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Change Strategies Supporting Equitable, Student-Centered Instruction in Undergraduate STEM Courses and Departments

BETTER in STEM

Dan Hanley, Saraswathy Nair, & Pat Burnett

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DUE-2111613, 2111610, & 2111417. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Thank you for joining us here today. We’re excited to share our work from our IUSE project, called BETTER in STEM, or Building Educational Theory through Enacting Reforms in STEM.

But that’s a mouthful, so we’ll just stick with BETTER in STEM for this presentation.

I’m Dan Hanley. I’m the Director of STEM Education Research and Evaluation and PI of the BIS project at WWU in Bellingham, WA.

I’m joined by two of my PI collaborators: Dr. Saraswathy Nair, who is a professor and chair of the Health and Biomedical Sciences department at UTRGV, and Pat Burnett who is an engineering professor at WCC in Bellingham,

BIS is a 5-year collaboration between UTRGV, WCC, and WWU. The project is designed to help STEM faculty and departments incorporate equitable, student-centered instructional strategies into their courses and classrooms.

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Reflection

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Think about a specific STEM course you have taught or taken as a student. To what extent were students engaged in these ways?
1. The learning goals were clear and transparent to students.
2. Students knew the criteria for successful tasks, activities, assignments, and assessments.
3. Students’ prior academic knowledge, cultural knowledge, and experiences were elicited and embedded into the learning activities.
4. Students engaged in learning experiences that incorporated diverse cultures and perspectives.
5. Students had opportunities to make connections between what they were learning and relevant issues that impact local and global communities and ecosystems.

6. Students were encouraged to participate in group discussions in ways that elevated all voices and ways of communicating.
7. Students had a variety of ways to show that they had developed the intended knowledge and skills for the course.
8. Students reflected on their current learning and learning strategies to identify the next steps they needed to take to support and/or adjust their learning strategies.
9. Student assessment and grading practices reflected a classroom culture of practice through iteration, feedback, and revision that allowed students to learn from errors without negative consequences.
10. The classroom environment promoted connection, relationships, and collaboration between students.
11. Students worked together to identify and disrupt forms of bias and behaviors that could negatively impact the classroom learning community.

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Low-income, first-generation, and systemically non-dominant students benefit the most from active, student-centered teaching and learning strategies…

…yet they are the least likely to experience them at higher education institutions across the United States (AAAS, 2019).

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…such frameworks should redefine equity and inclusion as a key component of effective instruction.

-AAAS, 2019

The biggest barrier to faculty’s use of active learning strategies is the lack of a shared framework to define and measure effective teaching.

-Wieman, 2017

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BETTER in STEM Theory of Change

Quadrant III: Dept/Division Policies and Practices

Quadrant I: Curriculum and Pedagogy

Quadrant IV: Shared Vision

Quadrant II: Reflective Instructors

Improved teaching and learning in undergraduate STEM departments can occur through the implementation of a coordinated set of concurrent top-down and bottom-up strategies to address the four categories of change (Henderson, Beach, & Finkelstein, 2010):

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BETTER in STEM

Timeline

Year 1 (Oct 2021-July 2022)

Develop an equitable, student-centered instructional framework for undergraduate STEM.

Years 2 and 3 (Aug. 2022-June 2024): Cohort 1

Faculty in Instructional Change Teams (ICTs) develop their knowledge and skills with the framework pedagogies and provide feedback to improve the framework, supporting materials, and ICT processes.

Years 4 and 5 (Aug. 2024-June 2026): Cohort 2

Faculty in Instructional Change Teams develop their knowledge and skills with the framework pedagogies and ICT processes.

Years 2-5: Meetings with dept./division

administrators

In Year 1, a team of faculty across our three institutions worked to develop an instructional framework grounded in research on equity/inclusion and active, student-centered instruction.

We received feedback on drafts of the instructional framework from our advisory board, external evaluators, conference participants, and our Cohort 1 faculty members.

For two years, Cohort 1 faculty members worked with us to develop their knowledge and skills with the framework pedagogies and they provided feedback to help us improve the framework, supporting materials, and ICT collaborative structures. About 40 STEM faculty members across our three partnering institutions participated in Cohort 1, and then this past summer we began working with a second Cohort of about 60 STEM faculty across our three institutions.

Lastly, we’ve been meeting with departments and chairs to share our materials and lay the foundation for discussions about ways departments can support faculty’s use of evidence-based instruction.

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BETTER in STEM Theory of Change

Develop a framework that clearly defines equitable, student-centered teaching and learning in undergraduate STEM.

Quadrant IV: Shared Vision

Improved teaching and learning in undergraduate STEM departments can occur through the implementation of a coordinated set of concurrent top-down and bottom-up strategies to address the four categories of change (Henderson, Beach, & Finkelstein, 2010):

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What is our instructional framework, and what is it not?

A cohesive structure of research-based components for equitable, student-centered undergraduate STEM teaching and learning that is adaptable/applicable across STEM disciplines and student needs.
Captures the complexities of teaching and learning and will require significant PD and practice for faculty to internalize the components of the framework and enact the pedagogies.
Not a curriculum framework (a set of standards that specifies the content to be learned) or a lesson planning framework (what teachers use to organize and plan lessons).

Purposes and potential uses of the instructional framework

1. Faculty members individually improve their instruction through use of the framework and its components.

2. Faculty members collaboratively improve their instruction through use of the framework and a structured, formative peer observation process.

3. STEM departments use the framework to define research-based instruction, have conversations to improve instruction, and support constructive Review, Tenure, and Promotion (RTP) processes.

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BETTER in STEM Theory of Change

Develop the knowledge and skills of STEM faculty with the equitable, student-centered instructional strategies that comprise the framework.

Quadrant I: Curriculum and Pedagogy

Improved teaching and learning in undergraduate STEM departments can occur through the implementation of a coordinated set of concurrent top-down and bottom-up strategies to address the four categories of change (Henderson, Beach, & Finkelstein, 2010):

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Supporting Resources

Planning Considerations Documents

Saras

We developed several resources to support faculty. We developed a Faculty Survey and Student Survey aligned to the framework indicators that we administered to partnering faculty and students in one of their courses at the end of each semester. Faculty used their survey data to identify their instructional strengths and areas for improvement. Then after they had identified indicator areas where they would like to improve, they used the Planning Resources documents to identify ways to improve in those areas. In the Planning Resources, there is a two column document for each indicator in framework that highlights “What the indicator looks like in Practice” and “How to do it”, which include instructional resources about how to implement the pedagogies to address each indicator area.

You can find all of this on our website.

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BETTER in STEM Theory of Change

Support STEM faculty as they deepen their understanding and instructional practice through collaborative Instructional Change Teams.

Quadrant II: Reflective Teachers

Improved teaching and learning in undergraduate STEM departments can occur through the implementation of a coordinated set of concurrent top-down and bottom-up strategies to address the four categories of change (Henderson, Beach, & Finkelstein, 2010):

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BETTER in STEM Theory of Change

Engage faculty leaders and administrators in professional development and conversations to support department-level change.

Quadrant III: Policy

Improved teaching and learning in undergraduate STEM departments can occur through the implementation of a coordinated set of concurrent top-down and bottom-up strategies to address the four categories of change (Henderson, Beach, & Finkelstein, 2010):

Saras

The majority of STEM faculty from our first cohort are continuing in a new role over the next two years as faculty leaders. These faculty leaders will help facilitate conversations within their departments about how to support instructional changes aligned with the framework. And to develop a critical mass of faculty using equitable, student-centered practices, the project is working with a second cohort of about 60 STEM faculty members across our three institutions to increase their knowledge and skills with the pedagogies from the instructional framework.

Because once STEM departments have a shared vision for evidence-based teaching and a critical mass of faculty working to make their instruction more equitable and student-centered, then departments will be well positioned to examine and revise faculty review policies and practices to better support faculty members’ efforts to improve their instruction.

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STEM instructors (N = 22) and students (N = 365) from UTRGV, WWU, WCC in Fall 2022

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.

Fall 2022

Spring 2023

N=380 students

N=365 students

BIS Student Survey Data: Open-ended items

Over Cohort 1’s first year, we did see some shifts in classroom instruction toward more equitable and active learning.

We are still analyzing data across Cohort 1’s two years of participation with the BIS project to see how their STEM instruction changed due to their engagement with the four categories of change.

And the final take home message is that we are seeing changes in faculty’s use of evidence-based teaching strategies, but it takes more than one year and more than one approach. We used the Four Categories of Change to identify and implement concurrent top-down and bottom-up change strategies to

-Develop a shared vision of evidence-based STEM instruction,

-Help faculty learn about the pedagogies that comprise the framework and vision,

-Provide opportunities and structures for faculty to collaborate with colleagues in Instructional Change Teams to improve their enactment of the pedagogies, and

-Initiate conversations within their departments about how to support faculty’s use of equitable, student-centered instruction.

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Thank You!

BETTER in STEM

WWU PI, Dr. Dan Hanley

hanleyd@wwu.edu

UTRGV PI, Dr. Saras Nair

saraswathy.nair@utrgv.edu

WCC co-PI, Pat Burnett

PBurnett@whatcom.edu