Fearless History
The Fearless Campus project is the outcome of an 11- year journey that began in 2011 with two USDA awards ($435K). The main goal was to train underrepresented minority undergraduate students in 21st century leadership skills and qualities, focused on non-violent communication, teamwork, and presentation skills. The vehicle was a flipped classroom course called Focus on the Future.
The need for these projects was supported by extensive research that identified a misalignment between the training students receive to succeed in school and the skills employers’ required for graduates to be prepared for the workforce.
The success of Focus on the Future, combined with student comments that faculty should have similar training and Cal Poly Pomona President Coley’s desire to scale the project to a larger audience, led to the transition of the course in 2018 from an elective within the Huntley College of Agriculture to a general education course available to all students.
Since 2019, 500 students drawn from 50 majors and all eight colleges on the campus have been enrolled in Focus on the Future classes, creating highly diverse classroom communities.
Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety as an enabler for organizational performance and retention, proven by Google Inc. in its Oxygen and Aristotle projects, resonated with the project team. Indeed, Google found psychological safety to be more important than technical skills for team performance. Further research revealed a body of literature supporting how the elimination of fear within organizations can improve organization, team, and individual performance, motivation, inclusion, innovation, and retention. It became clear that the Focus on the Future curriculum was in fact training in psychological safety, and the project team considered that it should be transferrable across organizational settings. The concept of the fearless classroom emerged: emphasizing trust, respect, empathy, compassion, and humility, not only as important leadership skills/qualities for students, but also for faculty to be able to create psychologically safe learning environments. The students were right that faculty should have a similar training, it just was not clear at the time why this was important. The journey started to become a movement.
The confluence of these events informed the idea to create the Fearless Campus project as an umbrella, focusing on student facing experiences. With the support of Associate Provost S. Terri Gomez and the Office of Student Success, the Fearless Classroom became the pilot activity focusing on student performance and retention by training faculty to create psychologically safe classroom communities.
In November 2019 the first Fearless Classroom workshop was held, with participants implementing the concepts in the following spring 2020 semester. Despite the disruption caused by the Covid 19 pandemic, between January 2020 and December 2022, some 200 faculty participated in Fearless Classroom workshops. They subsequently implemented concepts from these in 375 Fearless Classroom courses across all 8 colleges, involving more than 12,000 students. As of year-end 2022, 92% of students agreed their instructor created a comfortable (fearless) learning environment that supported their ability to succeed in the course (n=5,045)