The POD Network has a transparency problem.
POD recently circulated a poorly designed survey on proposed revisions to its mission, vision, and values without a clear justification for the revisions—a lack of transparency that sows mistrust.
Earlier this year, the POD Network emailed members with a link to a survey: “Member Insights of the POD Network’s Prospective Revised Vision, Mission, and Values.” The text of the June 3, 2025, email read as follows:
As we approach the 50th anniversary of the POD Network, we have a unique opportunity to write our future. We seek to have our guiding vision, mission, and values reflect the needs and aspirations of our growing community. Your voice is essential in this process!
We’re inviting you to take a short survey to share your insights and feedback on our proposed revisions to the POD Network’s vision, mission, and values. Your perspective will help us align our work with the priorities and challenges you face, strengthening our collective impact in the field of educational development.
Please take a few moments (approximately 7 minutes) to complete the survey. Please submit your response by June 30.
A post on Bluesky alerted me to this survey before I read the email. That post shared a take that made me audibly sigh and led me to guess that the survey was likely to frustrate me. I waited to click into it until I had the spoons to manage any potentially negative emotions.
But this isn’t a post about my emotions; it’s a post about the many questions I have about the rationale behind these changes and the lack of transparency around why they are under consideration. If we are to “reflect the needs and aspirations of our growing community,” and if my “voice is essential in this process!” … then why wasn’t a rationale provided for why these changes are needed now? Why are they changing? Whose needs and aspirations are being taken into consideration? Whose are left out? Why was my voice stifled and limited by the design of the instrument?
My positionality and roles in POD
Before I dive into my concerns about this process and the proposed changes, I want to share my positionality, because my identity and my roles within the organization have a profound impact on my perspectives here.
First, I am a disabled, white, cis-gender woman working at an R1 institution in the US south. Many aspects of my identity are representative of the modal member of the POD Network—a white cis-gender woman working in a center for teaching at a US university. My status as a disabled educational developer, though, has affected the ways in which I experience this organization, largely in exclusionary ways.
Second, I have served in a number of volunteer and leadership roles within the organization, including a POD Network-sponsored journal, SIGs, an affinity group, and an ad hoc committee whose work is ongoing. I note these roles because they have given me an unusually broad perspective on the inner workings of the organization.
Those experiences inform my words below, but in writing this piece, I represent only my personal perspective and do not represent any of the groups or teams to which I provide volunteer labor. Furthermore, everything I describe below draws on communications and information provided in member-facing contexts. There is no privileged data informing this piece. I write as a member, not as a volunteer or a leader.
Substantive changes
I welcome you to review the current versus the proposed vision/mission/values statements at this document to do your own comparison. The Vision and Mission statements do not strike me as substantively different. I have no qualms here. The Values statements, however, are markedly different in ways that demand further explanation, at least from my perspective. Three values are articulated in the current statement: Collaboration, Equity, and Evidence. The proposed changes replace those with:
Relationship-rich Engagement
Equity-Minded Community Development and Belonging
Diverse Perspectives
Relationship-rich engagement is not the same as collaboration. Along with many others, I am immensely grateful to Peter Felten and Leo Lambert for writing Relationship-Rich Education. Their values-driven approach to teaching and learning is quite powerful. However, relationship-rich engagement in our work is not the same as an organizational commitment to collaboration. In the current values statement, we claim that we strive “to be collaborative and collegial” and to be “transparent and inclusive.” Those commitments are gone in the revision. What’s more, the lack of transparency around this revision process highlights the failure to maintain our current commitments. Instead, we’ve just rewritten our values to remove the commitments to transparency and collaboration. Perhaps instead this process could have proceeded in accordance with the existing values—transparently, collaboratively, collegially, and inclusively. More on this below.
Equity matters beyond community development and belonging. The current values make the courageous and necessary commitment to equity as an end unto itself. The proposed revisions instead suggest that equity is merely a means to ensure “professional advancement and participation in education.” If this change was made in response to political attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, then my experiences in the US South would suggest that the word equity shouldn’t be in the statement of values at all. It’s still there, though, but in a circumscribed way that weakens our commitment to identifying and ameliorating inequities in our work broadly. After all, inequities exist far beyond just career advancement and educational participation. If we devote our work to ensuring equitable participation in education only, it’s easy to imagine those with minoritized identities facing discrimination in the assessment of their work or in opportunities to pursue internships, mentor relationships, and beyond. The revised statement of values has nothing to say about that.
What happened to evidence? I fully understand that traditional norms around “evidence” tend to prioritize Eurocentric ways of knowing. However, the current statement of value around evidence notes that, “Diverse forms of evidence, a variety of inquiry methods, and a basis in theory are recognized as valuable and essential.” The new articulation of Diverse Perspectives strikes me as unnecessary, given the previous language. What’s more, in an environment where the value of empirical evidence is under constant critique by the political leadership of this country—where, for example, Tylenol has been repeatedly cited as the cause of autism, despite no empirical evidence for this causal relationship—it strikes me as irresponsible to weaken our support for evidence-based practices. This doesn’t mean that we need to hew to overly restrictive views of what constitutes evidence. We must not allow our desire to recognize diverse ways of knowing to undermine our commitment to valuing evidence. This is not an either/or situation; evidence and diverse ways of knowing are not mutually exclusive.
I am deeply concerned that nothing in the revised language makes clear that inclusion in our work matters. Over the last two years, disabled POD members have repeatedly advocated for more inclusive program offerings from the organization—work that is meticulously documented in Michael McCreary’s post from earlier this year. To date, I am unaware of any good-faith efforts to address these concerns coming from the leaders of the organization. Instead, apparently, our organizational value commitments are being rewritten to exclude the notion of inclusion altogether. (I cannot resist noting this isn’t exactly in alignment with the proposed new values of equity-minded belonging, either.)
Survey design problems
If the survey was intended as a mechanism to gain insight on member perspectives, it was an especially poorly-designed tool for doing so. As a (largely quantitative) social scientist, survey design is one of my scholarly areas of expertise. Oh, how I wish the team that wrote this survey had consulted a survey design expert before rolling it out to POD members…!
There was just one type of question on the member survey about the revised values: Likert-esque questions that asked respondents to assess how much the new statements reflected their beliefs about educational development. For each question, there were five response options, ranging from “not at all” to “definitely” / “completely” / “completely resonates.” There were two free-response questions asking about what other values guide the respondent’s everyday work and what additional value should be added (both with 270-character response limits1). None of this suggests the survey was intended to elicit members’ perspectives—diverse or otherwise—about the core values of our association and our work.
Charitably, we could instead describe this survey as one designed to elicit endorsement by respondents. There were no questions prompting the respondents to compare the existing statements with the revisions and evaluate whether the changes were positive, neutral, or negative. There were no free-response questions for respondents to offer language suggestions on these revisions. When I filled out the survey myself, I could honestly respond in the affirmative to every question, yet I’ve written more than 2,000 words here about why the revised value statements feel wrong to me. A well-designed survey would not yield the impulse to write this much about perceptions I suspect many also share.
In studies of American public opinion, for example, we know that voters often have nuanced and at-times conflicting preferences over policy issues. These must narrow to a relatively blunt instrument—a choice between two candidates in an election. Here, too, members of the POD Network likely hold many varied beliefs about what values guide our work. It is possible that members largely endorse the values put forth in the survey without necessarily believing they are the central values of the POD Network as an organization or their work as educational developers. Nowhere on the survey was an opportunity to express such perspectives, however.
If I had been asked to consult on the POD Network’s project to revisit and potentially revise the vision, mission, and values statements, I would’ve taken a very different approach, one grounded in … transparency, collaboration, inclusion, and multi-modal research practices.
To begin, I would have established whether these statements are meant to guide the POD Network’s organizational work (how the organization operates) or POD Network members’ educational development work (how members do their work), as this is not entirely clear in the revised statements—and the current statements clearly apply to the POD Network’s organizational work. This would form the charge for the revision process.
I then would have offered a higher-level and shorter survey asking members to articulate 3-5 values that are especially core to the work of the POD Network. I would’ve also asked respondents to indicate if they were willing to participate in a member focus group on the existing statements and potential revisions. After reviewing the results, identifying the most commonly articulated values within the scope of the charge, I would’ve created a few potential revisions to the values statements and provided members with an opportunity to select their favored version(s) alongside the existing statements.
All of this would’ve been done transparently, with frequent communication from the organization’s leaders.
Alas, none of this happened.
Lack of transparency
I must conclude here with a final note that the lack of transparency here bothers me more than just about anything else. We haven’t been told why this is happening, whose perspectives informed the revisions, or how the decisions have been made. The survey was set to close June 30; nearly five months have passed, with nary a peep about what is happening. Those who are able to travel to San Diego will gather for the POD Network’s 50th anniversary later this week, and I see no meaningful opportunity for us to gather in any space to discuss what this organization should be in the years to come. Why is this? Why aren’t members driving change in this organization? And why don’t members seem to know anything about any of this?
My frustration is amplified by the fact that we are the people who understand how learning works… which is by leveraging the power of relationships, grounded in trust and evidence. We are the expert educators, the folks who understand why communication and transparency matter so much. And yet, as an organization, we are just, frankly, awful at these things. We know better, but we aren’t doing better.
Lest you think this is a critique of any one person, it is not! I have good personal relationships with many of the members of the POD Network’s leadership team, including members of the Core Committee, the POD Office staff, past presidents, the current executive team, SIG chairs, members, and beyond. The people I know have good intentions and want the POD Network to succeed.
Earlier this semester, weekly attendance in my night class had fallen below 50%. I took the midpoint of the semester to send this message to my students—one I think perhaps we all need to hear with respect to the POD Network right now: “We are failing to meet the goals we set for ourselves. This isn’t acceptable to me, and I hope it’s not to you, either.”
Let’s do better.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t say anything meaningful in 270 characters. Witness: This piece of writing.