California community colleges face urgent demands: closing persistent equity gaps, adapting to rapid technological changes, meeting workforce needs, and serving increasingly diverse learners. Foothill College is catalyzing personal, economic, and social change in Silicon Valley by creating protected spaces where innovation, reflective practices, and equity-minded reform can flourish. These spaces, known as culture pods, are a permanent institutional strategy for advancing our core values and contributing to Foothill’s Blueprint for Success and California Community Colleges’ Vision 2030 goals of equity in access, success, and support.

Culture pods are small, intentional microcultures within our institution where faculty, staff, administrators, and students gather to experiment, learn, and drive meaningful change. The concept of culture pods stems from Mary Murphy’s (2024a) research into the growth mindset of organizations, expanding the notion beyond a personal mindset to one embodied in the practices of the institution. Culture pods at Foothill College are groups of three to eight people who commit to a shared focus on a specific institutional priority, psychological safety, growth-mindedness, iterative experimentation, cross-functional collaboration, and equity.

According to Murphy (2024a), the pods are action-learning communities that move quickly from inquiry to implementation, document what they learn, and share exportable practices with the broader institution. Murphy emphasizes trust as the basis of culture pods, where all individuals are supported, challenged, and inspired to grow. Pods are voluntary. Participation should be energizing, not burdensome. Unlike a committee, which consists of a group of people appointed for a specific function, pods encourage members to stretch beyond their comfort zone, take risks, and grow together (Murphy, 2024b). If a pod is not working, members should pause, reflect, and redesign or sunset the pod without penalty.

In higher education, traditional governance structures are essential, but can be slow to adapt. Culture pods remedy this by establishing agile trust-centered environments designed for collaboration. Within these spaces, new ideas can be tested on a small scale to ensure viability before they are expanded across an institution. By breaking down traditional silos, culture pods empower faculty, staff, and administrators to co-create solutions. Culture pods shift the perception that innovation occurs in a siloed space, or that answers lie within an individual or committee. Instead, innovation is a daily practice that is integrated into the fabric of an organization. At Foothill, we have already seen culture pods accelerate progress on several institutional challenges, such as the need to rapidly meet online education regulations around regular and substantive interaction. With proof of concept established, pods serve as a perfect vehicle to reshape a limiting view of AI simply disruptive into the limitless space of innovation. Staff who have availed themselves of the League’s AI Fellows Program or other professional development opportunities can create culture-shaping reverberation through culture pods.

The President's Role: Six Commitments

As Foothill College’s president, I ensure that culture pods can thrive and drive reform in the following ways.

Anchoring Pods to Strategic Priorities

Culture pods are strategically anchored to Foothill’s core institutional goals, aligning directly with the college’s Blueprint for Success, Student Equity Plan, and Guided Pathways initiatives as well as California Community Colleges’ Vision 2030 goals. The President’s Office identifies two to three specific institutional priorities each year (e.g., retention, AI integration, workforce development) as focal points for culture pods. The pods may propose additional areas of focus, provided they clearly connect to equity and student success.

Building Institutional Scaffolding

Culture pods will be formally integrated into governance structures as an ongoing modality for institutional innovation and implementation. Drawing on Murphy’s (2024b) Culture of Growth framework, culture pods operate on agile quarterly cycles characterized by an intentional structure, using a goal-setting template, midpoint reflection, and end-of-cycle showcase to share results. To maintain transparency and alignment, the President’s Office maintains a culture pod registry so that these efforts are consistently visible in institutional communications and strategic planning.

Resourcing and Protecting the Work

To ensure that culture pods are viewed as essential to the college’s innovation strategy, participation in a pod is formally recognized as legitimate institutional service. Where possible, reassigned time, stipends, or professional development funds are allocated. Culture pods have prioritized access to institutional research support, facilitation, and digital collaboration tools. As president, I model this prioritization by streamlining lower-impact meetings, publicly championing pod participation, and contributing to and protecting these teams from being displaced by competing institutional demands.

Leading the Narrative and Culture

I am committed to telling the stories of our culture pods using high-profile platforms, such as board presentations, campuswide communications, and opening day messages, to highlight what was tried, what was learned, and the student experiences that were changed as a result. Additionally, I am committed to normalizing the process of learning from mistakes by celebrating near-misses and iterations as institutional wins when they produce actionable insight. By publicly recognizing pod members and sponsors in presidential messages, I will consistently reinforce that this work is a direct embodiment of Foothill’s values.

Connecting Pods to Decision-Making and Scale

To ensure that innovation leads to systemic change, culture pods have a clear pathway to influence policy and practice. Pods present their findings and recommendations to shared governance structures, such as academic and classified senates or our college council. To facilitate institutional learning, each pod will produce at least one exportable artifact per cycle that other units can adopt. The college will identify high-impact ideas to scale, along with additional support resources.

Sustaining Pods Across Leadership and Policy Shifts

By embedding culture pods directly into the college’s core strategic frameworks, we ensure that they transcend individual leadership transitions and fluctuating budget cycles. To support this, the President’s Office will cultivate a distributed network of facilitators and champions, shifting the weight of the work from any single leader to a collective institutional memory. Furthermore, by advocating for culture pods as a scalable implementation strategy on statewide platforms, we aim to foster a culture of growth for Foothill that exists in harmony with the broader state system. This alignment ensures that we are not working in isolation; instead, we are supported by a regional ecosystem that actively reinforces and sustains our local success.

Success Indicators

We will know culture pods are succeeding when multiple pods are active each quarter across different divisions and units. Ultimately, this work must translate into measurable improvements in student outcomes for disproportionately impacted students, specifically higher course success rates, increased persistence, and a stronger sense of belonging. The work done by culture pods can move beyond pilots to practices that are scalable and replicable, and adopted as collegewide standards. Beyond these data points, culture pods should impact faculty and staff on a human level, with increased psychological safety and professional growth, and a greater sense of agency in their work. Our goal is a palpable shift in Foothill’s identity, where organizational learning and strategic risk-taking are part of the college’s DNA and part of the playbook for student success.

References

Murphy, M. C. (2024a). Cultures of growth: How the new science of mindset can transform individuals, teams, and organizations. Simon & Schuster.

Murphy, M. C. (2024b). Cultures of growth workbook: Creating and nurturing your pod.  

Kristina Whalen is President of Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California.

Opinions expressed in Member Spotlight are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the League for Innovation in the Community College.