Getting the change to stick: From adaptation to evaluation and publication

Our conceptual paper “How did you get the change to stick?” exploring a change process in a UK university via co-evolution, recently published in the Innovative Higher Education journal, explores the challenges of embedding change and was an experience of commonly encountered challenges and learning that epitomize the scholarship of learning and teaching (SOTL). 

The article examines the redesign of Welcome, Induction and Transition (WIT) provision at the University triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic, which meant that in 2020 a typical welcome was impossible. Initially, like many things at the time, this meant the development of online asynchronous WIT provision, but the redesign culminated in a new year-round institutional approach to WIT. By September 2022 this included a dedicated team to run year-round WIT activity alongside student interns and this model continues today. This contrasts with the dispersed and varied approach that had previously characterized WIT at the university (as uncovered in an earlier LITE Fellowship, led by Andrew Mearman and Ruth Payne - read more about that here).

Our work started as a LITE-funded evaluation of the initial versions of the online approach through which we could see an evolution of the offer that appeared to result from iterative feedback from three key stakeholder communities: 

• Students

• Colleagues in Schools and Services 

• Leaders of the WIT transformation

There appeared to be an interesting story that we were well placed to tell. So, in 2022 we presented our findings about the new approach to WIT at two scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) conferences. 

Our initial telling of the story tentatively considered institutional change theory to explain the changes in WIT provision, although these early presentations focused on the digital platform, messaging to students and the efforts to generate a unified approach. It was only when a participant at the EuroSoTL conference asked ‘how did you get the change to stick?’ that we started to draw more explicitly on the literature on change in higher education to explore how innovations like the new year-round approach to WIT might be sustained.

We explored our understanding of change in complex systems like universities and drew on our own positionalities as researchers to develop insights into how a co-evolutionary perspective on change might help give insights not only into how change happened but also how it can ‘stick’.  By reflecting on our case of WIT at Leeds, thinking about it as system change, and comparing our experience with the range of theories of change in higher education, we identified lessons about co-evolutionary approaches as key to informing and sustaining change.

Getting this article published was not straightforward and included several rejections and rewrites. The three of us have considerable experience of writing and publishing, including on pedagogy and curriculum, but ran into numerous high barriers. A breakthrough moment came from sending the paper to a leading author on institutional change, who recommended Innovative Higher Education to us.

On reflection, our first submissions were to journals that were clearly unlikely to accept a single-institution case study, however careful we were to avoid making general claims, which highlighted the need to understand your target publication. More broadly, even though we had published discipline-based pedagogic research, we found that publishing in an education journal is different. For instance, whilst we understood that recognising our own positionality as designers and evaluators of the change process we were discussing was important, we did not communicate this enough, or we underestimated its importance.

Another challenge was that our paper was highly innovative. Journals have methodological norms, including how open they are to deviations from them. Not only did our paper deviate from typical structure but we also applied a theoretical perspective from ecology that had been used only infrequently in organisational theory, and viewed a higher education process via that lens. This is a translational process but it is essential to recognise that we as authors must do the translation – not the reader.

Also not a new experience was encountering the stereotypical reviewer 2, who appeared not to get what we were doing, and worse, seemed determined to find reasons to be critical. On reflection,  the reviewer’s frustration with our methodology reflected our lack of clarity in communicating it. When we addressed reviewer 2's comments, we met their objections but also had a much better paper. Here, a deeper critical reading of our work would have saved us time and emotional energy, yet despite our extensive networks, we had not managed to get such feedback.

Looking back over the five-year process, the work moved from a necessary pandemic response, to evaluation, reflection, conceptual learning and finally, a publication, which whilst reporting on change also required of us several changes in direction and approach. If we had to summarise the lessons we learnt through this journey they would be:

• Know your audience and journal - Methodological fit and expectations matter more than we initially appreciated.

• Make positionality explicit - When researching your own practice, clarity about your role is essential.

• Do the translational work - If you are applying theory from another field, it is your job - not the reader’s - to make it accessible and relevant.

• Take reviewer feedback seriously - Even difficult reviews can point to real opportunities to enhance clarity or structure.

• Seek critical feedback early - A deeper, more critical reading from colleagues could have saved time and effort.

You can read Anne, Andrew, and Emma's article here.