Presentations: Session IV

The Department and Leadership Teams for Action (DeLTA) project promotes second-order change in STEM undergraduate education at the University of Georgia. DeLTA uses a multilevel approach, collaborating with faculty regarding their courses, department heads regarding departmental practices, and college and university administration regarding institutional policy. DeLTA applies multiple perspectives about how to achieve change, including social cognition, cultural, political, scientific management, and others. On the department level, DeLTA created a Leadership Action Team (LAT) comprised of thirteen department heads and faculty facilitators from across STEM. The LAT members collaborate and work individually to improve departmental practices that impact undergraduate education, including how teaching is evaluated, how faculty are hired, and how teaching is recognized and rewarded. For example, the LAT learned about new frameworks for teaching evaluation that rely on evidence from multiple voices rather than student evaluations alone. Several LAT departments are piloting new approaches in their units by introducing peer evaluation and instructor self-reflection and structuring departmental committees to build the resources needed for new evaluation practices. The LAT meets six times per year to hear presentations about concepts, frameworks, and resources related to departmental practices that influence undergraduate education, and to question and discuss these ideas. Facilitators help department heads articulate their underlying assumptions, explain the affordances and limitations of their departmental practices and cultures, imagine new ways of working, and identify the best next steps for action. DeLTA also offers targeted support to department heads, including developing resources and facilitating departmental discussions. This presentation will describe the LAT structure, process, and theoretical underpinnings. It will also present initial outcomes, including the results of preliminary analyses of how LAT members' thinking has changed (or not) and how departmental practices are shifting (or not).  

Educational analytics has been in use by our higher education institutions for the last 10 years, or more, with an emphasis on university-wide metrics, advising support and various student-focused focused tools. In general, analytics tools and approaches that directly focus on faculty and their students, situated in the classroom, have been rare and efforts to provide this information at scale are slowly emerging. In this presentation we will present two such efforts, the Know Your Students online environment at UC Davis and the Course Equity Reports at the University of Michigan. Both of these approaches bring general and specific equity focused data and tools to faculty as they work to teach their courses. Additionally, prompts and other resources aim to guide faculty into trying activities and interventions that have the potential to improve the equity of outcomes.

As part of SEISMIC, a 10 public R1 institution collaborative, we are sharing our approaches to providing equity data and interventions to faculty. We have already seen new efforts emerging at UC Irvine and UC Santa Barbara as we continue to expand our understanding of the approaches, successes and challenges in sharing equity-focused data with faculty and faculty administrators. We will highlight some of the actions that have emerged thus far.

Organizational theorists and change practitioners have advanced many useful tools relevant to the evaluation of complex, often multi-institutional, higher education STEM reform initiatives. Evaluators often engage clients and stakeholders in discussion regarding change goals, the current state of projects and initiatives, and barriers and drivers of change. Kurt Lewin, in the 1940's, identified the importance of exploring these four topics and constructed a means of examining their interrelationship, otherwise known as Force Field Analysis. The overarching idea is that an organization constantly experiences two forces, one driving momentum to a desired future state and one pushing in opposition to that goal. Applied to STEM reform, the goal of a force field analysis is to collaboratively engage diverse stakeholders to diagram the current and desired future states of the initiative, what is driving the initiative towards goal achievement, and barriers that have/will prevent progress. The resulting map can then be used as a means of systems alignment among the diverse stakeholders and actors of the initiative to capture a more complete picture of the change landscape and to surface differing perspectives and priorities. Next, the initiative can use the force field analysis results to engage in strategic planning by identifying a sequence of targets to reduce or eliminate barriers and strengthen change drivers. The purpose of this interactive session is to have participants learn and experience the steps of a force field analysis and discuss the tool's potential in helping to align stakeholders towards systemic change in higher education STEM reform.