Chapter 7: Leveraging Professional Learning Communities for Institutional Change

Professional learning communities (PLCs) have the potential to be an agent for institutional change in addition to improving student learning. In this chapter, we discuss our experience leveraging a series of learning communities as a tool to facilitate attention to and infusion of an entrepreneurial mindset across the College of Engineering (CoE) at The Ohio State University. The goal of our PLC series was to encourage instructors to create and/or modify curriculum and adapt pedagogies in alignment with the desired institutional change around this mindset. Over 2 years, we facilitated five PLCs with focuses on first-year engineering, capstone courses, peer mentoring in middle-years courses, and graduate instructors; these multidisciplinary and distinct cohorts offered insights into how aspects of the PLCs worked toward or against change. We present lessons learned and contextualize our experience in the broader literature around three thematic considerations for PLCs with respect to promoting change: recruitment and facilitation, synchronization across diverse participant cohorts, and buy-in and ownership. We highlight our experiences facilitating PLCs in an online environment with evolving buy-in, and touch on the nuances of invoking sustainable change across the institutional hierarchies unique to a large research institution. Our chapter concludes with a synopsis of how these themes influence institutionalization and an analysis of how our series of PLCs operated with respect to our goal.