A Framework for Assessing Teaching Effectiveness (FATE)
Shawn Simonson, Boise State University
In higher education, teaching evaluation is often inadequate and inaccurate, neither improving teaching directly nor incentivizing teaching improvement. Complicating this is that effective teaching is difficult to assess and one or two subjective measures do not accurately consider all aspects of teaching and are often nebulous without established standards. COVID-19 may actually have helped by drawing more attention to this and reducing resistance to change as people became uncomfortable with student course evaluations not telling the complete teaching story that faculty and departments want told.

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.

Start somewhere: Resources on equity and inclusion for STEM and higher education
Kate White Temple University Naneh Apkarian Arizona State University at the Tempe Campus Kate White (Western Michigan University), ASCN Research Director Naneh Apkarian (Western Michigan University)
These recent articles and resources are meant to serve as a starting point for learning about equity, inclusion, diversity, and justice - with a particular focus on addressing systemic anti-Black racism - within STEM and higher education. This list of resources is long, but not by any means exhaustive. As change agents and scholars, we know that effecting change requires informed action. We hope you will use these and other resources to develop concrete and informed action plans. Please use the comments to share additional resources and concrete actions being taken by you and your institution. We also invite you to join the conversation in our Equity and Inclusion Working Group. If you would like to join, please fill out the form to Join the Network and indicate that you would like to join Working Group 5 (Equity & Inclusion). On Wednesday, June 10, we join the movement to #ShutdownSTEM.

Creating new knowledge about change by combining research-based knowledge with the wisdom of practice
Kadian Callahan, Kennesaw State University; Charles Henderson, Western Michigan University
One of the core ideas behind the formation of the Accelerating Systemic Change Network (ASCN) is to create and amplify knowledge by fostering interactions between two basic types of people who are working to improve postsecondary education: change researchers and change agents. While there is some overlap in these groups, they mostly operate independently. And, more importantly, each has access to different ideas and types of knowledge. Through knowledge creation and amplification, ASCN builds capacity within and across these two groups to more successfully enact change in undergraduate STEM education. Specifically, ASCN uses the model of a "Knowledge Creating Company." This way to think about business organizations was first published by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) who credited it for the success of Japanese companies in the 1980s and 1990s. It has since become highly influential in focusing businesses worldwide on the importance of knowledge and knowledge creation. In contrast to the Western approach to knowledge management, which views knowledge as explicit, Japanese companies place significant value on tacit knowledge.

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.

Communicating and Collaborating Across Disciplines
Judith Ramaley, Portland State University; Judith Ramaley
Those of us who are working on ways to attract students to the study of STEM fields must design a curriculum that prepares our students to understand and manage complex problems where scientific knowledge interacts with other ways of looking at the world. This means finding ways to work across disciplinary boundaries so that these problems can be studied in their broader social, political and environmental context. Boyd (2016, p. B4) argues that "if we really want to matter, we need to think critically about the questions we ask---and the questions we don't ask---and what influences that distinction." The questions we ask have powerful effects on how we design the curriculum, what we expect of ourselves and our students and how we work together with colleagues in our own department as well as other fields to prepare our graduates to live and work in a changing and uncertain world.

What is systemic change?
Charles Henderson Western Michigan University Charles Henderson
"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.

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.

Announcing the Curated Teaching Evaluation Change Initiative Repository
Casey Wright, Western Michigan University; Carlos Goller, North Carolina State University; Sharon Homer-Drummond, PhD, Tri-County Technical College; Stephanie Salomone, University of Portland; Christine Broussard, University of La Verne
The Aligning Faculty Incentives with Systemic Change Working Group is excited to report we havecurated a repository of teaching evaluation change initiatives to support national efforts at the systemic change of faculty teaching evaluation.  Teaching evaluation is an area of critical focus for systemic change efforts to align undergraduate students' experience in STEM courses with best practices for inclusive learning (NASEM, 2020; Boyer 2030 Commission, 2023). Since the academy is deeply resistant to change (Wise et al., 2022), it is critical to share innovations that have successfully impacted teaching evaluation with the systemic change community (e.g., Simonson et al., 2023). We have created the Curated Teaching Evaluation Initiative Repository to meet this need. For the repository, we define an initiative as a concerted program or set of related efforts that have been undertaken to change the policies, processes, or practices around teaching evaluation. These initiatives are not limited to resources for individual faculty to change their teaching practices but instead describe efforts that have been successful in creating systemic change.

Departmental Change: Engaging in a Change 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. In previous posts, we described the principles that underlie the DAT Project and the initial stages of DAT formation. In this post, we'll share some of what DATs and facilitators do as they engage in a change initiative together. If you are interested in learning more, we are leading a free interactive webinar (Tuesday, March 30, 12-1:30pm EST) about facilitating change using the DAT model. Register for the webinar.