Achieving sustained change through multi-institutional collaboration

ASCN is an established lever for engaging faculty, administrators, and policy makers in careful thinking about improvement in undergraduate teaching and learning, providing opportunities to explore and analyze strategies for transforming higher education. This presentation focuses on a powerful approach to scaling this work to promote widespread, sustainable change: cross-institutional partnership and collaboration. We draw on lessons learned from institutional collaborations we have been involved with over the last decade, and on research and theory on systemic change, to explore strategies for connecting institutions and collaborating for improvement. The goal is to help participants build on collegial relationships formed through ASCN and other networks and to envision and design cross-institutional collaborations. The purpose is to overcome common disciplinary and institutional boundaries that prevent sustained, systemic change from taking root in their programs and schools.

It is well understood that interventions solely focused on individual faculty members will not yield systemic change (Fairweather, 2009) so we have pursued approaches that involve cross-institutional collaboration as an approach that have great promise for scaling up and sustaining change (e.g., Kezar & Gehrke, 2015). Since 2012, we have been implementing and refining an approach based on Networked Improvement Communities (NICs) (Bryk, Gomez, & Grunow, 2011; Bryk et al., 2015) that applies action research to promote cultural change in undergraduate STEM programs and departments. The model has been developed and systematically studied by a consortium of ten universities, known as the Bay View Alliance. The workshop facilitators include organizers of this alliance and leaders and participants in associated campus-based initiatives. Drawing on concepts from improvement science (Berwick, 2008) and recent results from the consortium's projects, we will invite participants to engage with cross-cutting ideas on how to design and leverage collaborations that will advance institutional goals and engage in transformative culture change (Seidel, et al., 2017).