Welcome to season two of the Poggle Podcast. I'm Matt Targa, producer of the Poggle Podcast
for the Poggle Project. Poggle stands for Process-Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning,
a student-centered approach that guides students in constructing their own understanding of
content and helps them develop important skills such as teamwork, communication, critical
thinking, and problem solving. The Poggle Podcast is an ongoing conversation from the Poggle
Project that celebrates innovative educators both in and out of the classroom. During season two,
we will feature a total of nine episodes focusing on the project's strategic plan. In our first
episode, we focus on the historical context of Poggle's strategic plan, specifically,
how did the project create its plan and why is it so important? Today, co-host Alex Grushow,
who was a professor of chemistry at Rider University and chair of the Department of
Chemistry and Biochemistry, interviews Dr. Richard S. Moog, professor in the Department
of Chemistry at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the executive
director of the Poggle Project, as well as Susan Schadl, vice provost for undergraduate studies
and distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry and the founder of the Center for
Teaching and Learning at Boise State University in Idaho. Alex, Rick, and Susan, thank you for
being here today to kick off season two of the Poggle Podcast. And Alex, I will now pass the
baton over to you.
In today's episode, we begin the second season of the Poggle Podcast. In our first season, we
introduced you to a number of interesting people connected with the Poggle Project and had them
describe their academic journey and how they got connected with Poggle and how they now use it in
their educational setting. This season, we will explore the inner workings of the Poggle Project.
The project, it turns out, is not just about creating materials and disseminating to the
broader educational community. There are many other activities that people in the organization
undertake to promote the mission of the Poggle Project. We'll talk with educators around the
country who have worked to steer and shape various aspects of the project. And through different
episodes this season, listeners will learn about the many opportunities to participate in the
workings of the Poggle Project. Later in this second season of the Poggle Podcast, we will talk
with people associated with the various working groups to describe their work with the Poggle
Project. Please tune in to more Poggle Podcasts this season for details on all the activities of
the Poggle Project and how you can become involved with this community of practitioners.
So we'll begin this season discussing something that most organizations like the Poggle Project
have but don't often utilize to their fullest extent, the strategic plan. Now, many of us in
higher education hear those words and do anything we can to not be anywhere near a committee
associated with developing a strategic plan. It is often felt that these documents are developed
and then filed away to be examined at some later date. However, for those people who are working
closely with the Poggle Project, it is actually the opposite case. The development of the strategic
plan for the Poggle Project has been a community-based effort and its periodic revision has also been
performed by as much of the community as possible. To describe these efforts today, I have Rick
Mueh, the Executive Director of the Poggle Project, and Susan Schadl of Boise State University,
who was one of the early architects of the strategic plan for the Poggle Project. Rick, Susan,
welcome to the Poggle Podcast. Happy to be here. Thanks, Alex. Thank you. So Rick, I want to start
with you. You know, we're going to go outline some behind-the-scenes activities of the Poggle
Project this season, and our reason for doing this is we want to make these activities more visible
and invite others in our community to participate. But I think it's fair to say that most of these
activities that we engage in stem from the strategic plan. Can you tell us a little bit about
how this plan is used to guide our activities of the larger Poggle community? Sure, Alex. I'm happy
to do that. Before I do, I just want to thank you again for the invitation and to thank Susan
for being here. I would say that she was more or at least different than one of the architects
of the strategic plan. Susan was actually on the steering committee at the time, and she was
the leader of our strategic plan efforts. So she's an excellent choice as somebody to
be talking to about this. You know, I think the thing that we do is we treat strategic plans
the way they actually should be treated, which is as both strategic and a plan. And the idea is
that we use the strategic plan as a basis for making decisions about resource allocation. I mean,
that's essentially what we do. The process involves deciding what are, from a strategic perspective,
the goals we want to accomplish in the next five or so years, and then articulate those,
and then act on them in a planned way to try to achieve those goals for the project. So
when something is in our strategic plan, it means that we've decided that this is something that
if there's a decision about resource allocations that we have to make, the things that are in our
plan are the things that we're going to give priority to. It doesn't mean that other activities
aren't of value, right, or don't contribute to the project. But, you know, we have limited resources,
as does any organization, and we need a plan for how to make decisions about allocating those
resources. Human resources, financial resources, time resources, that's how we think about our
strategic plan. Okay, thanks. So now, early in the development of the POGLE project, there was no
strategic plan. I mean, as we talked about last season, you know, it stemmed from some grants
from the National Science Foundation. So what prompted the leadership within the POGLE project
to actually say, oh, you know what, we need a strategic plan? Because it's not like people
wake up in the morning and say, I think I need a strategic plan. Right, right. Well, so there's a
couple of things, right. The first thing is that, as you mentioned, when we started on this endeavor,
and at that time, when we started, it wasn't even called the POGLE project. But when we started on
this endeavor, it was from a large grant from the National Science Foundation. And we had two
consecutive large, you know, grants from the NSF that funded the project starting in 2003,
up through 2011 or 2012 is basically when that major funding ran out. And when we were funded
by the National Science Foundation, we didn't have a strategic plan because our plan was,
we're doing what we said we were going to do in our grant application, right, in our proposal.
So that really, the goals of the funded proposals really defined what our strategic plan was,
because that's what we said we were going to do. Of course, there were some deviations from that
as things evolved, but that was essentially the nature of the strategic plan. It was the goals as
articulated in our National Science Foundation proposals that had been funded. In fall of 2010
is when we actually incorporated as independent 501c3 nonprofit organization. Well, as a
nonprofit organization, we actually got our 501c3 status in June of 2011. And at that time, we,
as a corporation, had a board of directors. And we had a steering committee that made up of
practitioners. And it was really a combined perspective from those leadership teams,
that it would make sense for us to have a strategic plan as we were now stepping into our next phase
as an independent corporation. So that was really the motivation. And I think the people
in leadership on the steering committee, on the board, all agreed that we needed to establish
some principles for making decisions about resource allocation. And also bringing the
community together to agree on where were we going and what did we want to do, what were our
priorities. So it was really a combination of those two things. Okay. So it was decided that
we need a strategic plan for, as you say, resource allocation. So how does one go about doing that,
you know, from scratch? So you mentioned the steering committee, and we're going to talk a
little bit more about the steering committee in a later episode and, you know, bringing community
together. So how do you go about doing that? And so you said that Susan was part of the steering
committee back then. So how did you get started? Let me jump in here. I also want to thank you for
the invitation to talk about this. It's fun. It has been fun to kind of go back and unearth a
bunch of documents from 2012 to remind myself about what happened. So I think it has always
been true that on the steering committee, different people play particular different roles and move
particular projects forward. And at that time, Rick asked me the idea that we needed a strategic plan
had emerged. And Rick said, Hey, would you lead this effort? And I said, Sure. But I hadn't led
a strategic planning effort ever. And so I went to someone on my campus that regularly worked
at the department or the college level on strategic planning and said, Hey, are there, you know,
resources I should look at? And she recommended a book to me. And I actually looked up what it was.
It was called Collaborative Strategic Planning in Higher Education by Patrick Sanaghan. And I can
give it to you so you can put it in the show notes. And she recommended a few things, particular
things out of the book. I don't think I read the whole book. But what it had in it was a bunch of
really good ideas for activities that could help an organization or a group of people orient
themselves towards the process of planning. And as we know, the the Pogo project and the folks who
are in it care a lot about process when it comes to our pedagogy and in the classroom. And it turns
out we also care about process when it comes to moving something like a strategic plan forward.
And so that's really how I got started. And I'm happy to talk about some of the specific things.
But we we ended up using the Pogo National Meeting as the kind of nucleating gathering
to engage a smaller smaller group of people, not the entire community, but the folks who
who came to the PNM that year, which was probably about 60 folks in in a series of activities
designed to lead us to a set of goals, which as Rick said, then served as the priorities
for the project for the next five years. So this idea of community development is really stem from
just your research on, okay, how do we do this? So this is not like you had any prior experience.
But I think it's interesting that you point out process. And this is something that those people
who are new to Poggle, you know, they'll hear about process skills and trying to make sure that
everything goes well in the class. But those people who are who've been around the Poggle
project for a little while realize that nothing ever happens by chance at a Poggle meeting or,
you know, Poggle activity. Everything is well orchestrated. And so so can you tell us a little
bit about how this was orchestrated? Absolutely. So one of the activities that came out of that book
was an invitation to think about both the history of an organization, as well as what were the
factors that were going to be shaping the organization and its activities going forward.
So one of the first things we did, so each year at the Poggle National Meeting, the steering
committee meets for a day or a day and a half before everyone else comes in. And we used a
portion of that time, maybe even the whole part, I don't remember how much time it took, but to
conduct a to create a timeline. And to put together, you know, we were in classic in person
fashion with big Post-it notes and small Post-it notes and markers and brainstorming, asking about
what had the phases of the Poggle project been, right? What did it look like pre-funding? What did
it look like during that period of time when it was funded by the National Science Foundation?
And we mapped out who were the players, what was going on? What did being involved in the project
look like at that time? What were the highs, the lows, the burning issues? What significant changes
moved the project forward to the place that it was at that moment, which that was made for?
That moment, which that was May of 2012. And I mean, it was fascinating for the steering
committee at the time to kind of pull together all those ideas, because of course, any organization
is going to be influenced by its past. And it's going to shape how people in the organization
think about moving forward. And so that was the very first thing we did. And then once everyone
who came to the, and we did a bunch of reflection activities around that, we used a framework called
ORID, which is Observation, Reflect, Imagine. And now I don't remember what the D is, but I can look
it up. We did a bunch of reflection activities around it, which again, for those of us in the
Poggle project, that makes perfect sense, right? We think about being metacognitive, helping our
students reflect on their learning. And so that kind of process piece fit right in with our
community culture. Anyway, once we got to the point where folks were, had come together in the PNM,
we shared some of the history in a kind of encapsulated form. And then we did an activity
with everyone where we thought about what the future timeline was. And again, this was big
Post-it notes on the wall, little Post-it notes, markers, et cetera. And we were thinking about
future events that might occur, issues that might influence the direction of the project
and its activities, trends, which included, for example, trends in higher education.
And we together did a bunch of intentionally designed activities around mapping out how people
in the room saw that. And we again used this ORID framework and the D is for decision. Thank you,
Rick. And we generated this kind of messy picture of what the future would be. And
in between that activity and then the next, there was a small group of us that were
kind of making sense of what was going on. The next step was to pull together the really
brainstorming about, okay, so what are the things we could do in this space? And I can go into more
detail, but suffice it to say that we ended up doing a lot of brainstorming about what we could do.
And again, lots of big Post-it notes, lots of people walking around, gallery walks.
And what we ended up with is a lot of ideas that emerged into a number of themes. And so by the
time we finished the Poland National Meeting that year, we had a set of themes and a kind of,
and we had a lot of discussion around it. And so one of the things that I think happened is we
engaged the larger community in thinking about what is going to be important to the community.
From there, and I'm going to kind of gloss over a lot of detail here, but what we did with those
themes is the steering committee then over the next few months, shaped them into goals. And those
goals went out for feedback to the larger community by survey. And then that following fall,
which would have been October of 2012, we ended up shaping those themes into, I think it was six
goals that essentially became the strategic plan that was going to guide things for the next
five years. Right. So one of the things that I'm getting out of this is not only was it looking
back and seeing, okay, what are we doing? What are we doing well? But also where do we want to go?
There were some directions that the POGO project at that point had decided we're going to take on
this piece that we really haven't thought about before, but it seemed like everyone in the
community wanted the project to go in that direction. Rick, would you just sort of say
that that's one of the things that comes out of the strategic planning?
Yes. I think that the way I look at it is, because we've done this twice now, is that
there are some things that are not surprises at all. There are some things that we've been doing,
it's clear we need to continue doing, and there's a community consensus that yes,
that's important to continue to focus on. And I think that's probably not surprising for any
organization that's been around for a little while and does a strategic plan. It's generally
the case that there are some things that are important that you continue to do and that you've
done and you're going to continue to do into the future, perhaps modified slightly. I think the
other thing that's interesting is, as you point out, Alex, this idea that out of this process,
which is really a bottom-up process rather than a top-down process, out of this process,
that some interesting things emerge that are coming from the community as new ideas.
And I'll just tell you one of them that I think is interesting, and that is that early on,
the Poggle project was exclusively focused on STEM fields. And in the first strategic plan,
when we were doing it, there was some sentiment about stating in the strategic plan that we were
going to expand outside of the STEM fields as a strategic objective. And in the end,
in the end, we decided not to do that. That is, of course, that didn't mean that we weren't
welcoming to people from the arts and the humanities and so forth, but that we weren't
going to have a strategic priority be looking toward how to support those people in those fields.
That was not part of the initial strategic plan. When we went through the process the second time,
we ended up deciding that that actually was part of the strategic plan. And so our current strategic
plan has as part of it the, I don't remember exactly how it's articulated, but looking for
ways to support and expand the implementation and use of Poggle beyond the sciences and math.
And I was just going to say that's something that grew out of a community response. It was
not something that was decided from the top deck. Right. So yeah, I was part of that second pass at
the steering, at the strategic plan. And I found it interesting how things changed. Like some of
the directions of the Poggle project either became more articulated or people within the community
said we really ought to do this. So one of the characteristics of the Poggle project is we have
these specific working groups that again some people are familiar with and they've heard about
in these working groups target specific activities that have been identified typically by the
strategic plan as we should work on this. We should develop this. Now can either of you explain how
these working groups arose? Was this something that existed before the strategic plan or did they come
out of the strategic plan? Because it seems like most of the working groups have some connection
to the strategic plan. So it seems like a chicken and egg question. And I was wondering which was
which? So maybe I'll try to address that first. During the pre-strategic plan days, during the
NSF funded days, we, the leadership of those grants, tried a couple of different ways of
engaging members of the community more broadly in working group-like activities. And I don't think
the project was really mature enough in those first in that first decade to support that. We tried. It
didn't, it just didn't work. The approach now, I will just tell you that, and I had to look this up
because I wanted to remember the history also, and that is that we adopted the first strategic plan
in January of 2013. And so the 2013 national meeting in end of May, early June, was the first
one that took place under the auspices of a strategic plan. And some of the effort at that
meeting, and I don't recall, but I imagine Susan was responsible for kind of getting the people
at the national meeting to start thinking about how we're going to engage with the strategic plan.
At that one, things were not quite as organized as they became in the next year, because the
following year in 2014, we essentially began what are now our working groups. Those are
groups of people who are focused on some particular aspect, narrow or broad, that is
reflected in our strategic plan. Because as I said, we use it for making resource allocation
decisions. So we don't have a strategic plan about every single sort of bullet point underneath our
currently five strategic plan goals, but based on the interest in the community and what we think
makes sense in terms of working on them with groups of community members, our working groups
are aligned with the strategic plan, and there's a member of the steering committee who is sort of
responsible for as a liaison broadly to make sure that we collectively on the steering committee
know what's going on in all of those working groups. I don't know if Susan has anything to add.
Yeah, let me add a couple of things. So my recollection is similar to Rick's. One thing I
think is that after we did all this work to generate the goals which initially were adopted
in January of 2013, I think we felt like that had been really good work, right? That not only
were the goals useful, but that there had been a lot of engagement across the Poggle community,
and we didn't want to just say, okay, that's good, and we'll put it on a shelf and let's
continue on and never look at it. I mean, I think that's the problem with many strategic plans
is even if the plan itself is good, people don't use it as a touchstone. And so in that PNM,
the Poggle National Meeting in spring of 2013, we really wanted to use the strategic plan as
an anchor. And I don't think at the time that we had a grand vision for like, this is how
we're going to engage the community going forward. We're going to create these working groups.
But because the Poggle National Meeting had always, at least since I had been attending,
had always been a time where work got done for the project. And so the thought was, we've got
these strategic ideas now, let's use the Poggle National Meeting to identify what work could be
done initially at the PNM. But I think we even thought, but you can't get everything done in
four or five days at the PNM. So maybe we can find some ways to have some projects get traction that
can go forward. And that's really what emerged into working groups. I don't even think we were,
like we didn't come into that PNM saying, we're going to form working groups associated with each
of the, each of the goals. It wasn't that structured in part because as, as Rick mentioned, prior to,
to this, we had tried a number of things to have activity that would go on kind of regionally or
in other kinds of ways that it just had never gotten much traction. And so we didn't know whether
this was, we didn't go in knowing that this is what it was going to look like. But it turned out,
I think that knowing that you were working on something that had a strategic component to it
was a really important way for people to engage and contribute to the project.
And I'll say one more thing about this. I think really up until the strategic plan,
a lot of what was happening was kind of operational, right? How do we know whether a
Poggle activity is a Poggle activity? Well, I guess we need to make a rubric. How are we going
to run workshops and how are we going to make sure workshops are consistent, whether you go in
to workshop in Boston or in Florida or in Idaho. And the project had matured enough by around
2013 that those operational things kind of weren't necessary anymore, or not that they weren't
necessary, but they didn't take as much time and attention. And so we were able to pivot to
these questions about what is of strategic importance because the baseline kind of
operations for the project were established. Yeah, Alex, let me just, I want to just,
if you don't mind, I want to follow up on that just with one other comment, which is that
I think that for me, this evolution that the project went through from grant funded
to independent to establishing a strategic plan to actually treating the strategic plan
seriously as a way of prioritizing our resource allocation actually demonstrates the power of a
strategic plan as a guiding light for organizing work and getting really interesting and exciting
things done. If you take it seriously and treat it as what it's supposed to be, because to me,
in the last, over the last roughly eight years since this strategic plan was first implemented,
the result of treating it as a serious document that is a consensus of the community's view
of what is really important to accomplish has resulted in some of the most amazing progress
progress transformation ideas that one could imagine. And it's just the work that our current
and past working groups have done is truly remarkable. As I say all the time, the people
in the Polgol project are really great and they work really hard. Those two things are true,
but the community also is just remarkable in its ability to think about important things
and act on them in ways that are really productive. So I'm just a big fan of strategic plans
when they are actually used the way that they're intended.
Susan, go ahead.
And I want to jump in one more time to add to that. So amen to Rick. People think that
people find me very odd when I say I love strategic plans, but it's this kind of strategic
plan that is really valuable. The other thing I would say is that I think the strategic plan
in the Polgol project context serves not just as a list of things, right? As Rick said, it animates
great ideas, good work, et cetera, but it also serves as a framework and a context for meaning
making within the community. Why is this the thing that's important? So each time that the
strategic plan first in its original creation and then in its being updated forces the community
to grapple with how do we frame what's important. And I think the example of constraining things
to STEM, which wasn't really a constraint, but deciding this is where we're going to focus
on STEM disciplines versus more broadly was a really important conversation to be had around
where do we think we can make the most impact? Where do we have people who are ready to move
on things? What is the larger higher ed community ready for? It serves as a platform for that kind
of meaning making that then makes it easier for the working groups to dig in and get work done
going forward. Yeah, I would agree that one of the, I want to add one thing to that is that it is
the community that sort of looks at the strategic plan and, you know, having been part of working on
the strategic plan, I sort of look at it and say, yeah, these are all things that are important.
They sort of are things that we all value to some degree. Some of them are things that I can
really wrap my head around and I can work for the project in this way where I feel like I can
contribute. And so this is one of the things, you know, we've mentioned this idea of working groups
and we're going to talk more about what some of the working groups do in later episodes, but really
the key here is that these working groups sort of, now I understand, stemmed from the strategic plan
and, you know, if you find a working group that is doing something that's a, yeah, I can contribute
to that. Yeah, I can be a part of that. That's how I get brought into the larger Poggle community,
to do more than just be a Poggle practitioner and sort of help move the project forward. You know,
as we've talked about, adding more than just STEM fields to our umbrella, you know, is something that
some people felt really strongly about. And so that is something that the project has been
actively working on. So, you know, we're going to do a little bit of reflection now. Susan, it's been
a couple of years since your initial work with the project and, you know, you haven't, has been as
closely tied to the project as you used to be, but in helping us develop that first strategic plan,
looking back on it, you've already said a few of these things, but what really strikes you about
how the Poggle community continues to embrace a strategic plan when so many other organizations
do not seem to have such a connection with their organizational documents? So what about the
project seems to make it work? I mean, Rick touched on this, but I want to hear your thoughts too.
Yeah, well, I think I'm going to go back to something you said at the very beginning,
which is nothing happens in the Poggle project that's not intentional. I mean, and that's maybe
an exaggeration, but almost everything that happens in the Poggle project is very, very intentional.
And I think that what is exciting about that work is it reflects that commitment to saying we want
to make a difference to the students in our classes, to the way teaching is conducted in
higher education, and we're going to be able to do that more effectively and more purposefully
if we have a framework like a strategic plan. I also think that, as I've already said,
the process that we use to create it was then consistent with the kind of thinking that folks
who use Poggle in their classrooms already bring to their teaching, right? What do we do when we're
together? What's most valuable when we're together in a classroom? What can be done independently?
How do those processes go together so that our course designs are effective for students?
The same thing happens, I think, within the Poggle project around the strategic plan.
What do we do when we're together or when we bring smaller groups together, like in the working groups?
And how do we leverage, for example, the Poggle National Meeting to catapult things forward?
What kind of things can happen independently? And it's just really a great way of anchoring the work.
And I mean, I just have to say, when I was going back through and looking at some older documents,
in the last decade, there's kind of two big projects I've been involved in that I thought,
wow, that was just amazing. And this, the original strategic planning for the Poggle project
was one of them. It just felt like these are people who have a shared mission. We've been
described as a community of transformation, and I think that that is important in this case.
The fact that we've been able to leverage a strategic plan is because we do have a shared
mission, as well as some shared kind of assumptions about how intentional should we be when we spend
our time together. Thank you. Rick, do you have any other final sort of recollections or musings
after we've been here? Yeah, I think that one of the reasons many strategic plans in organizations
either fail or are put on a shelf has to do with the way the leadership of the organization
views their role vis-a-vis the rest of their community. And one of the things that our good
colleague Cliff Kussmaul repeatedly said during his time on the steering committee was,
the steering committee is named the steering committee because we're supposed to be steering,
right? We're not supposed to be doing all of the work. We're supposed to be steering. We're
supposed to be providing context to make sure the boat is headed in the right direction and making
sure that the other people in the organization are able to achieve more than they ever could have
imagined they were achieving heading in this direction. And I think that perspective,
the leadership of the organization as reflected in the board, as reflected in the steering committee,
which is made up of community members, is really one of the other things that has enabled our
strategic plan to be so successful, right? It's that we view the leadership of the organization
as sort of sitting in the back, holding the rudder and steering, right? And then we're
the rudder and steering, right? And the community has decided where we're supposed to go and
trusting them that they're going to get us there and just making sure we stay on that path. And
I think that's another great asset of an organization to have leadership that views leadership in that
way as a steering of an organization. And as I said before, just amazing community members
who are willing to put in the work and generate fantastic ideas and get things done.
Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I mean, it's definitely, it's interesting because people think
of a steering committee as a leadership committee that sort of tells everybody else what to do.
But within the Pogal project, that is not, you know, the steering committee, as you said,
guides and sort of provides support, but really a lot of the work gets done by
people within the community. And the steering committee is just there to make sure, you know,
we're not heading off the cliff or into the iceberg. So anyway, I really want to thank
Susan Shadel from Boise State and Rick Moog from the Pogal project for sharing your thoughts and
recollections and insights into this important structural piece of the Pogal project. You can't
say that about too many organizations. Thanks, Alex. It's been great. Thank you. This was fun.
Thank you. Thank you both. So later on in this second season of the Pogal podcast, we will talk
with other people associated with various of the working groups that we talked about today to
describe their work with the project. Please tune in to more of the Pogal podcast this season for
details on all the activities that the project undertakes and how you can become involved
in this community of practitioners. Thanks to all of you for listening to today's conversation
on the Pogal podcast. Intro and outro music of our podcast is produced by Pogal practitioner,
Wayne Pearson. Please join us next time when we discuss the importance of Pogal's national meeting
and how it helps move the project's strategic plan forward. Enjoy your week.