Chapter 6 Institutionalization
¶An important experience for the PI was participating in a workshop offered by Project Kaleidoscope (https://www.aacu.org/pkal) , a project sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities:
...that workshop was really influential...it was about how to make plans and how to institutionalize curricular change... It was a workshop where you had to go as a team and come away with a plan for what you were going to do...it was how were we going to bring the paradigms group together, how were we going to see the curriculum as a whole; I guess that was my first understanding that there was a whole institutional change area of thinking, of research.
Such workshops are still occurring for faculty involved in reforming undergraduate STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education (https://www.aacu.org/meetings/stem/16).
For radical educational reform to become the new normal, the faculty designers of the new courses needed to pass responsibility for teaching to other faculty. Team teaching would be helpful for new faculty. The department fostered continuity by providing experienced teaching assistants to help faculty taking over a course. In addition, faculty teaching the upper-level courses continued to meet regularly to discuss what was happening and how the students were learning. Also important was nurturing leadership by faculty beyond those who initiated the reform.