Bringing together PI and public service education
Summary
At Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions, we are committed to preparing students to lead with integrity, empathy, and purpose. Over the past year, we’ve partnered with faculty across our four schools to explore innovative ways to integrate the Principled Innovation (PI) framework into public service education. This initiative empowers students to critically examine the ethical dimensions of their work while fostering skills in reflection, critical thinking, and collaborative problem-solving.
Led by Dr. Bailey Borman, the project engaged eleven faculty, eight staff, across eight general education courses, and within our ASU 101 curriculum. These courses introduce students to PI’s core practices and assets, helping them navigate complex challenges with a focus on values-driven, evidence-based solutions that create positive change for humanity.
To support this integration, the project developed:
- Two introductory videos modeling how PI could be integrated into the public service framework.
- Canvas resources tailored for faculty use.
- Sample learning outcomes aligned with the PI framework.
Our instructional design team has been exploring how to incorporate PI principles into course quality reviews, and a dedicated Canvas shell is being created to empower faculty and staff to design their own PI-aligned materials.
Multiple intervention points
Watts College is finding ways to bring PI into teaching, learning, and assessment that fits the college’s existing priorities and cultures by:
- Exposing faculty and staff to the PI framework and challenging them to consider how they help students shape their decision-making skills.
- Developing curricular materials that faculty can easily adopt and adapt into their courses.
- Integrating PI into general education or core courses within Watts College to create a sustainable material that outlives the grant period.
- Engaging students in critical and innovative decision-making that improves the wide spectrum of public service fields.
Encountering institutional norms
- Academic freedom
Generally, college administration is not a part of the development of courses. Faculty are very sensitive to infringements on their expertise. Proposing integration of PI was something we did carefully and through our school directors. Because of this communication was quite sensitive and created some hiccups and confusion across the groups. Each school communicates course development a little differently. Our college catalyst team really worked to empower the instruction design team to evaluate courses as they would, be a resource for faculty, and establish deadlines through the school directors. - Ethics and reflection
The easiest adaptation of PI into coursework was as part of reflection within a module related to ethics. e.g. ASU 101 academic integrity. While this is useful as a first step, we would like to see our adaptation of PI grow in Year 3. PI isn’t just ethics and reflection shouldn’t just take place at the end of the course. We tried to address this in two ways. First, our modeling materials focused on professional values, demonstrating how personal professional values can shape the other principled innovation practices. Through this modeling, we had hoped to disrupt the assumption the PI belongs solely in ethics models. Second, when meeting with the instructional design team, we went over the PI framework and discussed how PI might be useful across a couple of course formats e.g. lecture versus hands-on. Using the reflection questions from the PI deck and the PI dimensions, we mapped them onto common course learning objectives. This really resonated with the Instructional Design team and we hope that it will result in a more holistic view of PI for future curricular integrations.
Insights from Watts College Catalysts:
“I think my primary personal challenge is how to develop support materials that are actually useful to faculty teaching courses across four very distinct disciplines– the four schools within Watts College”
“Shifting to think of our work as modeling versus developing materials with the expectation of fidelity was a really important shift to unlocking the ability to move forward and create materials for this project.”
Principled Innovation informs how we engage
Principled Innovation practices are useful when considering how to engage our community in this initiative. PI is a collection of assets and practices that are designed to help individuals make good decisions. We’ve done our best to use these resources to raise capacity in our college by developing new courses, challenging ourselves to think about how we’re meeting community and workforce needs, and engaging with our college broadly across disciplines.
Engaging multiple and diverse perspectives
Collaboration has been at the heart of this initiative. Faculty from four schools, staff, and community stakeholders contributed diverse viewpoints to ensure the PI framework resonates across disciplines and contexts. Rather than creating one source that we asked faculty to put into their courses, we tried to develop materials that served as a model, providing sample learning objectives, high-quality introduction videos filmed by our College leadership, and reflection questions for their Canvas shell that paired with the videos.
Our aim has always been to empower faculty to adopt and adapt PI, much as we hope students will adopt and adapt these tools. Faculty members were encouraged to incorporate reflection into their teaching, fostering students’ ability to consider their thoughts, actions, and decisions through a character-based lens. The integration of the PI framework into coursework helps students and educators alike cultivate a mindset that engages meaningfully with contemplation about how their actions impact individuals, communities, and systems.
Reflecing critically and compassionately
This project embodies the practice of reflective and compassionate critical thinking by showcasing how PI is both a practice within our organization and a product we hope students and faculty will engage with in their courses and research. As a practice, we met with the four school directors to discuss Principled Innovation, unpacking the Teacher’s College model and exploring how we might adopt and adapt the model for each of our four disciplines.
From this meeting, we attached resources to our ideas but supported the development of new general education courses that integrated PI. We met with faculty and instructional design teams, learning about how each group approached course development to inform how to develop a tool that would be general enough to be useful and not so prescriptive that faculty felt we weren’t respectful of their subject matter expertise. As a product, our courses are encouraging students to grow their ability to consider their thoughts, actions, and decisions through a character-based lens.
Courses and Instructional Design
Faculty, staff and administrators across all four schools in Watts College have developed introductory Principled Innovation material for existing courses. This work has lead to proposals for evaluating PI and supporting faculty embedding PI into future teaching.
ASU 101
In Fall 2024, 395 students enrolled in ASU 101 within Watts College and completed the module, gaining exposure to Principled Innovation. module was developed by Joanna Lucio, our Senior Associate Dean, and engaged the students, 10 staff, and one senior leader in its implementation.
General Education course integration
Eleven faculty members from all four schools within Watts College (School of Community Resources and Development, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, School of Public Affairs, and School of Social Work) worked to develop materials for including Principled Innovation within newly developed general education courses in the Watts College. Eight courses have been developed:
- PAF 411 – Law in Action
- PAF 160 – Disaster Management Politics and Policy
- CCJ 250 – International Criminology
- CCJ 280 – Sustainability and Green Criminology
- CRD 494 – Empowering Wellness
- CRD 494 – Arizona Bucket List
- SWU 394 – The Drug Overdose Crisis in the United States
- SWU 394 – Social Work’s Philosophical Traditions and History
Instructional design team collaboration
The Watts College instructional design team (Office of Education Innovation), comprising five staff members, has collaborated extensively with PI catalysts to discuss incorporating PI principles into course quality and how to evaluate PI integration of the GenEd courses. This work has led to the development of a proposed Year 3 project, which includes creating a PI Canvas shell with examples and integrating PI into the course quality review rubric to support faculty in embedding these practices into their teaching.
Benefits of academic integration
This project makes significant contributions to the disciplines of public service education, instructional design, and curriculum development.
Public service education
It innovatively integrates the PI framework, a values-based and reflective approach, into the public service curriculum. This enhances the preparation of future public service leaders to navigate complex societal challenges with ethical decision-making and a focus on positive societal impact.
Instructional design
By collaborating with the instructional design team, the project embeds PI principles into course quality reviews and proposes creating a PI-focused Canvas shell. These contributions offer scalable tools and methods that can be adopted by other institutions.
Curriculum development
The development of PI-informed general education courses establishes a model for how ethics and innovation can be seamlessly integrated into multidisciplinary learning environments.
Impacts on Watts College communities
- Students
Nearly 400 Watts College students, along with students from other ASU colleges taking these general education courses, benefit from the exposure to the Principled Innovation framework. Our work in public service is increasingly complex as systems are reacting to our changing sociopolitical climate. Students need tools for ethical decision-making critical thinking, and reflection to help them to become thoughtful leaders and contributors across their public service fields. - Faculty and staff
Faculty who have engaged with this project have been challenged to think about how we foster critical thinking in students. PI provides a multi-dimensional way to think about engaging students in public service — from asking students to take stock of their personal and professional values to evaluating local problems from a systems perspective. The development of course materials is a team effort. Working closely with our instructional design team only improves our ability to engage faculty in this work. Instructional designers evaluate the quality of courses. PI fits nicely with the Quality Matters framework popular at ASU and is in line with the inclusive pedagogy work this office has been spearheading for the last few years. - Senior leaders
PI proved to be a useful framework for discussing academic integrity. ASU’s explicit commitment to PI as part of our organizational culture and work has helped supplement our framing of public service. - Broader community
In October, we hosted community leaders to discuss the future of public service. This event included students, alumni, hiring managers, and nonprofit and governmental leaders. Hiring managers and leaders stressed the need for students to have critical thinking skills, communication skills, and interpersonal skills like empathy. Integrating Principled Innovation across our curriculum allows students to interact with the framework as well as use it when engaging in hands-on and case-study work. We believe integrating PI is responsive to our community stakeholder workforce needs.