IUSE/PFE:RED A&I: Soft Wired Teaming for Creating Opportunities to Revolutionize the Preparation of Students (TCORPS) through Building, Testing and Sharing Pedagogical Improvem

这个项目将彻底改变德州农工大学传统大型机械工程系的文化。它将侧重于创造一种自下而上的参与式文化，在这种文化中，教师和学生将不断地构建、测试和分享课程和教学法方面的连续创新。研究表明，学术部门是一个复杂的系统，教师对任何形式的变化的接受程度各不相同，尤其是在教学风格和自我形象方面。作为一名教师，教学风格和自我形象通常是由他们自己的经验决定的，什么是好的教学，而不是对教学的学术研究。这个项目将利用这些对教学的态度，主要基于经验，授权教师创建“松散连接”的团队，根据他们的兴趣提出变革的愿景和最小可行的产品。该项目不是专注于培训他们“如何教学”，而是将培训这些团队如何实施变革、衡量教育成果和分享结果，所有这些都是通过调整和扩展亚利桑那州立大学RED项目提出的附加创新模型来实现的。这些教师的变化涵盖了广泛的范围，从改变课程，通过将主题与学生的经验联系起来，吸引更多样化的学生群体（特别是代表性不足的少数民族），为学生营造一个合作而不是竞争的学习环境，到识别和使用技术来提高学生的学习。教学方法、成果和变革过程将通过非正式讨论小组以及工程教育与创新研究所（IEEI）广泛传播到其他部门。该项目将基于Prochaska变革模式实施文化变革，该模式由五个步骤组成：沉思、准备、行动和持续努力克服复发的维护。有兴趣的教师团体将提供一个基于开发新的教育价值画布的变革框架，以系统地探索变革的含义，他们也将接受培训，使用迭代创新方法。这两种工具都是基于nsf开发的ICORPS模型，适应教育创新环境。该项目将解决几个关键假设：1)促进小批量迭代实验和同行之间的共享将降低风险和时间承诺，并增加创新的文档和系统整合；2)在部门资源和修订的教师绩效评估标准的支持下，通过基于训练有素的促进者和变革推动者的分布式渗透，可以更好地实现大部门的变革；3)通过使用安提瓜论坛会议形式促成的新的教育价值画布，可以实现更好的共同愿景；4)如果教师在我们的研究和教学中都表现出积极的创新行为，那么它也会提高学生的这种能力。该提案将制定培训方法，包括识别内隐偏见、包容性项目和教学法发展、激励教师变革的因素、如何使活跃的课堂适用于不同类型的课堂、如何使用精益创业方法进行变革、以及如何开展教学研究。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project will revolutionize the culture of a traditional large mechanical engineering department at Texas A&M University. It will be focused on creating a bottom-up participatory culture where faculty and students are engaged in continuously building, testing, and sharing sequential innovations in curricula and pedagogy. Studies have shown that academic departments are complex systems with faculty who have different levels of acceptance of change, of any sort, but especially in teaching styles and self-image. Teaching style and self-image as a teacher are generally informed by their own experiences as to what constitutes good teaching rather than the scholarly study of teaching. This project will leverage these attitudes toward teaching, primarily based on experiences by empowering faculty to create “loose-wired” teams that propose a vision for change and a minimum viable product based on their interests. Rather than focus on training them on “how to teach,” the project will train these teams for implementing changes, measuring educational outcomes, and sharing the results, all carried out through adapting and extending the additive innovations model that was proposed by the RED program of Arizona State University. These faculty changes cover a wide spectrum, ranging from changing the curriculum to appeal to a more diverse group of students (especially underrepresented minorities) by relating the subject matter to their experience, fostering a collaborative versus competitive learning environment for students, to identifying and using technology to enhance student learning. The teaching approaches, outcomes, and change processes will be broadly disseminated to other departments through informal discussion teams as well as the Institute for Engineering Education and Innovation (IEEI). The project will operationalize a cultural change based on the Prochaska change model composed of five steps: contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance with continuous effort to overcome relapse. Interested faculty groups will be provided with a framework for change based on developing a novel Educational Value Canvas to systematically explore the implications of change, and they will also be trained to use an iterative innovation approach. Both tools are based on the NSF-developed ICORPS model, adapted to an educational innovation setting. This project will address several key hypotheses: 1) that facilitation of small-batch iterative experimentation and sharing among peers will lower risk and time commitment and increase documentation and systematic incorporation of innovations; 2) that change can be better achieved in a large department through the distributed percolation based upon trained facilitators and change agents, supported by departmental resources and revised faculty performance evaluation criteria; 3) that an improved shared vision can be achieved through the use of the new Educational Value Canvas facilitated using the Antigua Forum meeting format; and 4) that if faculty model proactive innovation behavior in both our research and teaching, then it will improve this capability in students as well. The proposal will develop approaches for training on recognizing implicit bias, inclusive projects, and pedagogy development, what motivates faculty to change, how to make active classrooms work for different types of classes, how to use the lean startup approach to change, and how to carry out pedagogical research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.