Exploration of the Relationship between Departmental Climate around Teaching and Adoption of Learner-centered Instructional Practice

Instructional change in STEM courses at the postsecondary level has been advocated for decades with a particular focus on adoption of learner-centered instructional practices. One of the barriers for instructional change identified by faculty and often raised in the literature is the departmental climate around teaching. However, the relationship between the departmental climate around teaching and instructors' adoption of learner-centered instructional practices has not been fully explored.
We addressed this gap by developing a survey that helps

1. characterizing the different types of psychological collective climate around teaching that faculty in STEM departments at postsecondary institutions perceive
2. testing whether departmental collective climate can be measured within these departments
3. exploring the relationships between adoption of learner-centered instructional practices and psychological collective climate/departmental collective climate around teaching.

The survey was collected from 166 instructors from 22 departments at 21 institutions across the U.S. Analysis of the survey data led to

1. the identification of four types of psychological collective climate around teaching by using mixture model clustering
2. the realization that measuring departmental collective climate is challenging as few constructs measured by the survey reached high level of consensus within faculty members from the same department
3. the finding that psychological collective climate did not predict STEM faculty's instructional practices.

Our results suggest that the link between climate around teaching within a department and faculty members' use of learner-centered instructional practices is more unclear than previously thought, and departmental collective climate around teaching may be difficult to measure because most elements that define a climate (e.g., policies, practices, expectations) are lacking when it comes to teaching. The absence of these elements may contribute to the highly autonomous and independent approach to teaching that is seen in higher education and thus the lack of instructional innovation at scale.