The Great Resilience: Notes on a Discussion Series to Cultivate Resilience for STEM
Holly Kelchner, Carleton College
Higher education was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, and as a result, many faculty, administrators, and staff quit their jobs. This Great Resignation produced upheaval at many institutions across the nation. Looking for a space to find hope and a positive outlook in the midst of instability, the Aligning Incentives with Systemic Change working group engaged in a series of discussions about resilience. During spring 2023, we looked for ways to cultivate personal and organizational stability in the face of the Great Resignation and its impacts on higher education.

What we wish we would have known about theories of change and change theory at the beginning
Laura Muller, The Jackson Laboratory; Melissa Eblen-Zayas, Carleton College
Six years ago when we first met, we were two individuals who identified a common challenge on our campuses – namely supporting students who arrived with varying comfort and experience using quantitative (Q) skills in STEM and social science contexts. Talking with others, we were eager to think about how we might collaborate to do better for our students. We wanted to make a change, but change theories or theories of change? We didn't know what those were! As we have learned about change strategies and change theory over the last six years, we've repeatedly come across ideas that make us think, "Wow, we wish we would have known this when we started this project!" This post is an effort to share some of what we've learned with other practitioners who might be trying to change things on their own campuses.

Using project principles to anchor changing departments
Joel Corbo, University of Colorado Boulder Courtney Ngai, Colorado State University Gina Quan, San José State University Sarah Wise, University of Colorado Boulder
The Departmental Action Team (DAT) Project supports departments as they make changes to their undergraduate programs. Project team members use the DAT Project's six Core Principles to guide their decision-making around change efforts. In this post we share why a principles-based approach supports successful change. This post is a great introduction for our free upcoming webinar on Tuesday, March 30, 2021 about facilitating change using the DAT model. Register for the webinar here

Instructional Change Teams: An Exploratory Model
Amreen Thompson, Texas State University-San Marcos
Over the past several years, our research team has been investigating factors that influence how instructional change teams collaborate to improve undergraduate STEM instruction. Our research revolves around a model we have developed to examine and interpret the effectiveness of instructional change teams in higher education. We define an instructional change team as a group of three or more instructors or other stakeholders who come together regularly to work on course design or redesign. This post will discuss the development and current state of our instructional change teams model.

Do you need a change theory?
Tessa Andrews, University of Georgia; Daniel Reinholz, San Diego State University
Do you have an innovative new approach to teaching? Are you an educator who is frustrated by the lack of support for new teaching methods? Are you an administrator trying to improve education on your campus? Although research has taught us a lot about how to improve teaching and learning, actually making these improvements a reality can be much more challenging. That is where change theory comes in.

Departmental Change: Sustaining Impacts
Joel Corbo, University of Colorado Boulder; Courtney Ngai, Colorado State University; Gina Quan, San José State University; Sarah Wise, University of Colorado Boulder
The Departmental Action Team (DAT) Project supports departments as they make changes to their undergraduate programs. In previous posts, we described the principles that underlie the DAT Project, the initial stages of DAT formation, and how DATs accomplish change initiatives with the support of facilitators. In about 70% of cases, departments that host DATs continue to catalyze change after external DAT facilitation ends, and sometimes even after the DAT itself ends. In this final post, we explore several ways DATs catalyze sustained impacts.

How Does Your Professional Organization Lead Positive Change?
Pamela Brown, CUNY New York City College of Technology
We are creating resources for the ASCN Working Group 4: Demonstrating Impact and others, interested in higher education systemic change efforts, by soliciting responses to important questions. This month's question is related to professional organizations. We are interested to learn about activities different professional organizations in STEM disciplines are using to accelerate change. Professional organizations/societies may have the authority, relationships and access to data to implement positive changes in specific disciplines. One example of an organization actively engaged with this mission is the Research Advisory Group of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences. The report "The Role of Scientific Societies in STEM Faculty Workshops" recommended by Charles Henderson in his contribution is a great resource that provides insights into faculty professional development workshops across STEM disciplines. The December/January question: How does your professional organization try to lead positive change? What changes have your professional organization led or you would like to see them lead?

Change as a Scholarly Act
Judith Ramaley Portland State University Judith Ramaley, Portland State University
The Accelerating Systemic Change in STEM Undergraduate Education (ASCN) Network was set up to accelerate change at program and institution levels, and to improve STEM education nationally. Underlying all of these efforts is the question of how to think about change itself and how to launch, expand, and then sustain and adapt a large-scale change effort in the context of our college and university environments. Much of the literature on change has been developed through the study of change efforts in business settings (e.g., Kotter 1996, Heifetz and Linsky 2002). While approaches like these offer a number of useful insights into the nature of change itself and effective ways to think about and lead a change effort, they are based on the culture, approaches to leadership, and working relationships that characterize a business environment.

Writing a proposal? Here are some great resources from ASCN!
Stephanie Chasteen, University of Colorado at Boulder
For many of us, it's proposal writing season. If you are submitting an NSF-IUSE proposal, there are increasing expectations that the proposal will include a theory of change for how the project aims to achieve its outcomes, and a well-developed evaluation plan for assessing progress toward those outcomes. As an evaluator, I am often asked to help people flesh out these objectives and metrics, and I have found several of the resources on the ASCN site very useful. I was lucky enough to be helping out with the ASCN project when these resources came in, and acted as a temporary librarian to create the list of resources on the site, and so am quite familiar with the breadth of resources. This blog post is to point you toward some of my favorites that have been useful when writing a proposal aimed at institutional change.

Departmental Change: Starting an Initiative
Joel Corbo, University of Colorado Boulder; Courtney Ngai, Colorado State University; Gina Quan, San José State University; Sarah Wise, University of Colorado Boulder
The Departmental Action Team (DAT) Project supports departments as they make changes to their undergraduate programs through implementing DATs. This blog post is the second part of a four-part series on DATs, and describes the groundwork laid before a DAT officially forms in a department. Our first blog post describes our use of project principles. If you are interested in learning more, we are leading a free webinar (Tuesday, March 30, 12pm EST) about facilitating change using the DAT model. Register for the webinar.