What is the Sensemaking Method?
“Sensemaking” is a process by which groups of people come together across time to change their ideas and practices in order to make deep change.
The combination of scholarship and guided activities to leverage expertise enables teams to work together to solve hard and systemic problems.
The Sensemaking Method I have developed engages teams of people from within and across specialized areas in naming problems they want to solve; engaging research and theory about threshold concepts and learning; and then imagining solutions to the problems they name. It is a carefully scaffolded program that engages scholarship and respects the experiences and expertise of participants in order to create conditions for collaboration across silos.
The combination of scholarship, activities, and grassroots team problem-solving of systemic problems across time sets this method apart from other professional development methods such as workshops, webinars, faculty learning communities, and reading groups.
I have used this method with hundreds of faculty from across multiple institutions, as well as with corporate clients.
The Sensemaking Principles
The sensemaking program proceeds from a core set of principles:
- Every problem that programs, divisions, and larger organizations face can best be approached as intellectual/scholarly opportunities, not bureaucratic tasks.
- Individual expertise from people at every level is central to any organization’s ability to innovate and solve problems.
- Leveraging individual expertise for problem-solving requires designing opportunities to engage in intentional and scholarly sensemaking.
- People must engage as teams and across silos with other members of the institution in order to meaningfully solve problems.
- Big, institutional problems need to be resolved with speed but not haste, considering principles for action and long-term consequences of decisions.
- The systems we have inherited are changeable, but changing them requires leveraging the expertise of all members of the institution.
Problems Faculty Can Solve
The faculty members who have engaged in the program have taken up problems such as:
- Intro courses are serving an unintentional gatekeeping function for some students and have not changed in decades.
- New general education requirements within the institution and changing faculty in a program require new approaches to gateway or capstone general education courses taught within a particular discipline or across related disciplines.
- Enrollment in a major is low and the curriculum for the major needs to change, with a coherent approach agreed on by all faculty. However, the faculty have not discussed their shared values and commitments or named their fied’s threshold concepts, making any curricular change challenging.
- Faculty within a program are unaware of the assignments being given and skills being taught in other courses in the major.
- Assessments have not been meaningful and little is known about student needs or outcomes of faculty pedagogies.
- How AI is changing professions, and implications for the curriculum
- High-impact practices like e-portfolios can reinvigorate programs, but faculty need time to learn and study them together, and support for implementation.
- Curricula are not coherent and students experience “whiplash” as they move from one disconnected course to another.
Videos
Books
Changing Conceptions, Changing Practices: Innovating Teaching across Disciplines
Writing Expertise: A Research-Based Approach to Writing and Learning Across Disciplines