My Interest in ASCN: Andrea Greenhoot
University of Kansas
Center for Teaching Excellence/Department of Psychology
Director/Professor
Prior Organizational Change Work
In 2010 at the University of Kansas, I helped lead a university-wide strategic planning effort to transform the KU undergraduate experience through engaged and experiential learning and comprehensive course redesign. Since then I have led several change/improvement initiatives informed by that plan, including (a) a multi-institutional investigation of strategies for helping faculty and academic leaders make use of student learning data for educational improvement, (b) an initiative to improve the first-year student experience through the development, pilot and evaluation of a first-year-seminar program, and (c) a university-wide course transformation initiative to promote adoption of empirically-supported teaching and curriculum design practices. In connection with the Bay View Alliance (BVA), I have also been leading a network of seven research universities ("TRESTLE") that are implementing and evaluating a model for promoting sustainable change in undergraduate STEM education.
How ASCN Can Contribute to my Work
I can envision many ways in which the ASCN could contribute to my work. I am especially interested in finding out what is being learned about the models of STEM reform that are being tested by other investigators, identify possible synergies with the work that our TRESTLE network is carrying out, and use lessons learned through other projects to enhance the work of TRESTLE. I would also expect my participation in the ASCN to enhance my other work as director of KU's Center for Teaching Excellence, such as an initiative to promote faculty teaching practices that enhance inclusivity and respect for diversity, and an initiative promote the use of student learning outcome data to improve courses and curricula. To support these sorts of initiatives, I hope to learn more about strategies for identifying and developing change agents, through various forms of distributed leadership.
How I Can Contribute to ASCN
I look forward to opportunities to share results and lessons-learned about change strategies through both my local and cross-institution collaborative change efforts. The model of STEM education improvement we are testing in TRESTLE combines department-embedded expertise (faculty leaders or specially-prepared postdoctoral scholars) to support course transformation with community building within departments, across departments, and across institutions. The experts provide the extra energy and knowledge needed to transform teaching, and the communities are designed to amplify the effects of the experts by providing social connections and opportunities for collaboration, motivating and supporting change, shifting social norms, and generating a critical mass of experts to support the work. Over the next five years we will be tracking the effects of this initiative on the seven campuses using a common set of measures, and I will be able to share our results with the ASCN. There may also be opportunities to pool data gathered through widely-used instruments in our project with those gathered through other institutional change projects. I also expect to be able to share experiences and lessons learned as a member of the BVA Hub and co-leader of one of the BVA's Research Action Clusters.