Sustaining change efforts: Application of theory to maintain momentum of the Transformational Change Initiative

Launched in 2016, the Transformational Change Initiative (TCI) was initially funded through a strategic reallocation of university resources as a 5-year pilot project aimed to improve undergraduate student retention and resilience. The TCI included a suite of faculty professional development (PD) activities designed to support faculty in adopting research-based practices known to promote retention and resilience. Propensity score analyses were applied to institutional data mined during the pilot period and demonstrated that students enrolled in one or more courses taught by faculty participants in LIFT (a TCI PD workshop) were retained at significantly higher rates than other students. These data were then used to calculate a return on investment and presented to university leaders, leading to institutionalized support from the Office of the Provost in 2021.

Continued sustainability of transformation efforts must be responsive to an ever-changing landscape. Institutional change efforts are vulnerable to leadership transitions, state budgets, and federal support. In this presentation we leverage two theoretical perspectives to inform continued efforts to maintain momentum in transformational change. First, we leveraged the Four Frames Model for institutional change (Reinholz et al. 2018) to build on existing student retention data and identify the faculty experience as a potentially useful voice to maintain enthusiasm for TCI activities. Second, we used the literature on employee satisfaction in general, and faculty satisfaction specifically, to hypothesize that well-crafted faculty development opportunities may lead to increases in faculty satisfaction and therefore faculty retention.

In this presentation, we present report on data used to test our hypothesis. We report on the degree to which participation in LIFT increased faculty perceptions of job meaningfulness (one measure of job satisfaction), and examine these results disaggregated by STEM vs non-STEM discipline. We will present disciplinary differences and invite discussion about the implications for high-impact professional development for STEM faculty.