Institutional change (part I): A framework for making a difference

Do you want to make a difference in your school or department but aren’t sure where to begin? This session is the first part of a two-part workshop aimed to help teachers, students, and university faculty make lasting changes in the places that they work. While decades of research provide insight into how to students learn, this research often has little impact on the everyday lives of teachers and students, due to cultural and institutional barriers. Accordingly, this session provides a framework for achieving sustained, systemic change. The framework was developed through the STEM Institutional Transformation Action Research (SITAR) project, which synthesizes the organizational change literature and applies it to higher education. While the SITAR project takes place at a university, it is grounded in underlying theories that apply more broadly. The goal is for participants to walk away from this session with a general overview of the change literature and examples of how the SITAR framework can be used to design change efforts. This will prepare them for part II of the workshop, focused on planning a change strategy.