Theme 3: Make policy change someone's job

Introduction

Making policy changes is work that requires leadership, stewardship, time, and effort. Thus, it is critical that people take on this work - both in terms of ownership and workload. Ownership of policy change work means that individuals or groups need to perceive that it is their responsibility to make the policy changes.

Ownership of policy change work can develop "bottom up," "top down," or a combination of the two. For instance, faculty members may determine that policy change is needed and may themselves be motivated to propose and implement changes. Administration may charge and empower faculty to propose and shepherd policy changes. Regardless of how ownership comes about, individuals or groups who are tasked with changing policy need to have the time, energy, and incentive to do this work. Having sufficient ownership or a sufficiently powerful mandate may prompt faculty to prioritize policy change work over other competing responsibilities. Yet, change work is more feasible to prioritize if faculty have the latitude to count it as part of their workload.

The policy change initiatives underway at LCC4 institutions have employed three overarching strategies to make it feasible for policy change work to be someone's job: (1) distributing leadership, (2) allocating workload, and (3) using multiple change frameworks. Each is described below and accompanied by specific examples that span institution types. Again, these strategies are not mutually exclusive, and several institutions used multiple strategies to conduct policy change work.

Distribute leadership

Several institutions distributed the leadership of identifying policies that needed to be changed to improve teaching evaluation, and of conducting those policy changes. Distributing leadership - meaning working collaboratively and in a decentralized way to manage a process or change - made it more feasible for change leaders to overcome the myriad challenges associated with changing policy. Policies are often complex and connected across levels of an institution. For instance, departmental policy must be consistent with college and university level policies. Thus, changing policy requires identifying these connections and anticipating potential ramifications of proposed policy changes. In addition, changing policy often requires engaging with different stakeholder groups who may vary in their support of policy changes and who are likely to offer unique perspectives that must be considered in effecting policy changes. Distributing the work of policy change across a group of change leaders helps make shouldering these challenges more feasible - both intellectually (e.g., bringing many minds to the work) and emotionally (e.g., providing one another with moral support). Distributing the leadership of policy changes offers the added benefit of bringing multiple perspectives to this challenging work, which can help ensure policy changes work for everyone involved.

• Work to change teaching evaluation policy at the University of Georgia relied on collective leadership and input from a team of tenured faculty with support from a National Science Foundation grant called DeLTA. This grant provided modest salary support for the faculty team to dedicate time and effort to drafting teaching evaluation policy changes, seeking feedback on the policy changes from various stakeholders, and shepherding the policy changes through the faculty governance process. Throughout the process, the team was able to consult with one another about how to navigate issues as they arose, tap a much broader network of colleagues to get input and feedback during the change process, ensure at least one team member was available for all key meetings and events, and provide each other with moral support along the way.
• The faculty senate at the University of Oregon initiated the policy change process when they raised the issue of bias in the use of student end-of-course surveys in evaluating teaching. The Faculty Senate created a task force to investigate the concerns and experiment with student surveys to identify changes that would mitigate bias and produce more useful feedback to faculty about how to improve their teaching. Not only did task force members share the workload of proposing and executing policy changes among themselves, they worked closely with the Provost's Office and Teaching Engagement Program to ensure policy changes could be implemented.

Allocate workload

Making progress in changing policy can require a wide range of work, including gathering campus stakeholder perspectives on current issues and solutions, identifying and synthesizing research and best practices, developing and piloting new tools to prove their feasibility, and drafting policy and navigating political structures. Multiple LCC4 institutions made progress on policy change because managing and completing this range of work was considered part of someone's workload. This workload allocation is critical because changing policy can be a big lift in terms of time and effort. Adding it on top of other service responsibilities undermines the likelihood the work will get done. In addition, policy change work can be a scholarly or pedagogical endeavor, and allocating workload to this responsibility offers the opportunity to recognize it as such. In some institutions, an ad hoc group was identified and charged with doing the change work. In other institutions, a standing committee took on the job of changing policy. Regardless of the approach, the policy change work became a responsibility so that it was clear who was expected and empowered to do the work and how the work counted as part of their jobs.

• Georgia Southern University's College of Science & Mathematics established an ad hoc Promotion and Tenure Committee with 6 tenured/tenure track faculty and 3 lecturer track faculty spanning all ranks, departments, and campuses as well as a department chair and an assistant dean who chaired the committee. This committee was further divided into subteams for the areas of teaching, scholarship, and service. Each team read about best practices for faculty evaluation in their respective area and solicited faculty input through a college-wide survey. The teams then synthesized this information to draft college-level rubrics for evaluating each domain of faculty work. The committee sought further input on the rubrics from departments, college leaders, and the college governance committee. The committee structure made it more feasible to accomplish this scope of work and bring multiple perspectives to the policy development process.
• At Gustavus Adolphus College, the standing Faculty Personnel Committee (FPC) saw a need to recognize and reward the often-invisible work of faculty in mentoring, advising, and teaching students from a variety of backgrounds. For the College, this included working with students who are first in their families to go to college, who have disabilities, who have experienced significant economic hardship, or are from minoritized or marginalized backgrounds. The FPC drafted language that enabled faculty to present evidence of their "demonstrated commitment to equity and inclusion" as part of showcasing their teaching excellence in dossiers for promotion and tenure. The FPC sought feedback on the drafted language and made revisions to ensure that faculty had the option to highlight equity and inclusion work but were not required to do so. This approach provided reassurance that the criteria for tenure were not changing but rather were becoming more flexible and fairer. The fact that the FPC accomplished this as part of its regular activities made it possible for the policy change work to count in annual evaluations for committee members.
• At the University of Oklahoma, the Faculty Senate and Provost's Office collaborated to establish a Teaching Evaluation Working Group to investigate promising practices in teaching evaluation that would minimize or mitigate documented issues with traditional teaching evaluation surveys. The Provost's Office provided dedicated IT and programming support that was critical for developing and implementing the project. Faculty members were responsible for crafting the content of the survey and making recommendations for more holistic evaluation of teaching. The group met with stakeholders, drafted recommendations for incorporating multiple sources of information into faculty teaching, developed and pilot-tested drafts of a new student experience survey, and developed resources to support departments in adapting to the new student experience survey. Subsequent funding from an NSF ADVANCE IT grant supported wide-scale re-envisioning of faculty evaluation policies. This facilitated further integration of the working group's recommendations into annual evaluations across campus and provided resources to sustain efforts required for long-term change.
• At Pomona College the Inclusive Excellence working group recognized the need for a central hub for campus-wide efforts and needs around inclusion, equity, and belonging. Toward this goal, the Institute for Inclusive Excellence was established in 2022. The mission of the IIE is to advance the practice of inclusive excellence at Pomona College through centralization and coordination of existing equity efforts - adding elements that focus on relationship-building, sustained engagement, and assessment - with the aim of informing and driving sustainable pathways of institutional change. The initial focus will be on faculty and staff professional development in inclusive teaching and mentorship, as well as research and assessment that informs decision-making and drives institutional change to further equity initiatives at the college.

Use change frameworks to tailor change strategies

One institution used frameworks from research on change in higher education to strategically engage various stakeholders in informing and conducting the change work. Using change frameworks helped identify which stakeholder groups were well-positioned to help with changing policy and what approaches to change might resonate most with different groups.

• A team at the University of Georgia made use of multiple change frameworks (see Table II in Corbo et al., 2016) to inform and guide its policy change work. The "social cognition frame," which involves attending to the underlying beliefs that guide decision-making, was useful for working with faculty and department heads on making changes to teaching evaluation policy. The team used this perspective to understand faculty and administrator beliefs that might constrain changes to policy and create situations that made shifting beliefs possible. The "political frame" was useful when working to change university-level policy. This frame helped the team identify which coalitions to build and which power structures to leverage in changing university-wide policy on teaching evaluation. Finally, the team considered both the "evolutionary frame" and the "institutional frame" in identifying and leveraging external factors to change policy. For instance, the University System of Georgia Board of Regents mandated a change in faculty annual evaluation. The team capitalized on this opportunity to collaboratively create and share robust examples for evaluation of teaching during annual review.