Coordinating College-Wide Instructional Change Through Faculty Communities

Abstract

In February 2012, the College of Engineering created the Strategic Instructional Initiatives Program (SIIP) to transform and revitalize the core engineering courses at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As SIIP has evolved, we have learned that in order to achieve these goals, we must first focus on creating collaborative teaching cultures. This effort has sparked the rapid spread of Research-Based Instructional Strategies across the college and created a thriving community of faculty invested in improving undergraduate instruction. In this paper, we describe the current policies and procedures that we use to direct SIIP. In particular, we will focus on the structure of the leadership team and how we have fostered deep collaborations among faculty developers, education researchers, and engineering faculty. We conclude by presenting an evaluation of the program.

Scaling-up Collaborative Learning for Large Introductory Courses Using Active Learning Spaces, TA training, and Computerized Team Management

“…[43,46] This redesign was carried out by a group of faculty working together as a mutually supportive Community of Practice [41,42,44] with support from both a college-level program [7] and an NSF program. [18,17] The critical aspect of these two programs is the centrality of using…”

Sustaining Innovation in Engineering Education through Faculty Communities

“…The college of engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been deploying the Strategic Instructional Innovations Program (SIIP) to support faculty-led innovation of teaching practices 7 . The primary emphasis of SIIP has been the creation of communities of tenure-track and specialized faculty that will motivate faculty to adopt RBIS and then sustain their use beyond the initial financial investment in creating that community 7 .…”

“…The primary emphasis of SIIP has been the creation of communities of tenure-track and specialized faculty that will motivate faculty to adopt RBIS and then sustain their use beyond the initial financial investment in creating that community 7 . The emphasis on community simultaneously addresses both challenges identified in the literature (i.e., perceived value and supportive environments).…”

“…Constructed under the guiding principle that education innovations will be sustainable only if they are owned and championed by the faculty, SIIP was structured as a competitive grant program through which faculty applied to conduct large scale renovations of a course or a set of related courses 7 . We (the SIIP administrative team) required that proposals be led by teams of at least three principle investigators, two of which needed to be tenure-track faculty members.…”

“…These observations sparked the creation of a new model for SIIP and a new central message for communicating its central mission. Our faculty are now rallied around the simple message of "teach like we do research 7 ." This message is enacted through a three-stage model of transformation illustrated in Figure 1.…”