A Vision for Change: Using ATP (Ambassador Training Program) to Energize Departmental Transformation

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An award has been made to Longwood University to organize a training program for Ambassadors to support implementation of recommendations made in the Vision and Change report as part of the mission of the Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education (PULSE). In September 2012, the PULSE partners (HHMI, NIH/NIGMS, and NSF) appointed 40 Vision and Change Leadership Fellows to stimulate transformative changes in undergraduate biology education. Fellows were selected from two-year colleges, liberal arts colleges, comprehensive universities, and research universities. The Fellows organized into four working groups with the overarching goal of helping life science departments transform their programs in a national effort to increase student learning of core concepts, increase student retention in the sciences, and prepare all students to be more curious and scientifically literate citizens. The Vision and Change report contained a number of recommendations for improving undergraduate life sciences education but did not furnish an implementation strategy. The current award is to train a cadre of Fellows to become external facilitators or "Ambassadors" who will visit college and university life science departments and assist with local planning and implementation. With support from a consultant, the Spreading the PULSE Working Group will develop, test, and implement an Ambassador training program. The initial cohort of Ambassadors will later train other Fellows and, as the program grows, members of the broader community to become Ambassadors. The V&C Rubrics, developed by the Taking the PULSE Working Group, will serve as a blueprint for departments to evaluate their own progress in adopting the V&C recommendations. In conjunction with this self-assessment, a department may request an on-campus visit by a team of trained Ambassadors to facilitate rich dialog about educational transformation and provide guidance and resources for moving forward with the implementation of reforms. The Spreading the PULSE Working Group is building a "Toolkit" of resources that departments can use when reforming their approach to teaching undergraduates. From its beginning, assessment of this organizational change effort will be a central consideration, and the dissemination of the methods and outcomes of that assessment will serve other projects seeking to foster department-level innovation and transformation. Information about the Rubrics, Ambassadors program, and Toolkit is available on the www.pulsecommunity.org website; all items will be updated as more departments field-test them over the next one to two years. Results from the PULSE project will be posted on the pulsecommunity website and shared with the life sciences community at professional meetings. This project is being funded jointly by the Directorate for Biological Sciences and the Directorate of Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education as part of their efforts to support Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education.