Moving Toward Institutional Culture Change in Higher Education: An Exploration into Cross-functional Professional Learning Communities

This article explores the implementation of cross-functional professional learning communities (PLCs) involving faculty, staff and administrators at three different institutional types – research, urban regional, and rural regional universities – with the goal of learning about and then implementing a culture change approach to support academic and psychosocial success for historically marginalized student groups. The action research-based study explores the research question: Do cross-functional PLCs help support institution-wide culture change? And if so, how? Our findings identified that PLCs can act as a vehicle for the beginning steps of institutional culture change if they adopt four organizational strategies for spreading learning. Given the complexity and size of campuses, PLCs can act as a strategizing team for developing a broader culture change approach that ultimately impacts the overall institution. Armed with the skillsets related to culture change that they learn in the PLC, they can become change agents that plan and spread culture change. They do this by moving from a PLC that learned together for a year to a coordinating group that utilizes their newly gained skills to execute and create a set of culture change strategies. The PLCs make the transition to a coordinating group by expanding and adding new members and/or connecting to units throughout campus, creating an extended network. They also implement four key strategies – data/assessment, communications, professional learning and auditing/mapping.