Session B7: Education I - Interactive Workshop: Institutional Change for Increasing Access to Physics

Institutional change (part I): A framework for making a difference

Do you want to make a difference in your school or department but aren’t sure where to begin? This session is the first part of a two-part workshop aimed to help teachers, students, and university faculty make lasting changes in the places that they work. While decades of research provide insight into how to students learn, this research often has little impact on the everyday lives of teachers and students, due to cultural and institutional barriers. Accordingly, this session provides a framework for achieving sustained, systemic change. The framework was developed through the STEM Institutional Transformation Action Research (SITAR) project, which synthesizes the organizational change literature and applies it to higher education. While the SITAR project takes place at a university, it is grounded in underlying theories that apply more broadly. The goal is for participants to walk away from this session with a general overview of the change literature and examples of how the SITAR framework can be used to design change efforts. This will prepare them for part II of the workshop, focused on planning a change strategy.   

Institutional change (part II): Planning a change effort

This session is the second part of a two-part workshop designed to help teachers, students, and university faculty make lasting changes at their home institutions, especially with regards to improving education. Building on the overview of institutional change theories and strategies from part I, participants will engage in a facilitated, collaborative process in which they will: (1) identify a change they would like to initiate, (2) apply what they learned in part I to their unique context, (3) decide specific steps that they will take to initiate their change, and (4) critique and exchange feedback related to each other’s plans. The intention here is not that participants will create a fully-realized change plan, but that they will leave the workshop with a starting point from which they can build further on their own.