Enhancing Student Success in Biology, Chemistry, and Physics by Transforming the Faculty Culture

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This project is initiating transformative change in the faculty culture and behavior regarding teaching and learning within and across the departments of Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. The success of this project is being judged and guided by the resulting enhanced student learning and improved success in completing eight gatekeeper courses in these three departments. The key processes are coordinated activities that will encourage and support a broad collection of faculty instructors in these disciplines to utilize the full breadth of research-based instructional strategies in their teaching of these lower division courses. Individual participating faculty instructors are choosing and adapting their own research-based strategies. In this way they are participating directly in this key aspect of faculty culture. Two university resources are particularly important in supporting this change. Technical guidance and assistance are being provided by departmental Teaching and Learning Liaisons (TLLs). The TLLs are faculty members within each department who have received special training and are prepared to encourage and support the department and individual faculty members as they increasingly incorporate research-based instructional strategies into a core of 8 gatekeeper courses. Secondly, a unique faculty development component is being tailored by the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CET&L) to provide support both for the Teaching and Learning Liaisons (TLLs) and for individual faculty. This project is proceeding with the full support of the Provost (who is a PI), the Dean of Arts and Sciences, and the three department heads. Change strategies are being detailed that will respond differently and appropriately for the local environments found within specific departments. Collectively these efforts will provide increasingly supportive environments or, viewed more broadly, an increasingly supportive ecosystem that will be the foundation for sustainable increased and increasingly effective use of research based instructional strategies. A series of assessments will guide and improve the impact of this effort, and provide useful research knowledge about the effectiveness of this approach to change.