The goal of this project was to create a network of national STEM education reform organizations, to foster community-building, communication and joint efforts that would support their work in order to speed broad diffusion of evidence-based instructional practices in post-secondary STEM education. The intellectual merit of this project was improving the understanding and use of practices that better support the efforts of our network participants' constituents, particularly around the adoption of effective, equitable teaching practices, through structured interactions and joint activity of these organizations. The use of active, student-centered teaching practices has been shown to increase student performance, persistence and to reduce achievement gaps for students from historically excluded groups. Therefore, the broader impact of enhancing the impact of our network participants' efforts to increase adoption of equitable, research-backed educational practices and curricula in post-secondary STEM education contributes to increasing and diversifying the STEM workforce.

Toward our goal, we held four annual in-person and numerous virtual meetings to foster awareness, connection and joint work between organizations that would increase communication of effective practices, coordination across efforts that would improve their impact and collaboration toward new approaches to recalcitrant challenges. Our project team stewarded the development and progress of our network using both a temporal and conceptual framework.  The temporal framework laid out the networks grant-funded lifecycle over three stages - network building, network functioning and network expanding.  The conceptual framework, 3C Framework, scaffolded a progression from communication through coordination to collaboration efforts across our network's developmental timeline. The first year of our project was devoted to network building through a host of communication-based activities at our single in-person and multiple virtual meetings.  These engaged the representatives of nine prominent STEM education transformation organizations in presentations, activities and discussions that fostered sharing their organizations" missions, purposes, target audiences, and principles or theories that guided their modes of operation. The organizational representatives also shared areas of success and barriers to success.  From this an effort-impact matrix was created that allowed the participants to identify common challenges and prioritize the challenges into "low-hanging fruit" that would lead to quick wins, medium level efforts that would require a little more work and high effort desired outcomes that would require longer term collaborative efforts.

The activities in year one set the stage for years 2-4 which were devoted to network functioning in the form of joint effort that encompassed "easy wins" and higher effort coordination and collaboration. Below are examples of these activities categorized as either coordination i.e., joint effort between two or more organizations involving previously existing initiatives, or collaboration, joint effort between two of more organizations that developed new materials or events.

Coordination efforts:

• Representatives from organizations that had successfully transitioned to non-profit status consulted with organizations that were taking this step. This is a crucial step for many organizations to continue after initial grant-funding has ended.
• Representatives from organizations with specific expertise, e.g., running pedagogy or inclusivity workshops, ran workshops at the yearly professional development events of other organizations.

Collaboration efforts:

• Three network organizations collaborated to successfully acquire National Science Foundation funding to merge their professional development programs into a comprehensive set of training focused on a state college system to drive adoption of evidence-based instructional practices.
• A subset of the network participants formed a working group that explored the concept of Psychological Safety to address the challenge of attracting educators from marginalized groups to participate in professional development events or take on leadership roles in professional development organizations. This was then fully adopted by one of the network partners as a framework to guide their recruitment of new members and onboarding of recent members.
• A subset of the network participants formed a working group that is building a template for a website to organize, share and provide guidance for individuals and institutions who are ready to enact change but may not have the knowledge or resources to support that. One of the products of this group was an inclusive syllabus template that has been used to transform course syllabi at two institutions of members of the network and is being developed into a workshop that will be more broadly available to constituents of the network participants after spring 2024.

While the fifth and final year of the project also supported ongoing communication, coordination and collaboration efforts, the network was also focused on expansion and preparing for post-grant sustainability. The notable outcomes of this final year were: 1) welcoming eight new STEM education transformation organizations to the network; 2) defining our mission for the post-grant sustainability phase of our maturation as a network; and 3) contributing to a new grant proposal to merge with the Accelerating Systemic Change Network to continue the important work of this network into the future.

Last Modified: 01/01/2024
Modified by: Michelle D Withers