Leveraging the connections in a state system of schools to accelerate dissemination of inclusive, high impact educational practices through tiered professional development and mentoring.

Educators once comfortable with traditional teaching strategies witnessed their inadequacy during the pandemic creating an opportunity to leverage this moment to accelerate broad adoption of evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs) in STEM higher education. Unfortunately, STEM educators still receive rigorous post-graduate training in their disciplines but little to no pedagogical training, leaving them to rely on traditional lecture approaches that are less effective in driving student learning or retention. In its initial phase, our NSF-funded project resulted in a tiered program of professional development, mentoring and community that leverages connections across national STEM transformation programs and within the State University of New York (SUNY) system, the largest post-secondary state system in the US. The project brought together three successful national STEM transformation programs - the Mobile Summer Institutes on Scientific Teaching (MoSI), the Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities (SENCER), and the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium – to develop a multi-faceted program that employs three important levers for change – professional development, agents of change, and communities of practice, to accelerate adoption of high impact practices (HIPs) already occurring within pockets in this system. Participants in the program receive general training in the use of EBIPs, specific training by local change agents, in any of three HIPS, project-based learning (PBL), course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) or vertically integrated projects (VIPs), and support and guidance in a faculty mentoring network (FMN) of their peers and two local experts. Cross-institutional administrator workshops and strategic planning sessions foster administrative awareness and support as well as connecting change agents to share practices and distribute transformation workload. Participation in the project programs is being tracked and changes in teaching beliefs and behaviors by individuals and policies and curricula by institutions will be measured to determine the impact of this approach in fostering widespread change in teaching.