Abstract
This paper provides a research-based framework for promoting institutional change in higher education. To date, most educational change efforts have focused on relatively narrow subsets of the university system (e.g., faculty teaching practices or administrative policies) and have been largely driven by implicit change logics; both of these features have limited the success of such efforts at achieving sustained, systemic change. Drawing from the literature on organizational and cultural change, our framework encourages change agents to coordinate their activities across three key levels of the university and to ground their activities in the various change perspectives that emerge from that literature. We use examples from a change project that we have been carrying out at a large research university to illustrate how our framework can be used as a basis for planning and implementing holistic change.
Highlights
Improving higher education requires more than the development and dissemination of innovative teaching practices; it requires fundamental changes in the practices and cultures of universities
Drawing from the literature on organizational and cultural change, our framework encourages change agents to coordinate their activities across three key levels of the university and to ground their activities in the various change perspectives that emerge from that literature
To illustrate our change framework, we provide an example of our change efforts at each level of the university, emphasizing how the change perspectives from Sec
Summary
Improving higher education requires more than the development and dissemination of innovative teaching practices; it requires fundamental changes in the practices and cultures of universities. This paper provides a framework for creating and sustaining such changes We developed this framework in response to numerous national calls to improve STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education by promoting the adoption of active learning techniques [1,2]. Typical approaches to educational transformation, like those above, assume that educational practices that are sufficiently well developed, packaged, and disseminated will eventually enjoy broad-scale implementation [9,10] This assumption ignores deep-rooted institutional structures and cultural norms that complicate educational transformation. We hope to support anyone at a university trying to make sustainable change in how their institution educates students These change projects may arise due to external pressure, topdown mandates, or grassroots needs. We include a description of our evaluation plans and early successes
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