A Scenario-Based Learning Approach to Board Development

The Challenge

A vast majority of college and university trustees come from outside of higher education, which is quite intentional as institutions build a “brain trust” of diverse areas of expertise, perspectives, and experience to bring to bear on the range of opportunities, challenges, and decisions that confront their institutions. As a result, these “outsiders” often find themselves as new board members barraged with a dizzying array of unfamiliar concepts, vocabulary, and practices—not the least of which is the all-important paradigm of shared governance that defines the respective roles and responsibilities of the board, the president, and the faculty (and increasingly, in many institutions, students and staff ) in the deliberations and strategic decisions that shape the institution’s present and its future.

The impact of this confrontation with the unfamiliar is compounded by the vast universe of things that a board member needs to know for their presence on the board to be of value—both to the board and to the institution, including but by no means limited t0:

• The roles and responsibilities of the board
• Board structure, practices, and policies
• Expectations of individual trustees
• Principles and practice of shared governance
• Institutional mission and vision
• Strategic planning
• Institutional finance
• Faculty self-governance
• Meeting the “team”: administrative, faculty, staff, and student leadership
• Current and future challenges as well as opportunities

The daunting challenges of orienting new board members to all these issues have, of course, been the subject of many articles and books in the higher education literature. Historically, in practice the approaches have ranged from handing a new trustee the board book at their first meeting and telling them to read it (the “sink or swim” method), to several hours of orientation with the president and senior staff, to full-day orientations (in which the overload of information usually causes cognitive failure shortly after lunchtime), to dividing orientation into multiple sessions throughout the year.

AGB’s online Board Orientation Courses,¹ comprising modules focused on governance, fiduciary duties, responsibilities of governing boards, and board dynamics, have freed many boards from spending time on those topics, enabling them to use what time they do have for board orientation concentrating on institutional specifics.

New Approaches to Board Development

In recent years, there have been some creative and impactful breakthroughs in addressing these challenges that are grounded in what we have learned about effective learning strategies for students in higher education. Cathy Trower’s influential article, “Flipping the Boardroom for Trustee Engagement,”² notes that faculty members “are experimenting with flipping the classroom,”³ entrusting students to acquire the necessary information from various sources (most online) before class, thus liberating the instructor to “guide students to actively and interactively clarify and apply that knowledge during class.”⁴ Clearly, the adoption of this practice to boards can have a powerful impact on “trustee engagement and learning.”⁵

An article entitled “Do Your New Trustees Have a Lot to Learn? ‘Flip’ Their Orientation” by Alina Tugend⁶ provides a compelling summary of the ways in which three institutions—Widener University, Arcadia University, and Scripps College— have used AGB’s learning series as well as materials developed in house (including videos and webinars) to begin the orientation process, followed by various kinds of in-person meetings with fellow trustees, faculty, administrators, and students.

As successful as these strategies appear to be, we must recognize that they are focused primarily on the first of three stages of the board member learning trajectory: knowledge acquisition (orientation); knowledge application (putting the information into practice); and the reinforcement and enhancement of that knowledge over time.

In addressing the latter two stages of that trajectory, at Goucher College we again turned to what we’ve learned about high impact learning strategies, in particular, “problem-based learning.”⁷ In problem-based learning, students are challenged to use the knowledge and skills they’ve acquired to work in groups to solve “an open-ended problem.”⁸ In Goucher’s case, we found a highly effective vehicle for problem-based learning in the development of scenarios that were based in a hypothetical institution that we created for the purpose (Billingham College, which, sadly, seems to experience every challenge known to higher education) but focused on real-world issues and challenges that could indeed become realities for Goucher College and its board of trustees.

Goucher College

Goucher College is a private, nonprofit, nonreligiously affiliated, liberal arts college located just north of Baltimore serving approximately 1,100 undergraduate and 900 graduate students. The college was founded 137 years ago as the Woman’s College of Baltimore by the Rev. John Franklin Goucher, at a time when women and African Americans were not admitted to its neighboring Baltimore institution, the Johns Hopkins University. To address this issue Rev. Goucher founded not only the college for women that would later bear his name but also played a pivotal role in founding what is today Morgan State University—Maryland’s first HBCU—by donating the land for Morgan College as well as serving on its board for 42 years. Rev. Goucher also participated in founding colleges in Japan, South Korea, and India in the 19th century that exist to this day.

Goucher College became co-ed in 1985 and in the years since has grown in both size and stature while continuing to maintain the commitment to access and a global perspective established by its founder. The college takes great pride in having an incredibly diverse student body with over 42 percent Black, Latinx, Asian American, or mixed-race students, 27 percent who are low-income Pell Grant eligible, and 18 percent the first in their families to attend college. Beginning in 2005 Goucher College became one of the first colleges in the nation to require 100 percent of its students to study abroad. Today Goucher attracts students from 42 states and 28 different countries and consistently ranks among the nation’s top undergraduate liberal arts colleges in the annual surveys conducted by U.S. News & World Report, The Princeton Review, and others.

The Need for Board Development at Goucher

Despite its storied history, Goucher College faces many of the same challenges that all small, private liberal arts colleges confront today. It has been buffeted by shifting demographics, rising instructional costs, and decreasing net tuition revenue. Moreover, while Goucher College has the benefit of a healthy and growing endowment, the board chair and president also recognized the need to invest in developing a high-performing board, fully equipped to confront the challenges of today, and capable of evaluating the strategic options available to the college in future years.

During the 2019–2020 academic year, the Goucher Board of Trustees streamlined its board committee structure to better facilitate decision-making given the increasing pace of change within higher education. In response to demographic trends, the board prioritized the recruiting of new trustees from a much more diverse pool of candidates representing a wide range of life experiences and expertise in varied disciplines, especially those where Goucher is experiencing growth (i.e., the health sciences, life sciences, and data sciences). The changes on the board also exposed the need to develop a much more comprehensive approach to both orient new trustees about how a private, nonprofit higher education institution operates, as well as provide longstanding trustees a “booster shot” on the fundamentals of prudent board oversight and effective decision-making within the context of shared governance.

A Scenario-Based Learning Approach to Board Development

Seeking a board development strategy that could provide value for both new and longstanding trustees, we quickly zeroed in on using a scenario-based approach. Scenario-based situational learning⁹ and problem-based learning (PBL)¹⁰ models are pedagogical models commonly employed in the classroom today. In fact, Goucher’s own form of problem-based learning called Complex Problem Exploration (CPE) courses bringing together faculty from different disciplines to lead students in a collaborative exploration of potential solutions to “wicked problems”¹¹ forms a central component of Goucher’s core undergraduate liberal arts curriculum. Could a scenario-based learning approach hold out promise as a possible model for effective board development? We set about finding out.

It is important to note that when we developed and presented these scenarios to the Goucher Board of Trustees (using a breakout session model), the task was decidedly not for them to decide on a solution to the problem. The work has been intentionally focused on the role of the board as the college addresses the issue, and organized around the following questions:

1. What is the role of the board of trustees in addressing this issue?
2. What are the questions that the board should be asking?
3. What kinds of information does the board need for its deliberations?
4. With whom should the board be interacting with on this issue and how should that interaction take place?
5. What is the role of the other parties to shared governance (president/administration, faculty, etc.) in deciding this issue?

In addition to serving as a highly effective learning strategy for understanding the universe of challenges and opportunities faced by colleges and universities today, this approach enables us to focus on several concepts that are often pain points in board behavior:

• Emphasizing the role of the board as “thought partners” in addressing challenges, collaborating in the exploration of options—not “dictating” solutions
• Helping board members understand the difference between governance (which, of course, is their job) and management (which it is not!)
• Helping to define relationships and contact protocols between the board and the staff.

The scenario-based approach thus provides several important benefits: it enables new board members to actualize the information that had been presented to them in orientation; it serves as both a “refresher course” for current trustees and a strategy to deepen their understanding of their roles and, if necessary, to correct behaviors, and the group-based, collaborative approach to the scenarios enhances and strengthens the working relationships of board members.

There is a further critical benefit to this scenario-based approach. First, it is not literally “scenario planning,” which involves making data-informed assumptions about possible futures and the respective challenges or opportunities of each and the appropriate institutional responses. Scenario planning focuses on the “what ifs?” of possible future realities—“what are we going to do if this happens?” The scenario-based approach that we have employed is, in essence, an antecedent to true scenario planning because it helps the board clarify its roles and responsibilities in making strategic decisions in collaboration with the president, faculty, and others involved in shared governance of the college.

Putting the Approach into Practice

Based upon results from the prior year’s board survey, Goucher’s board chair and president identified three areas of focus for board development: principles of trusteeship, understanding college financial statements, and the trustee and philanthropy. Board development training on diversity, equity, and inclusion was subsequently added.

Given the virtual meeting format necessitated by the pandemic, Goucher made the decision to jettison its traditional half-day, in-person orientation session for new trustees and instead scheduled three 2-hour, early evening orientation and board development sessions two weeks apart required of all trustees regardless of their tenure on Goucher’s board. Conducted via Zoom videoconferencing software, we began each session with a 20- to 25-minute presentation framing the general concepts to be discussed that evening and referring to any assigned reading provided ahead of time. For the first session on the role of the trustee, we supplied each trustee with a copy of AGB’s recent publication Principles of Trusteeship.¹² Then, once the key concepts for the evening were presented by that evening’s facilitator, we broke into breakout groups to discuss the first scenario, coming back together after 15 minutes to share any observations and lessons learned with the entire group. We then repeated this process two more times to address a total of three different scenarios in each session, leaving 10 minutes at the end to summarize key concepts.

Because Goucher’s Board of Trustees is large—its bylaws allow for up to 40 voting trustees plus 2 non-voting faculty trustees—it was decided to use Zoom’s “breakout room” function to facilitate the smaller group discussions of each scenario with trustees assigned to rooms randomly using Zoom’s built-in functionality. We found that these smaller breakout rooms of five to seven trustees fostered greater interaction and permitted trustees who might not ordinarily speak up in a larger, more formal setting such as a board meeting with close to 50 attendees, to speak more openly. Additionally, the breakout rooms benefited from the random intermixing of new and veteran trustees in each discussion group, thus facilitating the integration of new trustees into the board right from the start and breaking down any perceived board hierarchy.

Benefits of a Scenario-Based Learning Approach to Board Development

Our experience using a scenario-based learning approach to board orientation and development leads us to believe it offers several important advantages over other approaches, chief among them as Lave and Wenger (1991) have noted, it allows newcomers to actively engage in established “communities of practice” by participating in collaborative problem solving and move toward full participation in that community through the mastery of the knowledge and skills required of a full member.

Additionally, we found that creating a hypothetical college— Billingham College—beset with a variety of scenarios that might be familiar enough to those of us in higher education who begin their day reading The Chronicle of Higher Education but perhaps not a general audience, allowed trustees to explore a variety of questions that might arise only infrequently but are critically important to work through in a non-threatening manner. Furthermore, since a majority of Goucher’s trustees are alumnae and alumni of the college, using a hypothetical college helped to create sufficient emotional distance for these participants from their beloved alma mater, and permitted them to think through critically the specific questions at hand.

Lessons Learned

As stewards of institutions of higher education, our boards are predisposed to understand that a commitment to continuous learning and ongoing professional development is intertwined in the very DNA of our institutions. However, when it comes to board development that commitment often falls short. Goucher’s recent experience with structuring relatively short, practice-based professional development sessions to address the three most requested topics mentioned in our board’s annual survey have highlighted for us the benefits of investing in additional, ongoing, board development.

We know from our experience in the classroom, as well as contemporary learning science,¹³ that the simple presentation of information and facts does not necessarily translate into effective learning. Why would we expect the results to be any different in the board room? By employing a scenario-based learning approach to board orientation and development that builds upon the lessons we’ve already learned in the classroom, we can promote greater interaction with and faster integration of new trustees into an existing board. Meanwhile, we can engage all trustees in a collaborative process that helps to reinforce the proper role of the board in effective decision making and governance of the institution.

Kent Devereaux is the president of Goucher College.

David Maxwell, PhD, is a president emeritus of Drake University and a senior fellow/senior consultant at the Association of Governing Boards. Maxwell worked with President Devereaux and his board chair on the initial development of the scenario-based model.

Endnotes

1. https://agb.bridgeapp.com/learner/library
2. Trusteeship, Volume 23, Number 2, March/April 2015; https://agb.org/trusteeship-article/flipping-the-boardroom-for-trustee-engagement-why-and-how/
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. https://www.chronicle.com/article/do-your-new-trustees-have-a-lot-to-learn-flip-their-orientation/
7. See, for example, https://teaching.cornell.edu/teaching-resources/engaging-students/problem-based-learning
8. Ibid.
9. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
10. Barbara Duch, Susan E. Groh and Deborah E. Allen. (Eds.). The Power of Problem-based Learning (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2001).
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
12. https://agb.org/principles-of-trusteeship/
13. Peter C Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 201; and James Lang, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2016).