It takes effort over many years.

Based on the six institutional case histories in the book, developing the capacity for making 3fold gains takes many years of patient, persistent effort. Two of those institutions were developed from scratch for this purpose, and that took many years from conception to full-scale operation. The other four, all regional public universities, have been developing this capacity for ten to twenty years. For those four, this developmental process had three phases.

I. Uncoordinated development

Years later (in Phase 3 below), people will recall certain early initiatives were initial stepping stones toward a constellation that could improve quality, access, and perhaps affordability. During phase I, however, no such coordinating vision yet exists. Nor, most likely, does the institution yet have sufficiently clear and compelling goals for improvement.

Nor, at this stage, are institutional-scale goals for education motivating many people. The goals that exist are institutional-scale but vague (a high-quality education) or specific but not institutional scale (general education reformed for 21st century skills).

II. Emergent constellations and goals: This phase takes years. The University of Central Oklahoma began framing goals (emerging as a goal for “Transformative education”) in the 1990s. During those years, an informal group of leaders were also trying to make sense of seemingly unrelated offices and projects. After a while, they began to develop a set of goals (“tenets”) for grouping those offices and projects. Then they made sure that efforts toward a common goal were coordinated. Some such coordinating offices already existed, while others were created. By the end of this phase, these tenets began to be seen as routes toward transformative learning. In other words, the institution had begun to understand how its existing strengths (its constellation) could help achieve the institution’s most important educational goals: to transform the lives and minds of all its students.

III. Intentional and Accelerating: Sharper goals co-evolve with a constellation geared to advance them. A plan for collecting data emerges, as does pro-active development of the constellation (‘To advance Transformative Learning, we need these two new strengths.’) These emergent goals must engage a coalition of different silos and constituencies, each convinced that “we can’t not do this.” Interactions with the wider world (e.g., conference presentations and workshops) provide evidence of wider interest. The institution may join with peers to share experiences and collaborate on mutually-beneficial projects. Ideally, this phase will last indefinitely.

Georgia State assembled its constellation piece by piece over the years (see figure below). The shift from “Emergent” to “Taking Charge” probably began in 2008 with the Office of Student Success. One key to GSU’s success is that almost all its initiatives for student (academic) success were chosen because, once initiated, they could be scaled up in an affordable way. To put this another way, Georgia State’s constellation in 2018 included all the initiatives in this figure; they were all still working and developing.