The Pacific Northwest PULSE Fellows are focused on assisting life sciences departments in the region to align their curricula with the recommendations of the 2011 report “Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action” (AAAS, NSF).  This report calls for an emphasis on unifying core concepts in biology and the development of key student competencies, while recommending a de-emphasis on content details that characterize many undergraduate curricula.  The report also recommends that faculty members use student-centered, active learning strategies to ensure effective life sciences education.  These recommendations require departments to re-think their curricula and pedagogy; such efforts often hampered by the presence of significant resistance to change.  Thus, a key aspect of our project was helping participants to develop a plan of action, using a systems-thinking approach that addresses existing barriers.  The designed planning and implementation process enables institutional teams to envision their departments as systems whose behavior they can influence and helps them to understand and identify key leverage points that they can act on, thus empowering many departmental citizens to act as change agents.

Our project included three major foci: 1) a Fall workshop focused on development of departmental or institutional action plans to implement Vision and Change, using a systems thinking approach and, 2) coaching by PNW Fellows and members of our Steering Committee during the year, and 3) reconvening at the Spring NW Biology Instructors Organization (NWBIO) annual meeting to report on progress and discuss challenges encountered.  Through these activities, we have started a Community of Practice in which Life Sciences departments in the Northwest can support and advise one another as each implements change.  

Our first workshop was held in early October, 2013, with 17 teams of 2-4 members from Life Science Departments in the Northwest US (AK, WA, OR, ID, MT, WY) from community colleges, liberal arts colleges, regional comprehensive universities and research universities. The participants assessed the current alignment of their curricula with Vision and Change, developed a vision of what they wanted their departments to look like in 4 years, and produced an action plan to begin to achieve that vision.  Coaches were assigned to mentor departments and remained in contact with them during the year.  Team members presented posters at the NWBIO meeting in May 2014 to report to each other and PULSE Fellows on their progress since October in implementing their change agenda at their home institutions.  At NWBIO, we also reported on our assessment findings and had a general discussion of how to improve our project because we had received a 4-year RCN-UBE grant to support it.    Most participating departments successfully implemented curricular changes in both introductory and upper-division courses during the nine months of engagement with us.  We were not as successful as we had wished in establishing a deeper sense of community among the participants; we began to address this by creating a listserv so participants could communicate with each other easily to accelerate their local transformation efforts and share successes. 

As we began planning for our second fall workshop in 2014 (Cohort 2) with funding from our NSF RCN-UBE grant (NSF #1346583), we realized that another strategy that we could use to establish and support a robust Community of Practice would be to strengthen the connections between Cohort 1 and Cohort 2 institutions by having them interact in person.   We selected three members of Cohort 1 to participate in our ongoing activities.  Members of Cohort 1 have continued to attend subsequent NW BIO...

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