Evaluating drivers of change in faculty mindset across science and math departments

The ways that faculty think about student learning have profound impacts on their teaching practices. These ways of thinking – or mindset beliefs – include ideas faculty hold about student ability, intelligence, motivations, and classroom actions that produce excellence. Recent reports indicate that faculty mindset has direct and indirect impacts on students' experiences and performance in STEM classes, with faculty mindsets that center student growth producing better outcomes. To foster more productive faculty mindsets, we have established a series of faculty development interventions at our institution. These interventions include faculty learning communities and team-based summer course (re)design grants that include participants from science and math departments. While the specific topics of these learning communities and grants vary, the underlying focus is to promote a shift in faculty mindset that is then demonstrated in teaching practices. Here, we investigate whether a model of change developed by Lau and colleagues (2024) based on the Four Frames Change Theory describes the effects we see. The model as developed describes change in one practice – adoption of active learning – at the department level; we seek to determine whether this model can be modified and expanded to describe change in faculty mindset across a cluster of departments. The modified model predicts that motivated people with knowledge about productive mindsets and teaching practices leverage opportunities to develop values and structures that support those mindsets and practices. In turn, such values and structures promote the development of more motivated people. As productive mindsets and practices are adopted in the community, this positive cycle is reinforced. As a pilot test of this model, we analyze interview data from faculty participants. These analyses evaluate the expanded model and its potential to describe change in an important educational variable across departments.