ICED PODCAST - Mindsets for Wicked Problems in Educational Development | Pedagoscope.ch

Description

In a world where educational systems are constantly evolving, how can educational developers stay grounded, hopeful, and effective?

In this episode of the ICED podcast, Professor Donna Ellis, past president of ICED and Director of the Centre for Teaching Excellence at the University of Waterloo, invites us to rethink how we approach change. Drawing on the ideas of Randy Bass and Simon Sinek, she explores the power of mindsets—from wicked problems to infinite games—and reframes complexity as opportunity.

This conversation is a thoughtful and energizing reflection on stewardship, hope, flexibility, and the long view of educational development. Whether you are new to the field or a seasoned leader, this episode will leave you with practical lenses—and renewed optimism—for navigating the future of education.

Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Today on the ISET podcast, we are joined by Professor Donna Ellis. Donna is the past president of ISET and she is the director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Waterloo in Canada. She brings a wealth of experience in educational development and we are excited to hear her perspective.
Speaker #1
So without further ado, let's jump into the conversation.
Speaker #0
Donna, as president of ISED last year, you concluded your term by giving a keynote at the ISED conference in Nairobi, Kenya. What was the topic and why did you specifically choose that topic?
Speaker #1
Good questions. Thank you, Arianna. Thank you for having me on this podcast. This is exciting. So my keynote last year at the conference was called Future Proofing, as we were looking at educational ecosystems and just how dynamic that all is. For me, this future proofing, the other part of the title was the Educational Developer Perspective. We had some talks about the students' perspective, instructors' perspective. I was trying to bring the Educational Developer Perspective. Just thinking in such a dynamic changing system, what could we as developers look towards or have available for us to use that would help us navigate that. So, that's why I chose that theme to talk about.
Speaker #0
So, in your opinion, as you described just now, in a fast-changing world, what are the top qualities, competencies required for educational developers, in your opinion?
Speaker #1
Well, so my talk didn't focus on competencies per se. My talk was looking at mindsets. And so that to me, I saw as things that actually are underlying the competencies, things that help us choose what to do or how to approach our work or how to think about our work. And so, you know, there are zero in on something that was just a little more focused, that I think a lot of us probably bring to our work, but maybe not consciously. So I wanted to raise that to the level of consciousness.
Speaker #0
So the conceptions, you were talking about the mindset, the conceptions. So then I rephrase my question. So what's the mindset you consider being the most effective for educational developers today?
Speaker #1
In my talk, I identified two mindsets. One was called a wicked problems mindset that comes from the work of Randy Bass. And the other is an infinite mindset, which comes from the work of Simon Sinek. And so those together, by the end of the talk, I tried to put them together in a way that I labeled a wicked opportunities mindset. Then when you put them all together, I think you can go there.
Speaker #0
Could we say that wicked problems could be called complex problems or is it different?
Speaker #1
But with wicked problems as they are defined, yes they're complex. They typically don't have one solution. They are extremely broad in that there's a lot of people involved typically in them and they have a lot of different opinions. They tend to include incomplete or even contradictory information. And there's often it's costly to try to fix a wicked problem. And, and there are a lot of interconnections within the problem and with other problems. So I think a wicked problem goes beyond being complex.
Speaker #0
The mindset would be to be able to recognize those wicked problems and to deal with them. So, what kind of actions can educational developers take in order to face and to solve these kinds of problems?
Speaker #1
Well, I'm not sure we can solve them, but we can maybe help improve them. Yeah, improve them. Okay. In each of our individual lifespans as a worker, right? Solving some of these big things is pretty hard. But as far as what can we do, so within each of those two, the wicked problems mindset and the infinite mindset, I identified three views Bass identified three views within his wicked problems mindset, and then I extended that for the cynics work on the infinite mindset. So with a wicked problems mindset, the views are the long view, the wide view, and the critical view. And so those are all ways of thinking and acting that we could adopt that would enable us to engage that wicked problems mindset. And then there are three additional views for the infinite mindset. So I don't know, do you want to go through them kind of one at a time or?
Speaker #0
As you wish.
Speaker #1
As I wish, okay. Oh,
Speaker #0
let's make it a bit more practical. So if you take a long view, what could that be?
Speaker #1
Right. So if you're taking a long view, you're thinking about just the fact that our... Well, just tackling wicked problems. First of all, that typically is part of what's taken in as part of the long view because these problems are so multifaceted and so big they will take a long time to try to address. So if we come in with that way of thinking, as opposed to I'm going to come and fix this wicked problem, you know, in four months, well, that's not realistic, right? So having that mindset that it's going to take a long time and that the work is, it's slow and long term. Also thinking as we're working on it that what we're doing now can shape what's going to happen 10 or more years from now. So really thinking way beyond today's whatever project you're working on and trying to see how that can fit in with where education or ed development may be in the next 5, 10, 15 years.
Speaker #0
And if you take a wide view, what's the difference? What happens then?
Speaker #1
Okay, so the wide view is around as probably the word wide suggests looking really broadly. Right? So with that, ed developers and we do typically in our teaching centers function as hubs or connectors to bring people together to work on these fairly complex problems. Taking a wide view also means rethinking our relationships and rethinking who we are. who can do educational development. It's way beyond people in teaching centers. And so being really open and trying to amplify a lot of different voices and including different people than you might have typically done before, and just trying to get that really wide, both disciplinary but also interdisciplinary perspectives. So recognizing, as we do in education, it's trying to help students be prepared to handle wicked problems. We want them to have more interdisciplinary kinds of experiences and it's the same with our work that we need to draw on different disciplines to just have as many, I think, options in front of us as we're trying to figure out what we can do next.
Speaker #0
And then of course I'm asking you about the third view, the critical one.
Speaker #1
Right yeah so with that one um it's uh you know finding ways to support an advanced evidence-based practices, right? Because sometimes our instructors don't always want to do some of those things. So we're taking what we know works and trying to promote that and push that, but also supporting self-reflection for individuals as well as the institution and also supporting what might be called creative disruption by questioning. always questioning where learning is taking place, how learning is taking place, and thinking about are there practices that our institutions are engaging in that might be harmful to at least some people or their systems that would be harmful. So I think we're with the critical view, we are certainly not staying wedded to the status quo. We are in fact looking for those sort of little leverage points where we can ask some pointed questions that might change the course of how something might be proceeding. So again, thinking kind of ties in like these views aren't mutually exclusive. So it ties in with that long view, like if you can start to move a system in a certain way at this point, what could that help achieve? 10 or 15 years down the road.
Speaker #0
And do we have a methodology to apply those views? Or it's because the mindset is just a way of thinking somehow, but it seems to me fantastic, super interesting and, of course, inspiring. But how do you put that into application? How do you apply that in your everyday life? a professional life as an educational developer? I mean, it's not so easy.
Speaker #1
No, it's not so easy but I think being aware of the framework and then you have to sort of take that pause yourself and say okay, I have this issue I'm going to work on how can I apply the long view, the wide view, the critical view? Am I asking, you know, kind of edgy questions? Am I am I bringing in all the voices that I should be bringing in? So it's almost like a heuristic of sorts, you know, a set of sort of questions you can ask yourself as you're trying to work through things. And, you know, I was, it was in a meeting the other day and we were talking about Gen AI and teaching and learning and what's going to happen. And if we all had crystal balls, it would be amazing, right? But we don't, but you know, you start reading some of the stuff out in the literature and, and you recognize that where some of the, places things may go is certainly increased student agency in the whole learning exercise or experience, right? They're going to be able to interrogate information and gen AI systems. They're going to be able to almost map out their own learning experiences and the faculty member role is going to look really different. And so I made a point in this meeting that Well, this is just sort of another extension of a learning centered paradigm. And we've been working at long slow movement on that for years, right? We've had a course design institute we've been running for almost 20 years where we teach people how to do things like write intended learning outcomes from the student learning perspective, how to have constructive alignment in course design. So We've been laying the groundwork for this without knowing even that it may get picked up in new ways with Gen AI, but that to me is part of the long view. You take an evidence-based thing, you believe it really is important for teaching and learning, you commit to it, you persist with it, even though there are many people who might say, well, I don't want to have learning outcomes on my course outline. Well, that's nice. What are you assessing then? Right? having some of those kinds of conversations with people. But yeah, so I think it's just having in your head some of the pieces of the framework explicitly and some of those questions to figure out am I mapping it out the way that I would? I mean, I've taken up a lot of change management theory in my work as well. And so I now think when I work on a bigger project, okay, how can I map this out as an actual change process and what are the various, types of approaches I might use depending on where people are at on the diffusion of innovation curve, for example. And so it just like any kind of theoretical framework, I think once you know it, it starts to just shape the way that you think and then the steps that you take when you go to engage in the work. Yeah,
Speaker #0
it does. Thank you. Thank you. I fully agree with you. But now, if you think of the infinite mindset, the one which has been explained, described by Simon Sinek, what's the main difference between those two mindsets?
Speaker #1
Yeah. So with Sinek's work and a colleague turned me towards his book, The Infinite Game, to try to... Because she was recognizing I was seeing kind of the long picture on stuff. And she's like, I think you might really enjoy this book. So I went to read the book and there are a lot of things in there. And again, the three views that I pulled out are not he doesn't identify them as such. But when I was reading and thinking about what I know about ed development, these are ones that really stuck for me. And so the three views are the relational view, the flexible view and the optimistic view. And so they are, I think, complementary to ed. the views in the wicked problems mindset and add another important dimension. I think more around how we, how we approach our work sometimes like the relational view is very much about relationships, trust, and care and, And those are all fundamental to ed development work. And yeah, so it just really struck me as, oh, this is a really perfect chord here. Because he talks about working towards a future-oriented just cause. And those causes are things like optimistic, affirmative, inclusive, service-oriented, resilient, idealistic. The causes have no end. And that is education to me. Right? Education has no end. Like these systems are going to persist long after we stop working in them. So yeah, the one piece around that say that relational view was just so it's just so fundamental to me for a development.
Speaker #0
And what about hope in that infinite mindset?
Speaker #1
Yeah, so hope comes in and another 1 of the views for me, which I labeled the optimistic view. And that's where, yes, hope and positivity can help us persist as developers when things get a bit tough or really tough. Not even just a bit. You know, having, having hope for the future of education I think can help. Having positivity about the importance of our work can help. It can also, I think it just helps you rise above some of the day-to-day stuff.
Speaker #0
Could you explain the idea of stewards? I'm not sure I understand the idea behind that.
Speaker #1
Okay, so like a steward is someone who is taking care of, so a parent in some respects is like a steward of a child's life, right? They are taking care, they are providing, providing support, they are helping it move in what we believe will be a good positive direction to be sustainable and self-sustaining.
Speaker #0
Could we say that stewards are like protectors or gardeners or people who make things grow and happen somehow?
Speaker #1
Yes, yeah, I mean, I think the for example right so yes we are there to yes help things again progress and move in the direction that you know we feel is best and sometimes it's an extension of what came before and sometimes it needs to be shifted in different ways based on what we're seeing on the horizon so yeah the stewards are there to um yeah to assist and not necessarily take You're not taking individual credit for it. You're part of a larger community that is helping to say, yes, protect and move something forward.
Speaker #0
And if you were to give advice to educational developers at the beginning of their career based on those two mindsets, what would be all the key learnings? What kind of advice could we give them?
Speaker #1
What could we give them? Well. So maybe I can wrap that with the third view from the infinite mindset is that flexible view. And to my mind, flexibility in ed development is again another one of those sort of fundamental paramount things that we can't come in with very fixed ways of doing anything because we're working with people who are all different. Nice. Trying to be as flexible as we can, and even in the setup of our centers, thinking how do we devise roles that enable us to flex and move with whatever institutional priorities are identified, whatever is coming in from the larger society, government directions. There will always be new things coming at us, and so I think we... We are specialists in some of the things we do. We are also extreme generalists. And so I think some good advice is if you can do a bit of both and, you know, you have your areas where you're a specialist, but then there are you still have to be able to do many different things and be excited to learn about them.
Speaker #0
How could we end this podcast with one or two key sentences, a final conclusion?
Speaker #1
A final conclusion. Oh my gosh, okay. So I think that for any leaders in ed development it would behoove us to make folks coming along behind us or, you know, taking over from us, aware of these mindsets and the power of them and helping us be able to do really mindful, intentional work as developers. And yeah, to always be trying to think about, again, not just problems suggest there are solutions. Opportunities suggest solutions. There are many directions. And so I think trying to keep that opportunity word in mind is also really going to be useful for us in our field and in our careers.
Speaker #0
Thank you very much, Donna.

Description

In a world where educational systems are constantly evolving, how can educational developers stay grounded, hopeful, and effective?

Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Today on the ISET podcast, we are joined by Professor Donna Ellis. Donna is the past president of ISET and she is the director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Waterloo in Canada. She brings a wealth of experience in educational development and we are excited to hear her perspective.
Speaker #1
So without further ado, let's jump into the conversation.
Speaker #0
Donna, as president of ISED last year, you concluded your term by giving a keynote at the ISED conference in Nairobi, Kenya. What was the topic and why did you specifically choose that topic?
Speaker #1
Good questions. Thank you, Arianna. Thank you for having me on this podcast. This is exciting. So my keynote last year at the conference was called Future Proofing, as we were looking at educational ecosystems and just how dynamic that all is. For me, this future proofing, the other part of the title was the Educational Developer Perspective. We had some talks about the students' perspective, instructors' perspective. I was trying to bring the Educational Developer Perspective. Just thinking in such a dynamic changing system, what could we as developers look towards or have available for us to use that would help us navigate that. So, that's why I chose that theme to talk about.
Speaker #0
So, in your opinion, as you described just now, in a fast-changing world, what are the top qualities, competencies required for educational developers, in your opinion?
Speaker #1
Well, so my talk didn't focus on competencies per se. My talk was looking at mindsets. And so that to me, I saw as things that actually are underlying the competencies, things that help us choose what to do or how to approach our work or how to think about our work. And so, you know, there are zero in on something that was just a little more focused, that I think a lot of us probably bring to our work, but maybe not consciously. So I wanted to raise that to the level of consciousness.
Speaker #0
So the conceptions, you were talking about the mindset, the conceptions. So then I rephrase my question. So what's the mindset you consider being the most effective for educational developers today?
Speaker #1
In my talk, I identified two mindsets. One was called a wicked problems mindset that comes from the work of Randy Bass. And the other is an infinite mindset, which comes from the work of Simon Sinek. And so those together, by the end of the talk, I tried to put them together in a way that I labeled a wicked opportunities mindset. Then when you put them all together, I think you can go there.
Speaker #0
Could we say that wicked problems could be called complex problems or is it different?
Speaker #1
But with wicked problems as they are defined, yes they're complex. They typically don't have one solution. They are extremely broad in that there's a lot of people involved typically in them and they have a lot of different opinions. They tend to include incomplete or even contradictory information. And there's often it's costly to try to fix a wicked problem. And, and there are a lot of interconnections within the problem and with other problems. So I think a wicked problem goes beyond being complex.
Speaker #0
The mindset would be to be able to recognize those wicked problems and to deal with them. So, what kind of actions can educational developers take in order to face and to solve these kinds of problems?
Speaker #1
Well, I'm not sure we can solve them, but we can maybe help improve them. Yeah, improve them. Okay. In each of our individual lifespans as a worker, right? Solving some of these big things is pretty hard. But as far as what can we do, so within each of those two, the wicked problems mindset and the infinite mindset, I identified three views Bass identified three views within his wicked problems mindset, and then I extended that for the cynics work on the infinite mindset. So with a wicked problems mindset, the views are the long view, the wide view, and the critical view. And so those are all ways of thinking and acting that we could adopt that would enable us to engage that wicked problems mindset. And then there are three additional views for the infinite mindset. So I don't know, do you want to go through them kind of one at a time or?
Speaker #0
As you wish.
Speaker #1
As I wish, okay. Oh,
Speaker #0
let's make it a bit more practical. So if you take a long view, what could that be?
Speaker #1
Right. So if you're taking a long view, you're thinking about just the fact that our... Well, just tackling wicked problems. First of all, that typically is part of what's taken in as part of the long view because these problems are so multifaceted and so big they will take a long time to try to address. So if we come in with that way of thinking, as opposed to I'm going to come and fix this wicked problem, you know, in four months, well, that's not realistic, right? So having that mindset that it's going to take a long time and that the work is, it's slow and long term. Also thinking as we're working on it that what we're doing now can shape what's going to happen 10 or more years from now. So really thinking way beyond today's whatever project you're working on and trying to see how that can fit in with where education or ed development may be in the next 5, 10, 15 years.
Speaker #0
And if you take a wide view, what's the difference? What happens then?
Speaker #1
Okay, so the wide view is around as probably the word wide suggests looking really broadly. Right? So with that, ed developers and we do typically in our teaching centers function as hubs or connectors to bring people together to work on these fairly complex problems. Taking a wide view also means rethinking our relationships and rethinking who we are. who can do educational development. It's way beyond people in teaching centers. And so being really open and trying to amplify a lot of different voices and including different people than you might have typically done before, and just trying to get that really wide, both disciplinary but also interdisciplinary perspectives. So recognizing, as we do in education, it's trying to help students be prepared to handle wicked problems. We want them to have more interdisciplinary kinds of experiences and it's the same with our work that we need to draw on different disciplines to just have as many, I think, options in front of us as we're trying to figure out what we can do next.
Speaker #0
And then of course I'm asking you about the third view, the critical one.
Speaker #1
Right yeah so with that one um it's uh you know finding ways to support an advanced evidence-based practices, right? Because sometimes our instructors don't always want to do some of those things. So we're taking what we know works and trying to promote that and push that, but also supporting self-reflection for individuals as well as the institution and also supporting what might be called creative disruption by questioning. always questioning where learning is taking place, how learning is taking place, and thinking about are there practices that our institutions are engaging in that might be harmful to at least some people or their systems that would be harmful. So I think we're with the critical view, we are certainly not staying wedded to the status quo. We are in fact looking for those sort of little leverage points where we can ask some pointed questions that might change the course of how something might be proceeding. So again, thinking kind of ties in like these views aren't mutually exclusive. So it ties in with that long view, like if you can start to move a system in a certain way at this point, what could that help achieve? 10 or 15 years down the road.
Speaker #0
And do we have a methodology to apply those views? Or it's because the mindset is just a way of thinking somehow, but it seems to me fantastic, super interesting and, of course, inspiring. But how do you put that into application? How do you apply that in your everyday life? a professional life as an educational developer? I mean, it's not so easy.
Speaker #1
No, it's not so easy but I think being aware of the framework and then you have to sort of take that pause yourself and say okay, I have this issue I'm going to work on how can I apply the long view, the wide view, the critical view? Am I asking, you know, kind of edgy questions? Am I am I bringing in all the voices that I should be bringing in? So it's almost like a heuristic of sorts, you know, a set of sort of questions you can ask yourself as you're trying to work through things. And, you know, I was, it was in a meeting the other day and we were talking about Gen AI and teaching and learning and what's going to happen. And if we all had crystal balls, it would be amazing, right? But we don't, but you know, you start reading some of the stuff out in the literature and, and you recognize that where some of the, places things may go is certainly increased student agency in the whole learning exercise or experience, right? They're going to be able to interrogate information and gen AI systems. They're going to be able to almost map out their own learning experiences and the faculty member role is going to look really different. And so I made a point in this meeting that Well, this is just sort of another extension of a learning centered paradigm. And we've been working at long slow movement on that for years, right? We've had a course design institute we've been running for almost 20 years where we teach people how to do things like write intended learning outcomes from the student learning perspective, how to have constructive alignment in course design. So We've been laying the groundwork for this without knowing even that it may get picked up in new ways with Gen AI, but that to me is part of the long view. You take an evidence-based thing, you believe it really is important for teaching and learning, you commit to it, you persist with it, even though there are many people who might say, well, I don't want to have learning outcomes on my course outline. Well, that's nice. What are you assessing then? Right? having some of those kinds of conversations with people. But yeah, so I think it's just having in your head some of the pieces of the framework explicitly and some of those questions to figure out am I mapping it out the way that I would? I mean, I've taken up a lot of change management theory in my work as well. And so I now think when I work on a bigger project, okay, how can I map this out as an actual change process and what are the various, types of approaches I might use depending on where people are at on the diffusion of innovation curve, for example. And so it just like any kind of theoretical framework, I think once you know it, it starts to just shape the way that you think and then the steps that you take when you go to engage in the work. Yeah,
Speaker #0
it does. Thank you. Thank you. I fully agree with you. But now, if you think of the infinite mindset, the one which has been explained, described by Simon Sinek, what's the main difference between those two mindsets?
Speaker #1
Yeah. So with Sinek's work and a colleague turned me towards his book, The Infinite Game, to try to... Because she was recognizing I was seeing kind of the long picture on stuff. And she's like, I think you might really enjoy this book. So I went to read the book and there are a lot of things in there. And again, the three views that I pulled out are not he doesn't identify them as such. But when I was reading and thinking about what I know about ed development, these are ones that really stuck for me. And so the three views are the relational view, the flexible view and the optimistic view. And so they are, I think, complementary to ed. the views in the wicked problems mindset and add another important dimension. I think more around how we, how we approach our work sometimes like the relational view is very much about relationships, trust, and care and, And those are all fundamental to ed development work. And yeah, so it just really struck me as, oh, this is a really perfect chord here. Because he talks about working towards a future-oriented just cause. And those causes are things like optimistic, affirmative, inclusive, service-oriented, resilient, idealistic. The causes have no end. And that is education to me. Right? Education has no end. Like these systems are going to persist long after we stop working in them. So yeah, the one piece around that say that relational view was just so it's just so fundamental to me for a development.
Speaker #0
And what about hope in that infinite mindset?
Speaker #1
Yeah, so hope comes in and another 1 of the views for me, which I labeled the optimistic view. And that's where, yes, hope and positivity can help us persist as developers when things get a bit tough or really tough. Not even just a bit. You know, having, having hope for the future of education I think can help. Having positivity about the importance of our work can help. It can also, I think it just helps you rise above some of the day-to-day stuff.
Speaker #0
Could you explain the idea of stewards? I'm not sure I understand the idea behind that.
Speaker #1
Okay, so like a steward is someone who is taking care of, so a parent in some respects is like a steward of a child's life, right? They are taking care, they are providing, providing support, they are helping it move in what we believe will be a good positive direction to be sustainable and self-sustaining.
Speaker #0
Could we say that stewards are like protectors or gardeners or people who make things grow and happen somehow?
Speaker #1
Yes, yeah, I mean, I think the for example right so yes we are there to yes help things again progress and move in the direction that you know we feel is best and sometimes it's an extension of what came before and sometimes it needs to be shifted in different ways based on what we're seeing on the horizon so yeah the stewards are there to um yeah to assist and not necessarily take You're not taking individual credit for it. You're part of a larger community that is helping to say, yes, protect and move something forward.
Speaker #0
And if you were to give advice to educational developers at the beginning of their career based on those two mindsets, what would be all the key learnings? What kind of advice could we give them?
Speaker #1
What could we give them? Well. So maybe I can wrap that with the third view from the infinite mindset is that flexible view. And to my mind, flexibility in ed development is again another one of those sort of fundamental paramount things that we can't come in with very fixed ways of doing anything because we're working with people who are all different. Nice. Trying to be as flexible as we can, and even in the setup of our centers, thinking how do we devise roles that enable us to flex and move with whatever institutional priorities are identified, whatever is coming in from the larger society, government directions. There will always be new things coming at us, and so I think we... We are specialists in some of the things we do. We are also extreme generalists. And so I think some good advice is if you can do a bit of both and, you know, you have your areas where you're a specialist, but then there are you still have to be able to do many different things and be excited to learn about them.
Speaker #0
How could we end this podcast with one or two key sentences, a final conclusion?
Speaker #1
A final conclusion. Oh my gosh, okay. So I think that for any leaders in ed development it would behoove us to make folks coming along behind us or, you know, taking over from us, aware of these mindsets and the power of them and helping us be able to do really mindful, intentional work as developers. And yeah, to always be trying to think about, again, not just problems suggest there are solutions. Opportunities suggest solutions. There are many directions. And so I think trying to keep that opportunity word in mind is also really going to be useful for us in our field and in our careers.
Speaker #0
Thank you very much, Donna.

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