Workshop on Engaging Faculty: Action Plans

By the end of the Workshop, each team created an action plan to take back to their campus. The anonymized plans are below.

Most institutions are focusing on a department-wide strategy with a consensus and/or community building focus. A few institutions are focusing on reforming a few upper division courses to begin with and then engaging in department-wide conversations.

All institutions referenced one or all of the following goals: developing learning goals, incorporating evidence-based instructional practices into the program, and improving the assessments of student learning. The need for baseline data was a recurring theme.

Some institutions are employing more of an emergent process (with consensus building) while others also include a more structured approach through the creation of task force or committees to manage the reform process. One institution explicitly is targeting tenured faculty, while several institutions are involving more faculty and staff with teaching responsibilities. Two institutions, as part of their action plan, mentioned the Learning Assistant's Program. Brown bag lunches were also popular.

We attempted to anonymize the campus plans except for Oregon State University, which asked to be identified.

Campus Action Plans

Institution A: Our goals are to achieve buy-in through, and persuasion of, as many faculty members as possible, including research-focused faculty for transforming teaching methods that will lead to desirable student learning outcomes. The questions that help frame this discussion are what do our students need to know and be able to do, so we can position ourselves as producing top-quality undergraduates and so that our students can be very productive in research labs. Our strategy is to nurture a grassroots consensus process. This will include discussions with individual faculty for their views of what students should know and be able to do with a degree from our program. From these discussions, we will share the emergent themes with faculty, prompt discussions about possible actions (e.g. data collection, pilot courses), include external voices, and incentivize pilots (e.g. RA support, course release). To accomplish this plan, we will need diffusion beyond "innovators". We will need powerful change agent(s), including someone who may be skeptical initially, and who we can incentivize to try a change. In the immediate future, we will hold one-on-few meetings, convene initial faculty meeting framed with "mission" oriented questions, and launch brown bag lunches to determine shared learning goals. Longer term, we will develop chemistry department learning goals, begin baseline data collection on key concept inventory, and move forward with grass-roots-determined interventions.

Institution B: Our goal is to change the culture in the Physics Department to encourage and support reflective teaching practices throughout the whole department. Our strategy is to facilitate the intentional incorporation of appropriate evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs) by tenured faculty teaching upper level courses. Facilitation will require providing time, safe place, and resources for the faculty. Intentionality requires reflection to see what the issues are and to plan and to loop back and articulate outcomes. Appropriate requires understanding what strategies will work to address what issues and to find low threshold strategies that faculty can implement efficiently and find small successes. Changing faculty perception requires us to address faculty beliefs that there is increasing importance of research success, implementing evidence-based instructional practices is hard, and that you cannot fail in the classroom. There is also an absence of motivation to change teaching practices.

The action plan is to launch a cohort of tenured faculty (Summer 2015), implement a summer plan with observations and continued cohort meetings (Fall 2015 and Spring 2016). Then rinse and repeat and start department level discussions (2016 – 2017). In the more immediate term we will share concepts and examples of EBIPs, discuss current teaching practices, develop course lists of math used/needed and math assessments, and discuss areas of need (e.g. gaps in conceptual understandings). The expectations for Fall 2015 are to identify a portion of content that can be reduced (in class direct instruction) and select a low threshold/appropriate EBIP to try fall term.

Institution C: Our goal is to prepare students for a broader array of post-baccalaureate careers. We want to empower students with cross-discipline competencies to solve real world-problems. We also want to inform and engage faculty to ensure sustainable institutional change. Our strategy is to assess current student learning outcomes, and use those results to initiate faculty conversations, and, in collaboration with administration, mutually agree on the need for change. The next step is to develop a plan based on evidence-based best practices, and invite top-scholars involved in science teaching research to present their experience, successes, and active learning as well as other evidence-based teaching methodologies. We will also need to develop a system of "rewards" supported by the college.

Institution D: There is an institutional imperative to improve retention and graduation rates, STEM progression, and URM/SES achievement gap. We want to transform pedagogies across departments to improve student success, obtain departmental buy-in for needed reforms, and find the optimal incentives that respect different faculty perspectives and situations (e.g. tenure track and non-tenure track). Our strategy is to create departmental transformation grants, expand our LA program, invite external speakers and consultants to support departmental and institutional transformation goals, empower GTAs to become more engaged in instructional transformation, start on-going workshop series, and explore CIRTL membership (scholarship of teaching for graduate students) and related opportunities. Assessments are also important. We will use the COPUS observation tool and incorporate student success data (new tool development) into departmental and institutional decision making. What we will do in the immediate term is develop a RFP for departmental transformation sub-grants, and begin departmental conversations on transformation.

Institution E: Intro classes at our university successfully incorporate and recognize findings of discipline based education research (DBER), yet these ideas stop abruptly for courses in the middle of the second year. Our challenge is to leverage recognition of DBER's value to upper level curriculum and engage broad faculty community. Our strategy is to emphasize its priority in (and connection to) College and Institute Strategic Plan and to carefully populate a working group from across STEM departments to develop discipline-specific strategies. Over the summer, the working group will articulate goals and initial recommendations to facilitate College dialogue and approaches to framing the problem, while the Dean emphasizes goal and challenges in College-wide meetings. By the fall, we plan to have focus groups and faculty brown bags to build community and to develop concrete actions, timelines and potential external funding proposals.

Institution F: The problems we are trying to solve are lack of infrastructure for course reform, lack of community with colleagues within and external to department, and no mechanism for research and evaluation of what we are doing. Our strategy is to develop a Professional Learning Community for science education to raise faculty awareness of EBIPs, assist with nuts and bolts, provide a community of support/mentoring, and assess outcomes. The action plan is to determine where we are (baseline and interest), identify resources, identify assessment tools, and hold a charrette on Active Learning. A charrette is a meeting in which all stakeholders in a project attempt to resolve conflicts and map solutions.

Oregon State University: Eighteen years ago, the Paradigms in Physics Project at Oregon State University reformed the entire upper-division curriculum for physics and engineering physics majors. This involved both a rearrangement of content to better reflect the way professional physicists think about the field and also the use of a number of interactive pedagogies that place responsibility for learning more firmly in the hands of the students. The resulting curriculum has become a national model and reflects an organic culture of continuous assessment and reform. The project has produced over 30 research publications, four textbooks, and over 250 activities described on the National Science Digital Library and in an online website (physics.oregonstate.edu/portfolioswiki). Now, the team that attended the Workshop on Engaging Faculty plans to reboot the Paradigms Project. Paradigms 2.0 will (1) create a detailed plan for the redesign which will fully integrate new faculty into active learning strategies and update the curriculum to reflect current faculty research interests, (2) foster a sense of community among new faculty by sending them in groups to the AAPT/APS New Faculty Workshop, (3) conduct a thorough evaluation of the process and outcomes of the reboot, (4) create a "tool-kit" for reform that can be used by other units at OSU and elsewhere to create similar reform efforts, and (5) seek external funding the support the reboot, initially through a request to the NSF for a Supplement to the current Paradigms grant (already submitted and recommended) and subsequently from other sources in the coming months.

Institution H: The goals our campus need to address are introducing active learning methods into upper division courses; better preparing students to be creative thinkers and to enter today's job marketplace; and facilitating faculty bringing the full curriculum into alignment, beginning with the inorganic and organic divisions. Our strategy is to introduce evidence based instructional practices (EBIPS) into the organic and inorganic curriculum. In the immediate term, our plan is to present problems, resources, and expectations to inorganic and organic faculty, and to begin to develop a concept and skills inventory for Inorganic and Honors Organic. We will present the plan developed at the Workshop at the Department retreat in the fall. We will survey faculty about their teaching concerns. We will convene (every 2 weeks) Organic and Inorganic faculty to determine critical competencies for specific upper division courses, tailor content to align with competencies, and introduce EBIPS to convey the content and achieve the competencies. We plan to have the following course prep and roll out plan:

Class	Fall '15	Spring '16	Su '16	Fall '16	Spring '17
Orgo I		Prep	Prep	Rollout	Revise
Orgo II	Prep	Rollout	Revise	..	..
Fund Inorg	Prep	Rollout			Revise
Adv Inorg		Prep	..	Rollout	Revise

Institution I: The physics department changed its admissions requirements two years ago to grow the major. Starting this year, upper division physics courses will go from ~20 to ~50 students. It is a challenge to provide formative feedback (homework, assignments, etc.) to larger upper-division classes. Some professors cancel or under-utilize upper division discussion sections. Our implementation strategy is to conduct learning outcomes discussions and form instructional development groups in physics and chemistry (6-8 members, meet every two weeks) with graduate student support and incentives for faculty participation. Our targets will be to get movement for active learning in discussion sections, focus on knowledge transfer assessment, provide links to resources for remediation/review, and create faculty course packs of materials to ensure continuity and institutionalization. We will also foster Physics and Chemistry interdepartmental dialog on upper division teaching. We may use learning assistants in upper division courses.

Our action plan includes contacting the Dean of Physical Sciences to secure funding for graduate student support. We will contact the Physics Chair, Chemistry Chair, and Chair of Undergraduate Studies to ask them to convene the upper division Physics and Chemistry instructional development groups. We will conduct a meeting with members of the instructional development groups to give a charge to the groups, set target deliverables with deadlines and identify logistics for group meetings. As the instructional development groups meet, we will establish and conduct check-in points for the community progress on targeted outcomes. Longer term, as faculty cycle through the instructional development group, we will use it to promote and propagate EBIPs. The expected outcomes of this work are developing online quiz checkpoints of relevant lower division skills and knowledge, with correlated remediation/review resources; curating and disseminating recommended materials for innovative active learning in discussions; and articulating assessable outcomes for upper division courses.

Our planned data collection will incorporate active learning metrics like attitude surveys and inventory of instructional practices. It will also include performance metrics such as student performance on identified learning outcomes, baseline data of previous final exam performance, and measure value add of knowledge/skill gain from lower division baseline through upper division.

Institution J: Our goal is to fix the leaky pipeline by creating a 21st century curriculum for our Physics (and Physics & Astronomy) majors and by developing strategies for teaching advanced courses in an active learning format. We will deploy best practices to develop a modern Advanced Lab Experience (Capstone Experience and Transition to Research). Our strategy in Phase I is to develop the advanced lab course which is critical for faculty buy-in. We will ask faculty what do we want our students to learn. This phase will also include STEM mini-grants and estimation of costs to renovate the course. Phase II is a department wide discussion on Upper-Level Reform to transition from buy-in by the few to buy-in by the many. Phase III is to establish agents of change. Who will transform the courses? We will also need to collect baseline data. We may develop a LA program in Physics & Astronomy.