Poster Session A

Racial injustice has prompted much activism and reflection at Stanford University, leading to an increased interest in equitable pedagogical practices. Instructors now seek the resources and training to better foster student belonging and empower all of their students to succeed. As faculty developers in the Center for Teaching and Learning, we aimed to design and provide multiple effective professional development opportunities for instructors to meet these goals. The launch of the Presidential Initiative for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access in a Learning Environment (IDEAL) in 2018 set the stage at the leadership level for a coordinated effort to advance teaching. As such, we have launched the IDEAL Pedagogy program at Stanford that offers multiple pathways for instructors to develop their skills in inclusive pedagogy. The design of IDEAL Pedagogy prioritizes accessibility with multiple options for participation varying in timing and level of commitment. Some options engage with individuals in learning communities while other options engage with representative teams, based on the model of departmental action teams to support sustainable change. Our program is guided by the five following learning objectives: 1) integrate diverse examples, peoples, and texts into your course design; 2) encourage learning and sharing with peers through group work and discussion; 3) enact and uphold a classroom culture of respect for all students; 4) provide accessible resources and connections to meet the needs of all students; and 5) design varied activities and assessments for students to engage in learning. For each objective, we have curated inclusive pedagogy resources and activities on a Canvas site (our learning management system) open to all members of the Stanford community. This site serves as our core "text" and has been designed in a modular format for instructors to self-assess their learning and identify content relevant to their needs.

Principles are statements that identify the core values, philosophy, or operating assumptions of an initiative, allowing a project to externalize its core values and create accountability for enacting those values (see M.Q. Patton, 2017). A growing number of institutional change projects are defining principles to guide their projects, because principles allow flexible solutions that contextually appropriate in complex systems (as compared to projects that have clearly defined rules that all actors should follow).

In this poster I will highlight the 7 identified principles of the Transforming Education, Stimulating Teaching and Learning Excellence (TRESTLE; http://trestlenetwork.org) network; a network of 7 institutions organized around a common vision of leading change focused on department-based course transformation efforts.

Additionally, we will share results of the external evaluation survey of network members about the Principles. Network members generally agreed with the principles and felt that the TRESTLE project as a whole, and at their campus, embodied those Principles. Respondents agreed with the Principles more strongly than they agreed with whether the project emphasized that Principle. Respondents indicated that there was a good deal of local variation on how the ideas behind the Principles were put into practice because of differences in context, despite this overall consistency of purpose. Comments indicate that some principles were harder to implement (such as gathering evidence of the result of change), and this had negative implications for the work.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number DUE1525775 (KU), DUE1525331 (CU) and DUE1525345 (UTSA).

Research based instructional strategies (RBIS) have been shown to be positively related to student learning. However, most STEM instructors do not have the knowledge and skill necessary to implement RBIS effectively in their teaching. Our group has previously shown instruction-focused professional development (PD) to be effective in increasing instructors' use of RBIS in STEM. These in-person four-day intensive inquiry-based learning (IBL) workshops for mathematics faculty are well established; the core workshop model has been used for a decade and aligns with best practices of effective PD. Workshops feature discussion of education research, video examples of IBL teaching practices, time to develop course materials, and follow-up support to aid participants' implementation of IBL. Grounded in Ajzen's (1991) Theory of Planned Behavior, prior findings from in-person workshops showed that workshop participants' IBL knowledge and skills, and their attitudes about the effectiveness of IBL, were positively related to post-workshop implementation of IBL methods. However, access to these workshops requires significant time and monetary resources, making in-person workshops less accessible to potential participants with personal (e.g. family responsibilities, health) and institutional (e.g. lack of money to attend) constraints. In response, workshop organizers created an online workshop model largely based on the proven in-person intensive model. Pre- and post-workshop survey data showed that gains in beliefs about the effectiveness of IBL, IBL knowledge, and IBL skill by online workshop participants were comparable to those reported by previous in-person workshop participants. These findings suggest that, at least in the short term, the online intensive workshop model can produce similar outcomes to in-person workshops, thus providing an alternative model of PD that offers greater access to instructors who may not otherwise be able to attend. We plan to conduct a follow-up survey of online workshop participants to compare implementation rates between online and in-person workshop participants.

A substantial body of research demonstrates the benefits that reformed pedagogies have on student learning, equity, and diversity in STEM. However, implementation of reformed pedagogies remains sluggish in STEM higher education. This disconnect is in part the result of structural and cultural barriers that inhibit faculty agency when it comes to teaching and learning. Many teaching professional development programs for STEM faculty focus on developing and disseminating specific instructional ideas and practices to individual faculty through relatively brief workshops or seminars which treat faculty as receptacles of reform rather than engaging them as meaningful partners who bring unique skills and assets to the reform process. This deficit model ignores the constraints placed on faculty by the institution and fails to represent the influence of institutional structures on faculty agency. As part of an NSF-funded project to coordinate a Teaching Excellence Network at our institution, we are developing several programmatic activities to support faculty change; all activities are designed using an assets-based approach that targets faculty agency to catalyze lasting institutional and cultural change around teaching. We piloted one type of programmatic activity, Semester Support Groups (SSGs), during the Spring 2021 semester. These groups are designed to provide sustained support to a small group of faculty members using a structure that meets the intention and goals of the group (e.g., Faculty Learning Community, SIMPLE Design Group, Departmental Action Team). In this presentation, we will provide a brief overview of the grant activities, situated within the theory of change that guides our project, and discuss preliminary findings from two pilot SSGs: one on Values Affirmation Intervention and the other on Social Network Analysis.

The APS Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) project aims to help physics programs respond to challenges with a collection of knowledge, experience, and proven good practice disseminated via the EP3 Guide. As part of the project, we are piloting Departmental Action Leadership Institutes (DALIs), which support faculty members and their departments in implementing significant changes to their undergraduate programs. Starting in January 2021, two faculty members from each of five departments joined the first DALI. These faculty members were charged with creating and leading cross-constituency teams in their departments to engage in a change effort, following the Departmental Action Team (DAT) model. This DALI started with an intensive virtual kickoff workshop, followed by twice monthly meetings and the opportunity for individual consultations with the DALI facilitators. These activities were designed to to help the DALI participants learn about and implement critical aspects of engaging in a change effort (e.g., defining a vision, setting goals, gathering and analyzing data, assessing results), of supporting a high-functioning team (e.g., recruiting diverse team members, managing conflict and power differentials), and of interfacing with stakeholders outside the team (e.g., cultivating allies, managing resistance). These are all practices that align with the literature on organizational change and effective teams, both within and beyond the higher education context. In this presentation, we will describe the goals, structure, and curriculum of the pilot DALI. We will also present some initial feedback from our participants about their experiences with the DALI and with leading their change efforts and describe our long-term plans to systematically document the impacts of DALI on participants and their departments.

We have carried out a faculty change initiative to support incorporation of student-centered teaching strategies in STEM courses at our university. In semi-structured interviews, we asked participants to explain the factors that influence their pedagogical decisions. As a result, we have created an Ecological Model for STEM Faculty Change, which describes the personal, social, and environmental factors that influence faculty decision-making about student-centered teaching. While the specific factors may change depending on context, the ecological model is broadly useful for identifying levers for change.

Research has demonstrated that student learning and academic success are improved when students are actively engaged during class. Yet these evidence-based teaching practices are not widely adopted in introductory STEM courses. Faculty report the primary factors that hinder their implementation of evidence-based instructional strategies are insufficient time to plan and prepare materials, concerns about content coverage, and a lack of institutional support. We will describe the development of a faculty led learning community, the Transforming STEM Teaching and Learning Academy, that was established to support STEM faculty as they adopt evidence-based best practices in their courses. Faculty from 5 colleges and 9 departments have been represented thus far. The Academy introduced STEM faculty to the latest research on effective instruction in undergraduate STEM and exposed them to a variety of pedagogical techniques that have been successfully implemented in STEM courses to improve academic success. In addition, the program informed faculty about existing campus resources available to improve student learning, such as the Center for Teaching and Learning and Office of Assessment and Accreditation. These groups led professional development workshops for the Academy participants. Peer collaboration, support and feedback were integral parts of the cross-disciplinary program. Faculty who participated in the program reported an increase in their implementation of evidence-based instructional strategies. In addition, faculty noted that they were more equipped to pivot online in March 2020. Several examples of course transformations by the STEM faculty will be presented.

The current study investigates grassroots leadership in teaching communities striving to implement active and inquiry-based learning throughout their departments. Though evidence abounds to support use of active and inquiry-based learning to support students' mastery, achievement, and persistence in STEM fields, especially for women and underrepresented minorities, faculty may still choose to use old teaching methods (Austin, 2011). Departmental communities (Apkarian & Rasmussen, 2020) that involve most faculty (Wieman et al., 2010), including contingent faculty for foundational courses (Laursen, 2019) are social networks of resources for change (Hora & Hunter, 2014; Shadle et al., 2018) and can evolve to support growing community (Shadle et al., 2018). With grass roots efforts, local control by faculty, such as local leaders and internal change agents with vision, especially at the department level (Laursen, 2019; Wood, 2017), is important (Hora & Hunter, 2014) and builds trust resulting in informal coordination (Apkarian & Rasmussen, 2020). Reformers need to understand context and culture to effect sustainable change (Apkarian et al., 2019), but some contextual factors may need to be changed (Hora & Hunter, 2014), such as tasks, norms, practices and infrastructure to support the innovation (Laursen, 2019) at departmental or institutional levels (Englund et al., 2018). For the current study, it is important to understand the ways in which different department contexts and cultures influence how leaders tackle implementing the pedagogical change. The following questions will address this gap in knowledge. What grass roots tactics do team leaders use to create sustainable course-level and department-level changes toward the use of inquiry-based learning and how do these differ between departments? What obstacles arise for teams and how do leaders help their teams overcome challenges and barriers in their contexts? Focusing on communities of practice and grassroots theory provides a framework to answer these questions.  

The goals of this early capacity-building project are to strengthen the data infrastructure for faculty and cultivate faculty buy-in for engaging in STEM education transformation to improve student outcomes. The development and implementation of two integrated and multidisciplinary faculty communities, along with the initial observations of their impacts on the project goals, will be discussed. The Inquiry in STEM Success community seeks to enhance faculty members' understanding of student learning, success, and retention in STEM and increase knowledge of evidence-based instructional practices. The questions generated are used by the Data Tools Co-design community to iteratively refine data analytics tools. These activities aim to increase the collective understanding of faculty members in identifying bottlenecks and barriers to student success in STEM.

Three assumptions, grounded in theories of change, guide this project. First, providing faculty with multiple ways to engage with student success challenges and evidence-based teaching will cultivate motivation to consider change in the classroom. Second, data alone will not drive change, but rather developing connections with data and evidence will help motivate transformation. Third, systems thinking establishes an effective framework to organize efforts to implement change. The expectancy-value theory of motivation (Wigfield & Eccles, 2000) guides activities to provide faculty access to actionable data to inform teaching decisions (expectancy) and flexibility to make the information relevant (value). Faculty are collaborators in dashboard development, ensuring that the data provides actionable insights and answers meaningful questions. Communities of transformation/practice can be effective drivers to STEM education reform (Kezar & Gehrke, 2016; Shadle et al., 2017) and "significant conversations and significant networks" can influence faculty as they develop their understanding of teaching and learning (Roxå & Mårtensson, 2009). Moreover, data-based narratives engage individuals in sense-making while reflecting on their beliefs, expanding their understanding, and cultivating shared meaning (Peterson, 2017; Gandolfi, 2019).  

Computational approaches has become an integral part of STEM. For some years, we have adopted QPython which is the Python version in smartphones for the teaching of our computational courses. The reason is that while some students from low economic backgrounds cannot afford their own laptops or desktops, most students already have these smartphones because there are inexpensive models to purchase and they are acquired for many other purposes. The implication is that our students irrespective of their cultural and socio-economic backgrounds, can partake in our computational courses. Now in addition to the slimmed version of Microsoft Office in the smartphones, slimmed versions of a number of programming languages are already being incorporated into the smartphones whose capacities are continually advanced. Therefore, we are expanding our project to be an all inclusive such that smartphones will be adopted to be a mobile computational laboratory. Thus the goals of this project include promoting access, inclusion, equity and diversity related to supporting students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds.  

 This poster explains how faculty in Residential Academic Programs (RAPs) at the University of Colorado Boulder have collaborated across disciplines to improve assessment measures gauging instruction within the living-learning environments of the university. At CU, RAPs support first-year students and offer courses in a wide variety of academic disciplines in classrooms located within the residence halls. RAP faculty are drawn from the various academic departments on campus and are specialists in first-year education. By taking classes with other students in their residence hall and with faculty dedicated to their success, students establish trusting relationships and a sense of community early in their academic career. RAPs also help students develop a sense of intellectual purpose, build early connections with faculty and peers, and expand their creative thinking, critical analysis and communication skills.
Historically, the RAPs at CU operated with a fair degree of independence from one another because they were established at different times and have different thematic foci. However, a 2016 program review of RAPs at CU-Boulder highlighted the need for the RAPs to standardize our goals and our assessment of how well those goals are being achieved.
The RAPs then partnered with the Teaching Quality Framework (TQF) initiative (the TeVAL program at CU-Boulder), which are grounded in the scholarship of higher education, to articulate common goals across the RAPs and to transform teaching evaluation so that it would more thoroughly and consistently reflect those goals across the RAPs. Unlike other departments participating in TQF, the internal diversity of RAPs meant that they could not rely on common content goals to unify the programs. Instead, a small Faculty Learning Community (FLC), composed of instructors from each of the seven RAPs in the College of Arts and Sciences, transformed performance evaluations protocols and guidelines, student feedback tools, and teaching assessment protocols.

Faculty learning communities (FLCs) have been proposed as a mechanism for facilitating faculty adoption of more effective, student-centered teaching practices (SCTP). We refer to FLCs as groups of faculty members who meet regularly to overcome the isolation and lack of pedagogical expertise that constitute barriers to educational reform. Previous research has supported this contention, but FLCs vary widely in their attributes and little is known about which attributes are important for facilitating teaching reform.

We surveyed 66 faculty members from 11 FLCs in our research-intensive university. We asked the respondents to characterize their FLC along several dimensions. Then we explored the relationship between a faculty member's sense of community and their reported engagement in an FLC, their beliefs about teaching, and their use of SCTP. Sense of community was measured using a modified Sense of Community Index (SCI). Engagement, beliefs, and attitudes were measured using the modified Science Teaching Beliefs and Practices (STEP) survey. Quantitative data were analyzed using stepwise multiple regression and analysis of variance. Qualitative data were analyzed by grouping open-ended responses into common themes that were then quantified.

Characteristics of FLCs that were positively associated with SCI included frequent meetings, multidirectional communication within the group, having food at meetings, collaborative projects, and open-ended duration. High SCI was associated with belonging to more than one FLC and valuing SCTP more highly. Most (56%) respondents reported that their participation in an FLC had an impact on departmental colleagues who were not in the community, and 64% reported an impact on their colleges or the institution.

To our knowledge, this is the first systematic investigation of the impact of the psychological sense of community on university teaching. It fills a critical gap in our understanding of how faculty learning communities can be designed to promote departmental and institutional change.  

Between 2016 and 2020, the PRODUCT project hosted four-day, intensive professional development workshops for undergraduate mathematics instructors interested in incorporating inquiry-based learning (IBL) into their classrooms. In addition to these intensive workshops, the project also offered shorter traveling workshops between 2017 and 2020. These workshops were hosted at institutions across the United States and were typically a few hours in length.

The PRODUCT evaluation team distributed post-workshop surveys and a follow-up survey to traveling workshop attendees, through which we were able to measure self-reported changes in knowledge, skill, and implementation of IBL. Similar measures were collected for the intensive summer workshops, providing a basis to compare the impacts of each workshop model on participants. Our findings indicate that the two workshop models provide benefits to participants, and each serve a distinctive role in increasing awareness and uptake of IBL. Despite being shorter and less in-depth than the intensive workshops, the traveling workshop data show that participants reported gains in their knowledge and interest in IBL after attending a workshop. Preliminary analysis of follow-up data is underway, and we will also compare implementation rates between workshop types when the analysis is complete.

An additional benefit of the traveling workshops is their accessibility: because the workshops were hosted at local institutions, the travel and time costs of attendance were low. This accessibility combined with intentional efforts to reach a more diverse range of faculty led to a diversity of institution type, career stage, and ethnicity among traveling workshop participants. Overall, our findings show that the traveling workshops were effective at encouraging interest and increasing knowledge of IBL among a diverse range of faculty and suggest that there are specific benefits to be offered from a short, localized workshop model when other forms of implementation support are available.  

This presentation will focus on the early-stage development of Mercer University's Metro-Atlanta Wetlands Conservation Education Center. This outdoor learning space will support research and conservation outreach related to urban forests, wetlands, and broader urban ecology. Mercer University's Atlanta Campus contains 140 acres of naturally forested areas and wetlands that comprise some of the largest natural biodiversity zones within the Atlanta beltline. These areas have a crucial role in protecting the Chattahoochee watershed, which acts as the drinking water supply for the Metro Atlanta area, from run-off pollution. Mercer's urban ecosystems are a valuable tool for understanding natural resource conservation in urban locations, supporting conservation outreach, and broadening participation in STEM among minoritized groups.

The proposed urban conservation education center will leverage the expertise of faculty in the fields of education, community outreach, conservation biology, and natural resource management to support activities such as teacher professional development workshops, citizen science initiatives, educational outreach to diverse groups of stakeholders, and community events. The activities supported by this outdoor learning space will inform stakeholders of how they can be active participants in protecting Metro-Atlanta's urban ecology from threats such as the encroachment of invasive species, pollution, and other adverse human activities. The proposed center will also build greater awareness of Atlanta's green industry workforce in areas such, watershed/wetlands conservation, forestry, and urban agriculture.

The framework is the Collective Impact Model. This model describes five conditions that are necessary to engage in multi-level partnerships that enhance the impact of programs and collaborations (Kania & Kramer, 2011). These conditions include:

1. Establishing a Common Agenda
2. Share Measurement Systems
3. Mutually Reinforcing Activities
4. Continuous Communication
5. Backbone Organization Support

Through collaborative partnerships with other institutions, governmental agencies, and the local community this project seeks to develop a replicable model for promoting conservation education.