Presentations: Session C

The Departmental Action Team (DATs) project developed a new model supporting departmental change and ran seventeen DATs across the time period of 2014-2021. DATs were based in a wide variety of academic departments, including STEM, social science, and humanities. Members of each DAT typically included faculty, staff, graduate students, and undergraduates. DATs were externally facilitated by project staff for a period of up to two years, and supported in training internal facilitators to continue their work if desired.

Long-term impacts of DATs were recently investigated by qualitatively analyzing interviews of former DAT members that took place 1-4 years following the end of external facilitation for their DAT. In this presentation, we will describe the development of a departmental change-focused codebook, drawing from these rich interviews. To date, qualitative analysis has revealed that following external facilitation, most DATs or another group in the department sustained change by continuing to work on the DAT's original project.

Impacts of DATs routinely involved sustained structural changes within DAT departments, skill development of DAT members, and the spread of DAT-related skills or cultural features within other departmental groups. DAT departments also often experienced department-wide growth with respect to one or more core DAT principles for supporting change, such as engaging "students as partners" or demonstrating "a commitment to equity and inclusion through their work". Following a DAT, other departmental groups sometimes replicated part or all of the DAT model. This finding demonstrates that the DAT model can support the institutionalization of sustained change effort within academic departments.

Leading change can be complex and complicated and often requires more than just excellent problem solving, attention to process, and paying attention to the data, skills that are second nature to leaders with STEM backgrounds. It also requires us to examine our own personal journey, leadership values and practices. During the last year the authors participated in a Shared Equity Leadership Learning Circle through the American Council on Education where together they explored their values and practice and supported each other as they tackled their respective institutional challenges and their approach to DEI work. This process involves a mutual engagement in learning from each other and working through uncertainty. Come to this presentation to learn more about Shared Equity Leadership and how it can help us as we lead complex change at our institutions.

This presentation presents the ProQual Approach to supporting STEM instructional and tenure-track faculty in conducting qualitative educational research. Historically, integrating these two groups into STEM education research communities has been both challenging and essential to long-term, systemic STEM education change. Both groups are responsible for the education of students in students in STEM disciplines, and educational research provides them means to continuously improve educational practices and engage more deeply with their identities as educators. However, helping STEM faculty develop educational research skills necessitates overcoming barriers such as epistemological tensions between social and natural sciences (Berliner, 2002; Borrego, 2007; Labaree, 2003) and limited access to STEM education communities.

The ProQual Approach was designed to overcome these challenges using a model of educational research training defined by two guiding principles. First, leaders of the process begin by helping faculty identify a well-scoped specific research problem they want to solve. In doing so, the ProQual Approach gets STEM faculty invested in their research ideas and allows leaders to justify how qualitative research is appropriate for their ideas, rather than trying to justify its value as an abstract methodology. Second, the entire training process is conducted in the context of a supportive cohort of STEM faculty, with the leaders of the process gradually taking off the "training wheels" and letting the cohort members support one another as growing educational research experts. Doing so allows participants to build confidence in their skills and develop a network of colleagues at their skill level that they can continue to access once the formal training is complete.

The ProQual approach was refined and tested via a $1M NSF ECR:BCSER grant, and was pioneered by UGA's Engineering Education Research Institute through their novel engineering education research incubator approach (Sochacka, Walther, Morelock, Hunsu, & Carnell, 2020). The approach was successfully implemented at the national level for 48 faculty from several STEM disciplines across three cohorts. In this presentation, I will present the ProQual Approach itself, as well as evaluation data from the NSF project on the impacts of its implementation.

Developing Change Leaders in Advanced Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: A Change Leadership Development Program is an exciting new initiative launched by the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL). Funded by NSF-IUSE, the Change Leadership Development Program (CLDP) will empower graduate students and postdocs (GS/PS) to contribute to departmental and institutional systemic change to strengthen and transform STEM undergraduate education.

While CIRTL graduates enter careers well prepared to support the learning of diverse students, they typically do not have opportunities to learn about change leadership. This gap in understanding of change leadership is especially concerning to early-career faculty trained in evidence-based teaching (EBT) who may be eager to share inclusive approaches. However, if they begin careers in institutions where EBT is not customary, they may feel isolated or unsupported and may also wrestle with how to navigate their own career trajectory.

The CLDP is informed by principles from three theoretical perspectives. First, systems theory asserts that change in complex organizations must consider multiple levels of the organization, including the policies, practices, structures, and norms. Systems theory guides our strategy to emphasize leadership preparation for GS/PS as a lever for institutional change. Second, socialization theory posits that learning is enhanced by a supportive learning community. Third, identity development, a process across a lifespan involving education, training, and experiences. In this presentation, we will describe how the CLDP will prepare GS/PS to become change leaders in their next positions, by building on theoretical perspectives in three learning domains: 1) Change Leader Identity 2) Organizational Features in Higher Education and 3) Theories of Leadership and Change. We will report preliminary findings from a needs assessment conducted to refine the CLDP; focus group's perceptions of leadership competencies in terms of their relevance at different career stages.