Opportunities and challenges of change efforts involving faculty-student instructional teams

We have been implementing a 5-year initiative called the "STEM Communities Project" (NSF #1928696) at Texas State University, a large, diverse Hispanic-Serving Institution in central Texas. Through this grant, we have worked to support student-centered instructional change and build community across STEM departments by engaging faculty-student teams in teaching gateway courses. The programmatic design combines research about change strategies for undergraduate STEM, particularly instructional change teams, with research and experiential knowledge about the national Learning Assistant (LA) model for undergraduate peer educators. We are currently supporting 6 course redesign teams across math, chemistry, biology, and physics.

In this workshop, we will start by presenting our theory of change and explaining its connections to prior research. It includes 4 programmatic elements: workshops and campus events, department instructional assessments, faculty-student course redesign teams, and faculty leadership development. We will provide the most detailed description of the team element. We will then invite participants to discuss how this change approach compares with what they are doing or aspire to do at their own institutions, what stands out to them as interesting / promising, and strategies for overcoming anticipated challenges. We will encourage reflective note-taking during the presentation to support this discussion.

Next, we will introduce our ongoing interview study about Biology faculty and LAs' perceptions of their course redesigns. The study addresses the research questions: "How and in what ways does student-centered and culturally responsive instruction emerge from collaboration among faculty-student teams? What supports and limits this?" Our preliminary analysis shows that faculty and LAs have significantly different outlooks on the same course redesigns. We will play specific interview clips that highlight similarities and differences in faculty and LA perceptions, focusing on two specific topics that we find noteworthy. After showing each set of interview clips, we will invite participants to make sense of these data together and brainstorm implications for collaborative change efforts that involve students as partners.

We will end by providing time for reflection on personal takeaways from the workshop.