Scaling Up Educational Change: The TRESTLE Initiative

Stephanie Chasteen, University of Colorado Boulder

Imagine a faculty member — let’s call him Bob — who feels like he wants to shake things up in his course. Maybe he was inspired by ideas he heard at the New Faculty Workshop offered by AAPT/APS/AAS, or at the teaching and learning center on campus. Bob talks to a few colleagues in the department to figure out students’ biggest struggles. Maybe he writes some clicker questions, or makes up a worksheet for students. How does he figure out how to design the activity well? How will he know if it worked, and how to improve it? How does Bob persist in the experiment, given all the duties of a working professor? Wouldn’t it be great if Bob could find someone to act as an intellectual partner, to discuss student difficulties and possible teaching approaches, review the activity, and help assess its effectiveness? After all, once Bob figures out some crackerjack approaches in this course, he could then apply them to his other courses, and perhaps share the ideas with his fellow faculty.

For the past decade I have been involved in two initiatives at the University of Colorado Boulder which have aimed to support such substantive, discipline-based intellectual partnerships around teaching: The Science Education Initiative (SEI) and the Transforming Education, Stimulating Teaching and Learning Excellence (TRESTLE) project. The goal of both the SEI and TRESTLE is to empower STEM faculty and departments to use effective educational techniques more broadly.

Both initiatives have at their heart four main design principles:

1. Department-level focus. Activities are centered in individual STEM departments, like physics.
2. Course transformation as the core activity, to help faculty try out new educational techniques.
3. Embedded discipline-based education specialist (DBES); we give faculty access to a human who is expert both in the discipline and in education to provide intellectual partnership and help that is targeted to the specific issues of the discipline.
4. Intellectual communities; communities among the educational experts, faculty, departments, and (in the case of TRESTLE) institutions help spread and grow expertise around teaching and learning.

Why do we feel these design principles are so important for achieving educational change? The department-level focus is valuable since departments are the seat of educational activity; they direct curriculum and courses, and serve as faculty members’ professional home. By focusing activity on course transformation, it is easier to get the time and attention of busy faculty members (like Bob), and faculty get authentic opportunities to experiment within the context of their course and learn what works along the way.

A hallmark of the SEI and TRESTLE initiatives is the use of discipline-based education specialists (DBESs), who may be postdocs, instructors, or faculty, embedded directly within departments. Rather than leaving Bob on his own to figure out the best techniques and assess their effectiveness, he gets access to an expert who combines the disciplinary expertise of their physics colleagues, and the pedagogical expertise of a teaching-and-learning expert, who can give very targeted intellectual partnership and help to Bob – as well as valuable time to do some development and assessment.

Most of these ideas grew up with the first initiative, the Science Education Initiative, the brainchild of Carl Wieman. (See Wieman¹ for a full description of the SEI, and Chasteen and Code² for a practical guide to creating such initiatives). The SEI was implemented at the University of Colorado Boulder and University of British Columbia, and hired several postdocs to act as DBESs in 7 departments at each institution. A department director oversaw activity in each department, and a central organization coordinated the initiative across departments. I was originally hired as one of these postdocs; I learned about education and educational assessment from SEI Central staff, partnered with physics faculty to transform our upper-division E&M course, and met weekly with other such postdocs to share ideas and lessons learned. These initiatives lasted about a decade and involved 25-50 postdocs at each institution, and so were quite expensive – funded by each institution, they cost an average of $650K (at CU Boulder) and $1.4M (at UBC) per department.

The TRESTLE initiative grew out of an adaptation of the SEI model developed at the University of Kansas, in an attempt to answer the question, “Can we propagate change through more limited resources using networked communities?” TRESTLE uses fewer discipline-based education specialists, focusing more explicitly on building networked communities – communities of people joined by a common approach to addressing complex problems. These communities are being built among the project leaders, educational experts, and faculty, on and across campuses. TRESTLE is a networked community of 7 institutions (most of whom are members of the Bay View Alliance network of universities), directed out of the University of Kansas and funded through the NSF. All TRESTLE partners are dedicated to using department-based embedded experts, building communities within and across institutions, and generating visible evidence of these impacts to document change and establish norms to motivate further change. All campuses use common measures of impact (e.g. course-specific assessments, faculty surveys, course observations, course statistics, and qualitative case studies).

Each campus is free to apply the overall model in the ways that best fit their local context. For example, at CU Boulder we chose not to use individual postdocs again but instead to try to leverage the existing faculty expertise on campus. Initiatives such as the SEI and the Learning Assistant program (which uses talented undergraduates as facilitators of learning; https://www.learningassistantalliance.org) and other innovations like the PhET Interactive Simulations (http://phet.colorado.edu) have resulted in a wealth of faculty expertise about teaching and learning on campus. TRESTLE aims to empower those faculty to lead course designs and faculty communities. Other TRESTLE campuses have used a variety of context-dependent variations of the model; see below.

How is it going so far? We can say that TRESTLE is affecting multiple departments, and the involved courses are more student-centered. We have also learned that supporting the independence of each campus and its’ project is challenging (while maintaining a coherent project vision). We are also finding that there seems to be a national need for such collaborations, and many people are eager to find a community for DBESs and others who partner with faculty.

How can you use what we have learned?

If you are an individual faculty member, there are two things you could learn from our experience. First, your courses are a fertile crucible for experimentation. We have much written for you on what works in course design on our SEI instructor guidance pages. Second is to seek intellectual partnership from others in your department or beyond – you may be able to be creative and hire a postdoc or grad student (with a background in education) with an expectation that some of their time will be spent on educational change, or fund an existing postdoc to work on your course with you for a semester.

If you are someone who partners with faculty on course design (either as a postdoc, instructor, or physics education research faculty), there are many recommendations for you on how to be successful in this role in our SEI Handbook,² at https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/seihandbook/, such as how to partner with faculty, giving effective feedback, and developing your own professional expertise. And join the TRESTLE email list to connect with our cross-campus community, at trestlenetwork.org!

If you want to start an initiative in your department or campus, our 4 design principles can be flexibly adapted to your individual situation to attempt to spread change with modest means. Again, the SEI Handbook2 also has many valuable lessons learned for initiative directors, such as soliciting proposals, identifying departments for inclusion, and training educational specialists.

To learn more

SEI: cwsei.ubc.ca and colorado.edu/sei
TRESTLE: trestlenetwork.org
TRESTLE@CU: Colorado.edu/csl/trestle

This is based on work funded through NSF DUE 1525775, DUE 1525331, DUE 1525345.

Stephanie Chasteen is at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she is the Director of the TRESTLE Initiative @ CU and Associate Director of the Science Education Initiative. She conducts research and evaluation on STEM educational initiatives, with a focus on departmental change and faculty use of research-based teaching methods, and provides external evaluation for a variety of projects such as PhysTEC and Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3). More about her independent work at http://chasteenconsulting.com.

(Endnotes)

1. Carl E. Wieman. “Improving How Universities Teach Science: Lessons from the Science Education Initiative,” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, (2017).

2. Stephanie V. Chasteen and Warren J. Code. (2018) “The Science Education Initiative Handbook.” Accessed at https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/seihandbook/, (2019).

Disclaimer – The articles and opinion pieces found in this issue of the APS Forum on Education Newsletter are not peer refereed and represent solely the views of the authors and not necessarily the views of the APS.