Organizational Learning as an Approach to Institutional Change and Student Success

Featured on Friday, January 25, 2008

Special Guests: Estela Bensimon, Professor at the University of Southern California and  Director of the Center for Urban Education.

Professor Bensimon will introduce the Equity Scorecard, an organizational learning process she designed to help colleges be more effective in producing successful outcomes for minority students.  The Equity Scorecard is being used in two- and four-year, public and private, open admissions and selective colleges in California (e.g., Long Beach City College, Loyola Marymount College); the University of Wisconsin System, Colorado (Metropolitan State College), Washington (Washington State University), and New York (Vassar College).   Although the Equity Scorecard was designed to address one of higher education’s most intractable organizational learning problems—the inability to produce equitable educational outcomes among students of color—its core principles and processes are broadly applicable to all institutions that are struggling with improving student success.  The talk will be framed by questions such as:

1. What is organizational learning?  How do institutions of higher education learn (or fail to learn??
2. What is the difference between data for accountability vs. data for organizational learning?
3. Why is it that accountability systems are not likely to produce deep change in institutional practices?
4. Why is the inquiry paradigm more likely to bring about deep change?
5. How can tools and processes such as the Equity Scorecard structure organizational learning in institutions of higher education?  Why is it so difficult for colleges and universities to structure organizational learning?

Dr. Bensimon’s publications about equity, organizational learning, practitioner inquiry and change include, The Underestimated Significance of Practitioner Knowledge in the Scholarship on Student Success, Doing Research that Makes a Difference, Equality in Fact, Equality in Results:  A matter of institutional accountability, Measuring the State of Equity in Public Higher Education, and Closing the Achievement Gap in Higher Education:  An Organizational Learning Perspective.  Dr. Bensimon has held the highest leadership positions in the Association for the Study of Higher Education (President, 2005-2006) and in the American Education Research Association-Division on Postsecondary Education (Vice-President 1992-1994).  She has served on the boards of the American Association for Higher Education and the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Dr. Bensimon was Associate Dean of the USC Rossier School of Education from 1996-2000 and was a Fulbright Scholar to Mexico in 2002.  She earned her doctorate in Higher Education from Teachers College, Columbia University.

To download the PowerPoint presentation, CLICK HERE

To download the wmv file of the event, CLICK HERE (note: the audio on this program was comprimized. It is audible but has static).