedburg, B. (1977).  Saving an organization from a stagnating environment. In H. Thorelli (ed.). Strategy + Structure = Performance. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.    Swieringa, J. & Wierdsma, A. (1992).  Becoming a learning organization: Beyond the learning curve. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley.    Tokman, M. & Beitelspacher, L.S. (2011).  Supply Chain Networks and Service-Dominant Logic: Suggestions for Future Research. International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management 4(7), pp. 717-726.    Torres, R.T. & Preskill, H. (2001).  Evaluation and organizational learning: past, present, and future.  American Journal of Evaluation, 22(3).  387-395.   Twombly, S.B. (1995).  Gendered Images of Community College Leadership: What messages they send.  In B.K. Townsend (Ed.). Gender and power in the community college. New directions for community colleges. Vol 89 (pp. 67-77).  San Francisco: Jossey Bass.   Uhl-Bein, M., Marion, R. & McKelvey, B. (2007).  Complexity Leadership Theory: Shifting leadership from the industrial age to the knowledge era.  Leadership Institute Faculty Publications. Digital Commons @ University of Nebraska-Lincoln.    Vargo, S.L. & Lusch, R. F. (2004).  Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing.  Journal of Marketing 68 (January 2004), pp 1- 17.    Weick, K. (1995).  Sensemaking in Organizations.  Volume 3 for Foundations in Organizational Science.  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.   Wheatley, M.J. (1999).  Leadership and the new science.  San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.