Thank you for watching the TRESTLE video! Our video describes the common features of an intervention model that is being implemented at seven universities to promote widespread faculty adoption of teaching practices that support better and more equitable student outcomes. We are eager for questions and feedback on any aspects of our project, but are especially interested in learning what strategies you and your colleagues have found to be effective in scaling change in STEM teaching practices.

Fantastic project! I am especially interested in the idea of making these course changes visible. How has the project motivated other stakeholders to attend the visibility events? I am thinking about administrative folks and other faculty who may have yet to buy in to evidence-based pedagogical changes

I see how building a network of districts makes this work more sustainable. I am wondering--to what extent and in what ways are individual districts, and the network as a whole, engaged in continuous improvement of their courses?

Very nice video! I like the way you used graphical representations of your work rather than talking heads to explain the project. It sounds like your model is having an impact in the universities in your consortium and is successfully transforming a large number of courses. I have a couple of questions:

1) What are your plans to engage the rest of the faculty at each university? As someone who has worked for many years trying to bring about similar adoption of evidence-based teaching practices at my own and other universities, I find that the main challenge to systemic and cultural change is the resistance of the majority of faculty in the university who don't see any need to change.

2) Related to question 1, how are the administrations of the TRESTLE university engaged in this work? It seems to me that true systemic change will require additional resources and rewards for faculty who make these changes, as you correctly mention early in your video, especially after the grant funding ends.

Wow. Alex just channelled me. But in addition to his kudos and questions...Have you seen the Science Education Initiative on line book

https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/seihandbook

Some of it may be helpful in thinking about scale. 

I'd love to hear about any rewars and incentives that may be part of your approach.

 

To broaden faculty participation, we're working at a couple of levels. First, the department-level focus is a key part of our approach- many departments are using strategies to broaden engagement within departments such as:

• Co-teaching assignments or lead/mentee teacher assignments- so that that new practices incorporated into a course by one set of faculty are adopted and extended by those who are next assigned to the course.
• Department-level teaching working groups and/or using department colloquia to sharing teaching strategies and results
• Identifying opportunities for departments to extend and broaden their work by applying for their own grant funding for further teaching innovation- for instance, two computer science departments on two of the TRESTLE campuses just collaborated on a proposal to the NSF RFP on innovating computing education.

The emphases on cross-department community building and making results visible are part of the effort to expand engagement beyond the targeted departments. For instance, after seeing the potential of a teaching postdoctoral fellow in physics, Queen's University invested in hiring more fellows into two other departments to expand the initiative's reach.  Other campuses have invested in related programs that bring others on board, such as mini grants for course transformation, faculty learning communities, or undergraduate Learning Assistant programs. Campuses are also working to create synergies with other initiatives that connect to and reinforce work on course transformation. For instance: 

• Queen's has connected the TRESTLE initiative to a learning outcomes assessment project in engineering.
• KU has developed new methods for documenting and evaluating faculty teaching in order to better recognize and reward faculty efforts in course innovation (this also gets at the question about rewards). In fact, this effort is now a part of another multi-institutional NSF-funded effort that is being showcased in this event: the Teval project. See the TEval video here: https://stemforall2019.videohall.com/presentations/1635 

Administrator Support-- There is some variation across the campuses in the involvement/support of the university administrations and in the type of unit that is the platform for the initiative, and this is likely to be an area in which we will learn a lot. The NSF funding and especially the cross-university network (being able to say that peer universities are doing this with us) seem to help us get attention and support from administrators, but we think it will be important for us to be able to generate and share results that we can leverage to get the types of institutional and administrative support that will be needed to sustain this work.

We'd love to hear what others have found to be key levers for getting administrative buy-in and support.

Excellent work and very nicely depicted...thanks for sharing!

At the University of Minnesota, we've used a "Faculty Fellows" model for involving participants in learning about, and implementing, inclusive teaching strategies into their courses. Each participant is a fellow for one year, and concludes their fellowship by presenting at a poster session. It's been very effective at transforming teaching and broadening networks around pedagogy. But we worry about sustainability when our external funding runs out. I'll take a look at your other resources for ideas!

Hi Andrea

Thanks for the detailed answers.  This is cool. Love the STEVAL project too.  I will share with our Center for Faculty Development and Excellence and with groups that are developing ways to evaluate teaching excellence.

Great addition to Professional Development for sure!

1) Do your embedded specialists also receive training on culturally inclusive pedagogy to help teachers/instructors/professors develop more insightful curricula?

2) Similar to a question above regarding buy-in of faculty departments, has this systemic change been supported by boards of trustees?  It seems that once grant funding runs out, initiatives like this will need to be part of strategic plans and supported internally. 

 

 

Hi, and thanks for sharing your project in the Showcase. I’m curious about the administrative navigations that were likely required to bring together 7 universities.  Also curious about the Bayview Alliance, and its mission - I’m sure I can search this, but I’d be curious to hear about it, here, in the forum. I’m also wondering if your Alliance has given thought to how K-12 schools, nationally, might tap into the great work that you’re doing. Thanks! - Dav

I'd love to hear more about how you plan to disseminate this super project.  The embedded experts on diversity and inclusion sounds like an interesting model.  Do you know if any of the HHMI Inclusive Excellence projects are taking that approach?

 

Hi Patricia.  Thanks for your comments and questions.  We have been working on multiple avenues to disseminate the work of TRESTLE.  First we have established a project website (https://trestlenetwork.ku.edu) to share resources, milestones of the project, information on variation of the local embedded expert model employed by partner institutions, and various other updates.  The website also highlights our ZOOM-based brown bag lunch discussions and colloquia on topics related to course transformation impacts, building community around evidence-based teaching, and many other topics.  We encourage you and others to join the TRESTLE network to receive updates on opportunities to engage in a broader discussion of teaching practices.  

In addition, many participants at partner institutions have presented results at national/international meetings, regularly lead workshops locally and regionally, and a series of publications are anticipated as we now enter into the data analyses phase of the project.  

I am not aware of any HHMI-funding Inclusive Excellence projects that are trying to build a large support network to connect educators to resources as we are doing in our TRESLTE project, but it would be great to hear more specifically from others on the goals of their HHMI-funded projects and how TRESTLE might interface with that work. 

Thanks again for checking out our project.