Many people I connect with throughout the day begin their conversations with an emphatic declaration of their “busyness”, or that the past year has flown by and they are not sure where the time has gone or what impact they have had throughout the year. I, undoubtedly, fall into this category even when I’m intentionally trying to frame my “small talk” in a more hopeful context. When I notice myself leaning into the pattern of sharing how “busy” I am with others, I know it’s time to take a step back and reflect on what that means and how the way I talk about our work might impact our own perception of what and why we do what we do. While it’s true that our team experienced a “full” 2024, we’re attempting to share about what we’re looking forward to in the coming year. So, today I’ll share some reflections on the past year and our upcoming opportunities to authentically engage with many exciting people and projects in 2025.
Towards the end of the Spring 2024 semester our team felt it was time to recommit our efforts to the continued advancement of Principled Innovation at MLFC. With the identification of Practice Principled Innovation as a new ASU design aspiration in Spring 2023, came the opportunity to support several colleges and units across ASU in their cultivation of knowledge and practice of PI. Our team has spent the past two years forming and facilitating communities of practices, sharing our process and experience in creating the PI framework, socializing it with our ASU learning community and supporting the early efforts to operationalize PI across curriculum, culture, and relationships at ASU. While this work has been fulfilling, and it’s rewarding to see something we’ve worked so intentionally to create and implement make an impact on the university as a whole, the new direction also pulled our attention away from a deeper and continued focus on the implementation and advancement of PI at MLFC. So, last spring we sent a survey to our faculty to explore their interests in PI and the possibility of forming a new faculty CoP. Around 30 faculty members responded, and in Fall 2024 we began bringing people together to deepen understanding and practice of PI in the context of teaching and learning. You can learn more about the activities of this CoP in a related blog post.
We’ve also offered mini-grants to support PI demonstration projects across the college, open houses, and workshops to share PI tools and resources with faculty, staff, and students.
Moving forward into 2025, we’ll continue to engage a multi-faceted and dynamic approach to advance the individual, relational, and organizational demonstrations of Principled Innovation in our college. We’ll also work toward cultivating the observational, relational, and reflective PI practices that are essential for human flourishing.
To support the cultivation of foundational knowledge, our MLFC community can anticipate various presentations, workshops, and “lunch and learns” that will provide immersive learning experiences using PI tools. Our aim is to show how PI can be a useful approach for faculty, staff and students to navigate some of the explicit challenges they face in their everyday practice. Our workshops and learning experiences will address specific challenges or questions facing educators and will provide explicit examples of PI tools, resources, and practices and how they might be used to move us collectively towards solutions.
Our team will also foster shared learning and sense making through various communities of practice. We’ll continue to support the current faculty CoP to meet the needs of their community, and in the near future we’ll have a staff CoP designed to meet the needs of staff who are interested in learning more about how PI can support them in their personal and professional development and daily work. A new cohort of THRIVE Collective, a CoP designed to support individuals and teams to navigate change in the context of innovation and systems transformation, will launch this spring for teams working within the new Institute for Learning Design and Discovery. This CoP experience focuses on four overarching themes: Collectively evolving as individuals, building trust and connection, cultivating responsibility and purpose, and nurturing communities of practice.
In addition to the above activities, we continue to support the practical application and integration of PI through asynchronous learning opportunities, continued development and iteration of PI tools and resources, and transparently disseminating what we are learning along the way.
If we continue to do our work well, we imagine individuals and teams across our college will embody Principled Innovation in their decisions, actions, and relationships, leading to ethical leadership, deeper perspective taking, and flourishing communities. Students, educators, and leaders in our college community will be equipped with PI tools and practices to ensure they navigate complexity with integrity, foster trusting and brave environments that prioritize ethical and moral reasoning, and ensure thoughtful collaborative action and values driven innovation in education – even when it’s challenging.
Throughout all of this, we intend to learn how PI can be effectively scaled and sustained across diverse cultural and organizational contexts without losing its depth or authenticity. Specifically, we seek to understand how individuals and groups transition from conceptual knowledge of PI to authentic, lived practice. We are curious about how PI impacts long-term character development and organizational culture, and how it can be adapted to meet the unique needs of various communities. Additionally, we aim to explore effective methods for measuring the flourishing that PI fosters over time. We welcome anyone who is interested in joining us on this road of discovery to please reach out to us! The more people and perspectives we can engage, the stronger our collective work will become.
While we’ve been at this now for almost eight years, we recognize there is still so much work to be done to create sustainable change. We’ve come a long way over the years and we feel we’re at a transformative stage in our development. The institutional commitment to PI has contributed to additional awareness of our work, while the demonstration projects and CoPs will help us to learn more about how PI can be applied and practiced. However, the true value of this work is in the individual sense gathering and sense making, the personal application and reflection, the trusting environments we foster and the authentic relationships we cultivate along the way. These are the meaningful outcomes that move with us beyond our time at ASU and allow PI to be the catalyst for positive social change.