Abstract
BackgroundChange leaders (faculty, administrators, and/or external stakeholders) need to develop relational expertise, recognizing the perspectives of others, to enable emergent, systemic change. We describe how change leaders of a grant-funded instructional change initiative developed relational expertise by analyzing faculty relationships and social subgroups to identify who was involved in discussions about teaching and learning and what specific topics were discussed.ResultsFaculty discussions focused on daily classroom needs. Faculty who were in different departments or schools were mostly disconnected from each other, and faculty within these units often had subdivisions among them.ConclusionsFaculty lacked opportunities to discuss education, specifically, systems-level perspectives. The change leaders created organizational structures to catalyze communities, including an action research fellowship program, to support faculty in education discussions.
Highlights
A central goal of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) educators is to prepare students to be productive in the STEM workforce and to make informed decisions as citizens
We focused on the use of social network analysis (SNA) of the disciplinary units as a tool to develop a piece of this relational expertise and show how it led to tangible change activities
This analysis built the relational expertise of the change leaders by identifying common topics of discussion across units and less common topics, as well as where interests vary between units
Summary
A central goal of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) educators is to prepare students to be productive in the STEM workforce and to make informed decisions as citizens. Change initiatives in education attempt to transform learning systems, educational structures, or processes (e.g., classroom practices) to improve the preparation of students (Henderson, Beach, & Finkelstein, 2011). These initiatives are led by faculty members (tenure-track or fixed-term) from the classroom or administrators who create change from enacting policy or encouraging practices. We describe how change leaders of a grant-funded instructional change initiative developed relational expertise by analyzing faculty relationships and social subgroups to identify who was involved in discussions about teaching and learning and what specific topics were discussed
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