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Guiding Theories
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Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty
20 matchesImplementing Integrated Comprehensive Student Programs in STEM: Challenges and Facilitators from the CSU STEM Collaboratives
Target Audience: College/University Staff, Non-tenure Track Faculty, Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty, Institution Administration
Program Components: Institutional Systems:Strategic Planning, Supporting Students:Mentoring Program, Academic Support
In my last post, I described the benefits of integrated support programs for underrepresented students in STEM. These integrated programs bridge organizational silos and build a unified community of support, in which faculty and staff work together to break down barriers to student success. The campuses that participated in the CSU STEM Collaboratives project saw increased student success and other organizational benefits as a result of creating integrated programs.
While integration across functional areas represents a promising strategy for supporting student success, it represents a new way of working in higher education. Implementing integrated programs presents some unique challenges that may not be evident when implementing other types of interventions. In this post, I will briefly discuss a few of these challenges, as well as some strategies that STEM Collaboratives campuses used to overcome them. More
Turning on the Thrive Channel to Accelerate Change in Higher Education
Target Audience: College/University Staff, Non-tenure Track Faculty, Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty, Institution Administration
Program Components: Institutional Systems:Strategic Planning
A key challenge is that achieving change in any organization is hard. It is complicated. It involves many levels of the organization. It is motivated by a variety of purposes. It is challenged by competing agendas. It is frequently stalled by a variety of obstacles.
Further, positive change requires a vision, strategy, and tactics. But most importantly, it requires effective change leadership. What does that actually entail? More
Frameworks for Inclusive Excellence and Systemic Change
Target Audience: College/University Staff, Non-tenure Track Faculty, Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty, Institution Administration, Teaching/Learning Assistants, Post-doctoral Fellows
Program Components: Professional Development:Diversity/Inclusion, Cultural Competency
In the work I and my colleagues have done to create change around STEM Education on our own campus we've intentionally worked at two levels. We try to focus both on what will help individual faculty to make changes to their teaching and on how we can shift norms, structures, and teaching culture at the institutional level. My focus as a faculty developer has historically been focused on helping faculty make changes to their pedagogy through exploration and adoption of a variety of active learning pedagogies. I've also been interested in how the spaces in which faculty teach and the norms and policies that guide their practice can promote the adoption of evidence-based teaching practice. More recently, and for a variety of reasons, I've become more interested in how to support faculty to pay attention to their classrooms as inclusive places for learning and the degree to which their courses help to support equitable outcomes for students. While these ideas are connected to good pedagogical practice, thinking about inclusivity has prompted me to expand my toolbox. More
Reflections on the SMTI/ASCN Workshop on Diversity and Inclusion
Target Audience: College/University Staff, Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty, Institution Administration, Post-doctoral Fellows
Last month in partnership with the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) we organized SMTI/ASCN Workshop on Diversity and Inclusion.


One of the major objectives of the workshop was to advance a dialog on diversity and inclusion in undergraduate STEM education between practitioners transforming institutions and researchers who are studying systemic change at higher education institutions.
The workshop featured case studies of institutions that are making progress on increasing diversity and inclusion on their campuses. These case studies were used to stimulate small group discussion amongst all participants on what is working or not on their campuses. In addition, small group discussion by ASCN working groups also were offered.
With a great interest we read reflections offered by the workshop participants and in turn More
What is systemic change?
Target Audience: Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty, Institution Administration
Program Components: Supporting Students:Learning Communities
"Systems are perfectly designed to achieve the results that they are achieving right now."1 Higher education organizations are complex systems with many interacting subsystems. In order to create sustainable change, it is necessary to understand and align these subsystems. Subsystems include the faculty reward system, the higher education funding system that is based on student enrollment, the organization of universities into academic departments, the tradition of faculty autonomy over instruction, the metrics used to judge student performance (grades vs. learning), etc. Many change initiatives fail because they focus on only one subsystem without considering how this subsystem interacts with other subsystems. For example, in STEM it is common for education reformers to work to convince individual instructors about the benefits of active learning (that is, to change the instructor-student-instructional method subsystem). Research suggests that many instructors are receptive to this message and are interested in using more active learning strategies. More
