An Emergent Interuniversity Consortium for Educational Change

As behavioral scientists take an increasingly active role in planned change efforts with school systems, the need to develop our own skills of collaboration, resource sharing, and creating flexible work structures becomes paramount. No one individual or institution has all the necessary capabilities.

This report describes the development of an interuniversity consortium, COPED (Cooperative Project for Educational Development),¹ designed to develop and test strategies for planned change in educational systems. To maximize the resources available to client systems, it was decided to involve five universities, each with specialized resources and interests. It was acknowledged from the beginning that considerable energy would have to be devoted to intraorganizational issues such as power and influence, membership concerns, institutional and individual needs for autonomy, and consultant-client relationships. What follows identifies the major organizational and interpersonal issues and describes how the consortium dealt with the issues of its own maintenance.