Learning Your Work Differently | 055 | Teaching Moment
Why listening to your own ideas explained differently can sharpen your practice.
I want to share something with you that I’d put in the category of pretty cool.
I recently uploaded some of my original work into Google’s NotebookLM, my book, Why Colleges Struggle To Implement Priorities & What To Do About, along with a few recent articles.
NotebookLM offers different ways to learn content, including audio. I decided to try it out, and I was pleasantly surprised.
NOTE: I created the first draft of the 2nd edition to Why Colleges Struggle To Implement Priorities & What To Do About It. I hope to release it later this year!
So much so that I wanted to share it with you for two reasons.
First, you’ll learn by hearing or you can read the transcript below, a conversation between two voices who engage with and unpack my work. They refer to it as “the source.” NotebookLM’s Studio can be a meaningful tool, especially for those with learning disabilities. It offers a variety of ways to learn content.
The teaching and learning possibilities here are significant.
Second, it’s a useful way to reflect on and strengthen our own work. Hearing or reading the text of our ideas explained, questioned, and connected in a different format can help us sharpen our thinking and, ultimately, improve how we support student outcomes.
Now, I’ll say this: NotebookLM took a few liberties, especially at the beginning, that I wouldn’t have taken. But the core ideas come through clearly.
Take a listen.
(Transcript below.)
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Transcript:
Speaker 0:00
You know, um when a patient is wheeled into an emergency room with a critical injury, the attending doctors they don’t call a timeout to form a blue ribbon committee.
Speaker 1 0:10
Right. No, definitely not.
Speaker 0:11
They don’t draft a like 50-page strategic plan about how to theoretically stop the bleeding over the next three to five years. They triage, they act. They use the tools they have in that exact moment to save the patient on the table.
Speaker 1 0:24
Exactly. I mean the urgency of the trauma dictates an immediate, disciplined response. In a medical crisis, delaying action for the sake of a beautifully formatted PDF report, it’s basically synonymous with malpractice.
Speaker 0:39
Yeah, but then you look at higher education, and it feels like collectively we’ve kind of convinced ourselves that the institutional bleeding will stop if we just schedule, you know, one more task force meeting for the middle of next semester.
Speaker 1 0:50
Which never actually solves the problem.
Speaker 0:52
Right. So welcome to this custom tailored deep dive. If you are a college faculty member, a classified professional, or an administrator, this conversation is specifically designed for you. I’m your host, and today we are digging into the first edition of Dr. Al Solano’s Guide, Why Colleges Struggle to Implement Priorities and What to Do About It, along with his uh evolving practitioner-focused frameworks.
Speaker 1 1:15
And I’m your resident expert for today. Our mission here is really uncompromising. We’re moving past the ambient noise, the endless planning cycles, and that sort of performative theater that so often dominates campus politics.
Speaker 1:28
Oh, the performative theater is the worst.
Speaker 1 1:31
It really is. We’re going to examine the raw, unfiltered reality of why higher education initiatives stall out, and more importantly, how to fix them using structured action and genuine accountability.
The Organism And Six Failure Causes
Speaker 1:41
Consider this a frank practitioner-to-practitioner conversation. We’re leaving the fluff and the buzzwords at the door. So, okay, let’s unpack this. Before you can fix a stalled college initiative, you have to accurately diagnose the underlying The organism and six failures causes illness. And the source material uses this brilliant biological analogy.
Speaker 1 1:57
Oh, the organism comparison. I love this part.
Speaker 2:00
Yeah, exactly. A college is essentially a living organism. If you feed an organism toxicity, things like um passive aggression, unchecked departmental silos, or those performative call outs we just mentioned, it decays from the inside out. But if you feed it kindness, respect, and action, it actually thrives.
Speaker 1 2:19
That biological analogy is highly precise because organizations, much like living organisms, they possess specific structural vulnerabilities. The sources actually outline six distinct factors of implementation failure that cause this institutional decay.
Speaker 2:34
Right. The six factors walk us through those.
Speaker 1 2:37
Well, it starts fundamentally with lacking a culture of kindness. When basic professional grace is absent, fear just takes over. And following that, we see unproductive committee structures. I mean, we’ve all seen committees that exist simply to justify their own existence, right?
Speaker 2:51
Oh, absolutely. The ones that meet endlessly without ever producing a single tangible deliverable.
Speaker 1 2:56
Exactly. And the decay just compounds from there. The third factor is lacking a student-centered framework where decisions are basically made for the convenience of the adults rather than the needs of the students.
Speaker 3:08
Which is completely backwards. And then the fourth one is operating in isolated silos, right? Like, for example, student services and academic instruction often exist in entirely different universes on the exact same campus. They barely communicate about the very same students they share.
Speaker 1 3:23
It’s so common. And the fifth factor transitions into the classroom itself, a lack of faculty teaching preparation. We often assume that uh content expertise automatically translates to pedagogical expertise.
Speaker 3:37
Which is a huge leap, a dangerous assumption, really.
Speaker 1 3:39
It really is. And finally, the sixth factor encompasses effective leadership challenges. You know, leaders who manage the status quo rather than actively guiding the institution through really difficult change.
The Three Cs That Enable Action
Speaker 3:50
So that’s the illness disrupting the organism. But the antidote presented in the text is a framework called the three C’s clarity, coherence, and consensus. And I really want to dig into the mechanics of this because it sounds simple, but I suspect it’s incredibly difficult to execute in the real world.
Speaker 1 4:07
Oh, it’s incredibly difficult. The sequence of those three C’s is where the actual magic happens. The fatal flaw most institutions make is building this gorgeous 50-page strategic plan and immediately trying to force consensus. Right. They want everyone in the auditorium nodding in agreement on day one, but without clarity on what the goals actually mean on a daily basis and coherence in how different departments will logically align their resources to achieve them. True consensus is, well, it’s a mathematical impossibility.
Speaker 4:38
Let me push back a little on that order, though. Are colleges jumping straight to consensus simply because it’s the path of least resistance? Like it’s very easy for us to sit in a room and uniformly agree that we want, quote, improved student success.
Speaker 1 4:50
Oh, sure.
Speaker 4:51
But that’s just a bumper sticker. Nobody is actually agreeing on what that practically means for the Tuesday morning developmental math class.
Speaker 1 4:58
Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. The reality is that consensus without clarity is just a shared illusion. It’s everyone nodding in a meeting because they interpret a vague, high-level goal in a way that conveniently requires zero change to their own personal behavior.
Speaker 5:14
Right. The oh yeah, I agree with that. As long as I don’t have to do anything differently mindset.
Speaker 1 5:18
Exactly. When you skip clarity and coherence, you lack the basic operational discipline required to execute. And the moment the actual difficult work begins, that fragile illusion of consensus shatters and the organism starts to break down again.
Speaker 5:33
Here’s where it gets really interesting, though. Even if an institution miraculously aligns those three C’s, execution still requires time. And if there is one thing higher education falsely believes it has in abundance, it is time.
Speaker 1 5:45
The illusion of the academic year.
Speaker 5:47
Yes. Let’s look at the mechanical reality of the academic calendar because it is an absolute trap. You think you have a whole academic year to implement a massive priority. But let’s break it down month by month, September. That’s startup chaos.
Speaker 1 6:02
Oh, it’s pure survival mode. Everyone is just trying to get the financial aid dispersed, the classes running, and just, you know, manage the ad drop periods.
Speaker 6:10
Right. Then you blink, and it’s November and December. Those months are completely swallowed by Thanksgiving, winter holidays, and finals prep. You might get one, maybe two productive meetings on the books.
Speaker 1 6:21
If you’re lucky.
Speaker 6:22
Exactly. Then January and February, that is second semester startup chaos all over again. April is completely chopped up by spring break, which just derels any momentum you had. And May is exclusively dedicated to year-end wrap-up and graduation ceremonies.
Speaker 1 6:37
So when you look at the math of the academic calendar, you are left with exactly two viable months, October and March.
Speaker 6:43
Two months. What the sources originally called the three-month rule has practically shrunk to a two-month window for high-functioning transformational priority work.
Speaker 1 6:51
It’s pretty shocking when you map it out like that.
Speaker 6:53
It is. And if you’re an administrator listening to this right now, you’re probably looking at your calendar and nodding, realizing how many times a vital equity initiative got bumped to, well, after spring break and then simply vanished into thin air. The calendar is constantly weaponized as a stalling tactic. You hear, let’s revisit this in the fall. It kills momentum instantly.
Speaker 1 7:14
What’s fascinating here is that the most successful campuses understand the psychology of this shrinking window, and they simply refuse to pause. They know that if you drop a complex priority in mid-December and try to pick the pieces back up in late February, institutional amnesia has already set in.
Speaker 7:32
The momentum is completely dead.
Speaker 1 7:34
Exactly. To counteract this, high-functioning institutions keep the engine warm. They hold virtual mini retreats during the intercessions. They pay modest, targeted stipends for off-contract work over the summer and winter breaks. They basically refuse to wait for the perfect time, because the perfect time is a total myth.
Speaker 7:50
But I have to challenge the premise for a second. Is the campus calendar actually the villain here? Or is it just a highly convenient scapegoat for leaders who want to avoid making politically difficult decisions?
Speaker 1 8:02
That’s a really fair question.
Speaker 8:04
Right. Because if you don’t want to ruffle the feathers of a vocal department chair, blaming the upcoming summer break is a lot easier than admitting you just don’t want to lead the change.
Speaker 1 8:13
The calendar frequently serves as the ultimate shield for inaction. It provides leaders with plausible deniability. I mean, an administrator can claim they fully support an equity initiative, but lament that they just couldn’t find the space in the calendar to implement it.
Speaker 8:28
It’s the perfect out.
Speaker 1 8:29
It is. But Dr. Solano’s text fiercely emphasizes a sobering reality. If your student success rates are hovering in the single digits for certain marginalized populations, you do not possess the luxury of waiting. You have an ethical obligation to problem solve with immediate action, regardless of whether it’s November or March.
Naming Blockers And Rejecting Complicity
Speaker 8:49
Wow. Yeah. So if the calendar is just a convenient excuse, then who are the actual active blockers of progress? This brings us to the elephant in the room. And I want to be very careful here because the sources point out that the vast majority of college educators, the faculty, the classified professionals, the administrators, they are brilliant, passionate, hardworking people who really want the best for their students.
Speaker 1 9:13
Absolutely. The text is very clear on that.
Speaker 9:15
Right. So the toxic culture actually stems from what the text identifies as the few.
Speaker 1 9:20
And in many cases, the few is not even a faction. Sometimes it is literally just one or two individuals who have learned how to manipulate the institutional machinery to halt progress.
Speaker 9:29
Think about it like a single drop of dark dye in a glass of clear water. The dye doesn’t just sit politely at the bottom of the glass. Its very nature is to diffuse. That one person who chronically twists words or maybe weaponizes a union grievance process over minor slights or uses strategic silence to passively stall a project, they subtly change the color of the entire room.
Speaker 1 9:52
Right. And suddenly good people stop speaking up because the waters become too murky.
Speaker 9:56
Exactly. And what happens next is we fall into this incredibly destructive habit of blanket blame.
Speaker 1 10:03
Blanket blame is fatal to institutional culture. It happens when frustration boils over and people start saying things like the faculty are lazy or the administration is entirely incompetent.
Speaker 10:15
Which is never universally true.
Speaker 1 10:16
Never. And when you generalize an attack against the faculty as a whole, the excellent dedicated faculty members will naturally become defensive. They will circle the wagons to protect their profession and their peers. And in doing so, they inadvertently end up providing cover for the bad actors hidden within their ranks.
Speaker 10:34
It creates a total fortress mentality. So the solution presented is to stop generalizing and start naming the specific individuals and behaviors. If someone is distorting the truth about a new scheduling matrix, name it. But you don’t go into that conversation empty-handed, right?
Speaker 1 10:48
No, you gather your evidence, you document the specific behavior over time, you find your allies, and you say it out loud in the daylight. You cannot fight shadows. You cannot fight shadows. I love that. And this dynamic requires a serious reevaluation of how we view neutrality in higher education. Often, well-meaning, exceptional educators are advised by their peers to, you know, keep their heads down, stay out of the campus politics, or just focus on your own syllabus.
Speaker 11:15
The classic survival advice.
Speaker 1 11:17
Right. But the text argues passionately that in the face of toxic obstruction, telling people to keep their heads down is not neutrality, it is complicity. Silence doesn’t make a professional strong, it makes the problem stronger. You don’t have a First Amendment right to lie and bully your colleagues, but the people being bullied absolutely have a professional right to speak the truth.
Speaker 11:37
As the source material bluntly puts it, faculty blood isn’t thicker than the truth, and administrator blood isn’t thicker than the truth. If one individual is distorting a simple data-driven suggestion about offering more evening classes into some toxic campus-wide narrative about the administration upending schedules without consultation, you have to name that specific behavior and address it directly.
Speaker 1 11:58
And critically, this culture of accountability, this willingness to speak the truth and look at the hard data, it cannot just be a phenomenon that occurs in administrative boardrooms or academic Senate meetings.
Speaker 12:10
No, definitely not. Because if the few are poisoning the committee room, that toxicity doesn’t just magically stay there. It inevitably bleeds into the one place it can do the most profound damage to the classroom.
Speaker 1 12:21
Exactly.
Academic Responsibility Over Academic Freedom
Speaker 12:22
Let’s look at how this resistance manifests when faculty close their doors. There’s this foundational story in the material about a martial arts sensei. The sensei taught a four-step process of continuous improvement. You plan the content, you visualize the sequence, you implement and adapt in real time, and you deeply reflect on the lesson.
Speaker 1 12:41
Which makes sense.
Speaker 12:41
Right. But his most vital, non-negotiable lesson was this teach the students you have, not the ones you wish you had.
Speaker 1 12:48
And that phrase requires a massive paradigm shift for higher education. It demands a critical transition in our vocabulary and our pedagogical mindset. We have to move away from using the traditional concept of academic freedom as an impenetrable shield and move toward a new standard of academic responsibility.
Speaker 13:06
Dr. Solano makes a really fascinating and likely controversial observation in the text about how academic freedom sometimes gets invoked in these scenarios.
Speaker 1 13:14
Yeah, this is a delicate but important point.
Speaker 13:17
It is. And just to be clear to the listener, we’re impartially reporting what’s in the source material here, not taking political sides. But the text notes that sometimes institutional conservatives, and interestingly, he notes that some of these individuals might loudly champion social justice causes. Outside of the academy, they will use academic freedom as a protective veil inside the college.
Speaker 1 13:38
It becomes a way to maintain the status quo.
Speaker 13:40
Exactly. To hide antiquated grading systems or ineffective teaching practices, which the data clearly shows disproportionately impacts students of color.
Speaker 1 13:49
This raises an important question. The cognitive dissonance there is just staggering. How can an educator genuinely claim to utilize an equity lens if they are fundamentally unwilling to look critically at their own disaggregated classroom data?
Speaker 14:03
They can’t.
Speaker 1 14:04
True equity means taking responsibility for the outcomes. Returning to your martial arts analogy, the Sensei wouldn’t accept failing a cohort of students by blaming their socioeconomic background or their lack of high school preparation. He would meticulously adapt his teaching methods to ensure the technique was actually learned. Asking for help with pedagogy is a sign of strength, not weakness.
Speaker 14:27
It’s a massive shift in locus of control. It moves the focus from external attributions, you know, blaming the high schools, blaming the students’ home lives, blaming the pandemic to internal attributions. It forces the question: what can I actually control in my own classroom?
Speaker 1 14:42
Which is a terrifying question for some.
Speaker 14:44
Oh, let’s be honest. Admitting that your teaching might need a major overhaul after doing it the exact same way for 20 years is terrifying. It requires immense emotional intelligence. It requires treating teaching not as a solo performance behind a closed door, but as a vulnerable collaborative craft.
Speaker 1 15:02
But the transition from theory to practice is always the hardest part. The question becomes: how does a college practically apply this concept of academic responsibility without it devolving into just another empty professional development slogan?
Speaker 15:15
Through highly structured continuous improvement, enter the inquiry and action model. The sources outline this as a very specific six-step cycle designed to pull teams out of the trap of endless planning, what some call admiring the problem, and push them into what the author terms productive struggle. I really want to break down exactly how this mechanism works.
Speaker 1 15:35
The inquiry and action model is where the rubber meets the road. It forces agile workgroups to actually execute. The six steps are deeply intentional. Should I run through them? Please do. Step one, form a dedicated cross-functional inquiry team. Step two, analyze your own disaggregated data to identify a specific student pain point. Step three, research and design a localized treatment or pedagogical intervention.
Speaker 15:58
Okay, so a specific local fix.
Speaker 1 16:01
Right. Then step four, implement that treatment in a pilot setting. Step five, rigorously assess the outcomes against historical data. And step six, reflect on the results and scale what works.
Speaker 16:12
I was looking at the Ventura College English Department case study in the notes, which used this exact six-step model. And I have to say, the data looked almost suspiciously high for a single semester of work. How on earth did a brief productive struggle yield such massive leaps in student success?
Speaker 1 16:29
The day is remarkable because the behavioral change was just so targeted. Guided by a coach, Ventura launched three faculty teams. They didn’t just tweak the font on a syllabus, you know.
Speaker 16:38
Right. They actually did the work.
Speaker 1 16:39
They engaged in the messy work of step three. They fundamentally redesigned their grading rubrics to be more transparent. They integrated structured personal reflection into their hybrid classes, and they basically revamped their entire approach to writing pedagogy.
Speaker 16:54
And the outcomes. Like let’s show the actual numbers.
Speaker 1 16:56
Well, when they reached step five and assessed the data against the previous semester, the assessment team saw course success rates jump from 49% to 68.8%.
Speaker 17:07
Wow. That is nearly a 20 percentage point increase in a single semester.
Speaker 1 17:11
It is. And retention for that same team rose from 86.5% to 93.8%.
Speaker 17:18
That’s huge. But the most vital piece of this is the equity gains, especially given their status as a Hispanic-serving institution. For Hispanic students in that specific pilot group, success went from 41% to 66%.
Speaker 1 17:32
Incredible job.
Speaker 17:33
And for female students, it went from 54% to 67%.
Speaker 1 17:37
Consider the mechanics of why that worked. By focusing entirely on internal attributions, what they could tangibly control in their own instructional practices, these faculty members utilized disaggregated data not as a weapon to punish themselves, but as a diagnostic instrument to elevate their craft.
Speaker 17:56
That’s a great way to put it.
Speaker 1 17:58
They didn’t lower their standards. They elevated their pedagogy to meet the students where they were. They took absolute ownership of the outcomes.
Speaker 18:04
And let’s emphasize something crucial here. This was not achieved by purchasing a million-dollar flashy new software platform.
Speaker 1 18:12
No, not at all.
Speaker 18:13
It was achieved by centering a culture of kindness, utilizing skilled leads to guide the six steps, and making the incredibly brave, vulnerable choice to analyze their own teaching practices rather than blaming the students sitting in the desks. They willingly entered the productive struggle, they tested a hypothesis, looked the results dead in the eye, learned from the failure or success, and adapted.
Speaker 1 18:35
The Ventura case study proves a vital psychological principle in organizational change. A shift in attitudes almost always follows a gradual change in behavior, not the other way around.
Speaker 18:46
Wait, really? The behavior has to change first.
Speaker 1 18:49
Yes, exactly. When faculty learn how to successfully implement a new technique, teach toward higher expectations, and actually witness the resulting student progress, the culture shifts organically. You do not change a campus culture by blasting a new vision statement out in a mass email. You change it through sustained, measurable patterns of practice.
Speaker 19:10
So, what does this all mean for you, the listener? We started our journey today by diagnosing the institutional illness, looking at the six factors of implementation failure from toxicity and unproductive committees to isolated silos. We introduced the structural antidote aligning clarity, then coherence before ever attempting consensus.
Speaker 1 19:29
We dissected the harsh mechanical reality of the shrinking two-month calendar trap and explored how high-functioning campuses beat it by keeping the engine warm through the winter and summer intercessions.
Speaker 19:40
We talked about the immense courage required to stop the destructive cycle of blanket blaming and to start naming the few who actively manipulate the system to block progress. We explored the necessary and sometimes painful mindset shift from using academic freedom as a protective shield to embracing academic responsibility as the ultimate catalyst for student success.
Speaker 1 20:02
And finally, we saw exactly how executing the six-step inquiry and action model can yield incredible, measurable equity gains, moving institutions out of endless planning and into the productive struggle that actually changes student lives.
Speaker 20:16
If you are listening to this, whether you are a faculty member adjusting a rubric for a Tuesday morning math class, a classified professional designing an intake process for first-generation students, or an administrator steering the strategic ship, you are the architect of your campus culture. Let’s be brutally honest. Equity work without structured implementation is just a wish.
Final Takeaways And Closing Challenge
Speaker 1 20:36
Right. Student success without an accompanying change in adult behavior is a myth. True institutional transformation requires a relentless commitment to operational discipline. It requires doing the ordinary, unglamorous work extraordinarily well, day in and day out, regardless of the month on the calendar.
Speaker 20:54
Which brings us right back to that living organism we talked about at the very beginning. I want to leave you with this final provocative thought to mull over as you walk onto your campus tomorrow morning. If your college is indeed a living, breathing organism, and its ultimate health is determined by the compound effect of every single daily interaction, what specific behaviors are you feeding it when no one else is watching?
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Onward…
Dr. Al Solano
Founder, Continuous Learning Institute | About
Host, Student Success Podcast
A meaningful test of success is how helpful we are in contributing to our fellow human being’s happiness.