Our grant is more about supporting local initiatives, so as a project, we don't have a single form of professional development that we offer. We do communicate with partner universities that professional development is a key to improving mathematics teaching practices. We encourage campuses to connect with CoMINDS for grad student development, and send faculty to IBL workshops. We also help dept leaders connect with places that have effective professional development (such as instructor lesson study) to learn from what those places are doing. We are about to have our second annual workshop where we bring several representatives from each campus together, to share what each is doing, and help them learn from each other.

For communities of practice, we are focused on helping departments increase/improve their coordination of multi-section courses. Having common syllabus, textbook, homework, and exams are important (as is common grading of common exams), but also important are common pedagogical practices and shared discussion about the teaching and learning. As one of our partners said, "coordination with community is just a checklist." We encourage instructors at each site to have regular conversations about teaching and learning--as departments and focused on particular courses. Sometimes campuses have weekly instructor meetings that focus more on the nuts and bolts; administrative details are important, but so are conversations that attempt to anticipate what students will find difficult in upcoming lessons, and what instructors might do to better support student learning. For graduate student instructors, we think such conversations are even more important, both because grad students are typically novice instructors, and because doing this in grad school can set a norm that we talk about teaching and spend time considering the students' points of view. Some of the communities of practice operate as lesson study groups; others don't reach that level but do have regular discussions about student learning and how their instruction can better support students. All of the communities of practice have developed shared materials for teaching (such as in-class activities, lesson plans, etc). The more mature communities of practice have developed ways to onboard new instructors and provide for ongoing revision of shared materials, to better sustain their community through changes in instructors.

Alex, here are responses to your questions:

1) Specific important leadership: it takes a department chair (or assistant/vice chair) to push change from a few interested instructors to wider implementation; it takes a campus administrator to provide resources to the department (usually via the dept chair), such as classroom renovations, funds for hiring a coordinator, paying for more professional development; sustained changes usually have some type of faculty committee in the dept to oversee the reforms and make ongoing refinements; and leadership of coordinators who can develop a community of practice among instructors, and bring new instructors on board to the vision of effective teaching and learning.

2) Each campus has a slightly different story, but most were able to use dept leaders' relationship with upper administrators to get funds to at least renovate a few classrooms (1-4), collect data to show students in these classes have better success, and then coax more funds for further renovations. Some sites started with small sections, so this classroom renovation has been for those of us who started with large sections (and still have large sections, with mid-size recitations of ~40).

3) Across the participating sites, success rates of those who have implemented changes at least 2 years is in the 60-90% range; one campus that started with 80-85% passing rates didn't increase their passing rates but doubled their Calc 2 enrollment. The newer partners are in year 1 of changes; most are starting around 50% passing rates. When we see the big jumps in pass rates, it's from sites that go "all in": professional development (up front and ongoing support), increased coordination, attention to equitable outcomes, collecting and using local data, better student supports, attention to placement, community of practice among instructors, and some additional resources (room renovations, extended time, smaller sections, etc).

4) We are working on a book from our Year 1 data that will be fully drafted in the next month or so; we'll have an additional book near the end of our 5-year grant. The audience for these handbooks will be math departments/math faculty and other faculty & administrators interested in change. We have a session at the Joint Math Meetings 2020, and are working on getting funding for a broader national dissemination conference in 2020 or 2021. For expansion, we are also working on additional grant funding to further scale up our models, and for ongoing support of networked improvement communities. We don't need every campus to reinvent all the wheels, so collaborating with others in similar contexts trying to make similar changes, is very powerful for accelerating reform efforts. Positive peer pressure is also helpful, particularly when told something is impossible--you can point to campuses where they are already doing what is supposedly impossible. The CSU sites would likely welcome a visit and can explain in more detail what they are doing.

Great answers!  I look forward to seeing your book!  I wonder if you all would consider presenting at a BioQUEST workshop or at the Bienniial chem education conference?  All our fields have trouble with implementing changes in mathematical based reasoning  and we all need to learn from each other how to implement change.

Thanks, Patricia. BioQUEST and other workshops that have any kind of STEM faculty will be good avenues for dissemination. Our team has had multiple conversations about which aspects of the reforms are particular to mathematics and which are just good practices in general. We don't necessarily have conclusions, since our participants are all in math departments, but many of the findings do seem to be broadly applicable.

Thank you, Sehoya, for your encouragement and positive feedback. 

Patricia, each campus had different challenges to getting campus leaders on board. Some change processes were actually initiated by upper administrators, pressing the department to "fix" calculus. All of the campuses aligned their change efforts with university goals/missions (such as improving freshman retention, graduation rates, etc.). On most campuses, more freshman enroll in mathematics than in any other department's classes, so success in math correlates strongly with freshman retention. Having a data-based argument usually goes over well. Many campuses began faculty participation with those who were willing, and then expanded once they had more data to show the success of the reforms. We collect more data than just DFW rates to measure success, including student course-taking trajectories, grades in subsequent courses, majors (do they switch to/away from STEM after taking Calculus 1?), and measures of student experiences and attitudes.

In terms of persuading institutions to invest resources in improvement efforts, someone has to be passionate about the reforms at the department level, and it helps if that person has some type of formal leadership role. Improvements in student success aren't free, so if the university has a mission about improving student outcomes, then the department can build on that to show how other campuses have gotten better outcomes when they _____________ (offered ongoing professional development, increased course coordination, focused on actively engaging students, had classrooms set up for collaboration, extended the minutes per week of class time, etc).

Hello Patricia, 

To build on Wendy's reply, when department faculty demonstrate initiative to improve student retention and persistence through improved instruction and related support, we have observed that campus leaders often endorse these department/faculty initiated proposals and allocate various institutional resources to such efforts. Deans and provosts often welcome department initiated efforts that can be demonstrated through action plans, internal proof of concept proposals for instructional innovation, etc. 

Andrea, the campuses participating in the SEMINAL grant have all sizes of classes, from 18 to over 700. Instructors with classes up to about 80 have (mostly) found spaces on campus for tables/chairs to facilitate active learning (or at least can push desk/chair units together in clumps). Most of the locations with 100+ students in sections have smaller recitations to go with the large classes, and focus more of the active learning in the recitations (there are still things that can be done in larger classes, but it's much harder for instructors to talk to lots of students during group work). A key to having active learning become the norm for a department is coordination. Most of our sites coordinate not just the syllabus, textbook, and homework, but also have common exams, common grading of common exams, and weekly instructor meetings that discuss approaches to teaching, how to address the concepts students will likely find difficult, etc. Some campuses went "all in" and transformed all sections at once. Others did more of a staged approach, starting with a few sections with instructors who are on board, collecting data to show improved student outcomes, and then expanding to more/all sections. The expansion takes data and takes leadership, usually the chair and the person who assigns instructors to courses. All of the sites are offering professional development to instructors, to help them learn how to start small with increasing student engagement. Most of the campuses have or are developing shared materials. It's easier for an instructor to use clicker questions in a large class if the questions already exist; it's easier to enact group-worthy tasks during class if the materials exist and the instructors have had a conversation about what questions they will ask groups that get stuck, etc. It's certainly not an easy process. Some campuses had an external "trigger" of being pressured to "fix" calculus. All of the campuses aligned their efforts with university goals of improving graduation rates, freshman retention, etc.

Zen, all of the SEMINAL sites have new/more professional development for instructors. In most cases, this includes both pre-semester workshops and weekly instructor meetings throughout the semester. Some departments have implemented teaching and learning seminars for the whole department, on a regular basis, to normalize the culture that values teaching and the improvement of teaching. Most departments are also coordinating instructional materials, providing worksheets or even common lesson plans (or engaging instructors in lesson study) to support shifts in instructional practice. Once faculty get used to trying new materials and engaging students in small group and whole class discussions, they typically then seek support in helping groups to work more effectively, and to ensuring discussions are both equitable and mathematically productive.