Communities of practice for engaging faculty in STEM course reform
Laura Hahn, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
At large research-intensive universities, teaching STEM at scale has posed instructional challenges to faculty who are unaccustomed to addressing pedagogy in a collective, sustainable manner. At our institution, through strategic implementation of communities of practice, we are beginning to integrate the qualities of a strong, collaborative research culture into the context of teaching.

Unconscious Bias Faculty Training
Travis York, APLU
The Office of Faculty Development and Diversity and The Cornell Interactive Theatre Ensemble (CITE) offer a workshop focused on establishing an effective search and addressing issues such as unconscious bias in active recruitment.

Crossing Boundaries for STEM Teaching through Mini-Conferences
Shande King, The University of Tennessee
Partnering with other STEM faculty members across the university campus, the our center hosted their first mini-conference, open for K-12 STEM educators as well as university faculty members, researchers, and other community outreach organizations. In this abbreviated PechaKucha-style conference, speakers from all university STEM and education departments, local K-12 schools, and other local STEM organizations presented different research highlighting educational practices that focused on advancing K-12 and undergraduate student engagement and inquiry into STEM fields. Concurrent sessions of 10 minutes allowed various departments and other education representatives to highlight their specific fields of interest, followed brief question-and-answer sessions. Sessions were grouped according to similar themes, and upon the completion of each theme's presentations, connections were made to underline the practices already advancing STEM education. Further, presenters and attendees provided helpful feedback for continued improvement in STEM education, and in this comfortable environment, they exchanged information for future collaboration.

Teaching Quality Framework Initiative
Noah Finkelstein, University of Colorado at Boulder
This effort provides framework for supporting and assessing teaching quality across all departments on a campus (i.e. a Teaching Quality Framework, or TQF). The TQF has two essential elements: (1) categories that define teaching as a scholarly activity, and (2) a change process for implementation. To assess teaching quality, we draw on three perspectives--faculty members, their students, and their peers--as sources of data. The TQF scholarly categories are held constant across departments, but each department contextualizes them according to the specifics of their discipline. The implementation strategy is grounded in theories of organizational change and is designed to lead to campus-wide adoption. This strategy is not a top-down mandate; it focuses on bringing together key faculty leaders and departments and providing them with a structure to co-create, test, and evaluate an assessment system in the context that makes the most sense to them.

UA-AAU STEM Collaborative Learning Spaces Project
Lisa Elfring, The University of Arizona
The Collaborative Learning Spaces Project (CLSP), an extension of the UA AAU Undergraduate STEM Education Project, is a university-wide collaborative effort at the University of Arizona to develop classroom environments that are more suitable for active learning pedagogies than traditional lecture halls. Instructors and their teaching teams who are using these rooms receive training and participate in faculty learning communities (FLCs) to explore best practices and innovative ideas for use of these spaces.

Institutional Impact of Scaling-up Course-Embedded Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs)
Judy Awong-Taylor, Georgia Gwinnett College
Georgia Gwinnett College was established in 2006 as a public liberal arts institution with a mission to provide open access to all high school graduates regardless of SAT scores. In 2011, The School of Science and Technology (SST) implemented a program for enhancing student engagement and learning in all STEM disciplines. GGC's Four-year Undergraduate Research and Creative Experience (4YrURCE) program is based upon a discipline-specific course-embedded research model which scaffolds multiple research and creative experiences for all STEM majors during all four years of matriculation. To date, 54 courses have been re-designed as CUREs and over 3,000 students (unduplicated count) are impacted annually. Longitudinal program-level assessment data includes student performance, student attitudinal, and faculty attitudinal data gathered over the past five years of the initiative.

BreakThru: The Georgia STEM Accessibility Alliance (GSAA)
Nathan W. Moon, Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus
BreakThru is a five-year National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project to broaden the participation of students with disabilities in secondary and postsecondary STEM education.

Windows on the Inquiry Classroom
Christopher Bauer, University of New Hampshire-Main Campus
The project is a comprehensive documentation of an inquiry-based course, a college-level interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of heat, temperature, and energy (Fire and Ice). The door to this classroom is open for observations at any time for teachers, teacher educators, professional developers, researchers, and science learners. The entire course is available at the University of New Hampshire Scholars Repository: https://scholars.unh.edu/bauer. All 27 class sessions are captured in 10-minute video segments from four angles, including instructor and student teams. All course documents are also available: daily agenda, student team instructions and work products, and hands-on activity procedures. There are behind-the-curtain stories as well: instructor previews and debriefing for each class, graduate interns reviewing every class, student focus groups, and videos about course design process.

Systemic Transformation of Education through Evidence-based Reform (STEER)
Gerry Meisels, University of South Florida
STEER seeks to create a culture that reflects a strong balance between teaching and research, and values both. STEER promotes the adoption of evidence-based teaching practices in all science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) courses, especially in the large-enrollment gateway courses. To facilitate systemic change, the University of South Florida (USF) and Hillsborough Community College (HCC) are partnering to offer professional development for faculty and strengthening coordinated student advising, because the number of STEM community college students transferring to USF exceeds the number who began their studies at USF. STEER's comprehensive approach also addresses other factors that may influence students' academic experiences, such as graduate teaching assistant (GTA) training, student advising, course alignment, institutional policies related to teaching, and physical infrastructure such as classroom configuration. This effort is supported in part by the National Science Foundation, grant number DUE1525574.

Departmental Action Teams (DATs)
Daniel Reinholz, San Diego State University
SITAR aims to improve undergraduate STEM education by professionalizing educational practice through measurement, assessment, and cultural change. We focus on department-wide change to achieve more coherent, long lasting reforms. Our project uses a three-layer approach: (1) We work with groups of faculty through Departmental Action Teams (DATs) to create sustainable mechanisms to address educational issues in an ongoing fashion (bottom up); (2) We apply targeted approaches to individual departments to stimulate cultural change (middle out); and (3) We work with the administration and faculty senate to promote and incentivize the use of evidence-based teaching practices (top down). We support these three layers with infrastructure provided by the AAU and our collaborations with our Office of Informational Technology (OIT) to develop and import technology for better utilizing already existing institutional student data.