Growing Orchids Amid Dandelions

Many of us working in higher education, including those of us in teaching and learning centers, might find that our work is dramatically accelerated by rapid technological change and increasing pressures to be more efficient and productive. Technology adoptions such as smartphones and Slack, video communication, and now generative AI all contribute to the acceleration of the organizational culture.

In her recent essay “Teaching Centers Aren’t Dumping Grounds,” Kerry O’Grady argues that many academic leaders “focus on more instead of on effectiveness and efficiency.” O’Grady recounts continued calls to “create more workshops, more one-pagers or more training when attendance was dismal for initial sessions, or when the original documents went untouched.” She argues that educational developers are in a constant state of emergency response, in which they are tasked with “retroactive cleanup” as opposed to “the work of proactive planning for teaching and learning success.” O’Grady calls for a much-needed reset—something that feels wonderfully exciting—and institutionally unrealistic.

Our collective teaching and working in higher education at more than 20 institutions over 50 years tells us that we are always working with limited agency to significantly change how our centers align with our strategic vision and the changing needs of the institution. Amid the dizzying pace of constant disruption, we feel a need to find a more sustainable and pragmatic approach. O’Grady’s essay inspired us to reflect on our strategic plans and how we support our respective communities. While the “dumping ground” metaphor importantly calls attention to current challenges, we consider a different metaphor that has guided our decisions as we direct centers and support educators.

The Dandelion and the Orchid

Dandelions are versatile flowers—resilient, fast-growing and abundant. In the context of educational development, dandelions represent the many ways developers adapt to institutional demands, producing quick outputs that propagate widely. Dandelion work is essential: It includes the programs and resources we create rapidly to meet pressing needs. However, as with real dandelions, the results of this work are often scattered, growing without the intentional design of a cultivated garden. When we run from meeting to meeting or throw together a one-off workshop to respond to emerging pedagogical issues, we rely on dandelions.

In contrast, orchids require significant care and controlled environments to flourish. Orchid work symbolizes slow, intentional cultivation—projects that are thoughtfully nurtured over time. These efforts demand patience, consistency and a commitment to depth over breadth. While the process is slower, the results are uniquely meaningful, reflecting a product of deliberate focus. Orchid work requires long-term planning, collaboration across units and thoughtful engagement. While orchids can result in beautiful landscapes, the time taken to cultivate them can mean that we miss many emergent day-to-day needs.

Together, this framework highlights a central question: Which systemic issues require sustained effort, and which challenges can be addressed through quick, one-off engagements? Balancing dandelion and orchid approaches helps educational developers respond to immediate needs while creating space for intentional growth.

Growing Relationships

Resilience does not sprout in isolation but through networks of care, mutual support and shared experiences. To push the floral metaphor further, if our goal in centers for teaching and learning is to help educators help students bloom, then we need to model and promote the space and time needed to learn, even if social pressures point in the opposite direction.

Although meaningful relationships take time to develop, their benefits are powerful. Research supports the idea that individuals with a high relational self-construal—those who define themselves through their relationships with others—may be better able to embrace inconsistency and instability (two things that very much describe life in education today). Educational developers therefore can foster resilience and adaptability not only by caring for relational networks at their institution but also by defining their work based on such networks.

In our own ways, we make space for orchids in our work and programming by emphasizing the ways in which relationships and time are necessary conditions for educational development. Some of the ways we do this as we go about our regular, day-to-day “dandelion” programming include:

• Check in and reflect on connections: Regularly pause during engagements for reflective check-ins wherein participants can share their thoughts on new connections, challenges or any collective insights gained. This helps participants see relational growth as part of their learning.
• Create opportunities for cross-disciplinary interaction: Design group activities that mix participants across different disciplines or roles. Consider discussion prompts that require multiple perspectives, reinforcing a sense of shared purpose.
• Define affective outcomes as clearly as skill-based ones: When planning workshops, incorporate affective goals—such as fostering connection and community—as explicit objectives, treating them with equal weight as skill-based outcomes.
• End with collective reflection: Close programs by inviting participants to share not only new skills but also the relationships or networks they’ve started building. This emphasizes the value of affective outcomes and normalizes the commitment to sustaining these connections beyond the event.
• Engage with personal storytelling: Begin events with interactive exercises that invite participants to share a meaningful or challenging recent moment from their teaching or from their lives. This sets the tone for community-building and eases the transition into collaborative work.
• Lean into play and creative approaches: Include an exercise that might activate imaginative thinking like using visual thinking strategies or a paired movement activity and enjoy a shared experience of lightness.
• Model care in facilitation: Demonstrate care in your interactions, setting a precedent for participants. Show genuine interest in their insights, making room for personal or contextual details that may be meaningful to them. Generate collective resources that bring a variety of participants’ contexts to the forefront.
• Provide candor about institutional challenges: Directly speak to the realistic limitations of what the institution can do to support faculty; do not overpromise possibilities or shy away from the realities of the conditions in which the work will happen.

Balancing the orchid and the dandelion depends on priorities and time constraints. The dandelion approach can produce quick solutions when the pressure is high, and the orchid approach encourages us to carve out the time and tend to our relationships even in our constant push to maintain that field of flowers.

While it may disrupt our metaphor, dandelions can give way to orchids and orchids can give way to dandelions. After all, the more often that deeper relationships develop, the more often we’re going to be in contact with faculty and colleagues, which will seed new ideas and possibilities, be they orchids or dandelions.

The metaphor encourages us to ask how and where we can make space and time for deeper engagement. We cannot just grow a field of dandelions if we want to foster a culture of innovation, nor can we respond effectively and in a timely manner to an institution’s needs if we just focus on orchids. We have found that giving ourselves the permission to grow orchids amid the dandelions allows us to feel more agency and more relationally connected to the work we’re doing and the people we’re doing it with. The metaphor has helped us foster and model a more inclusive, supportive academic culture—one that balances collaboration with efficiency, collective resilience with institutional responsiveness and meaning with productivity.