04: Leadership Action Team (LAT)

DeLTA Leadership Action Team (LAT)

The Leadership Action Team (LAT) is one of two key pieces of the NSF-funded DeLTA model. It consists of department chairs from participating departments who meet about seven times in an academic year to learn about robust and equitable teaching evaluation, building new departmental evaluation practices, and piloting and refining these practices. Members collaborate in a Learn-Build-Pilot sequence, learning first and then building and piloting new departmental teaching evaluation practices based on the Three-Voice Framework. This curriculum draws heavily on social cognition and cultural change perspectives and the readiness for change framework. LAT members work in tandem with the Catalyzing Action Team (CAT) advocate(s) from their department to develop and enact new departmental teaching evaluation practices.

The DeLTA project leaders identify candidate departments for participation in the LAT/CAT model. This happens as we learn about department chairs or faculty who are keen to improve their practices or who have been showing up at teaching evaluation workshops or who are known to embrace new ideas and transformative change. Project leaders hold an initial meeting with each candidate department chair to explain the project, the rationale behind it, what can be gained, and what the commitment involves. We explain that participation involves committed participation by both the department chair for the LAT and 1-2 faculty members for the CAT.

Learn - Build - Pilot

DeLTA uses the Learn-Build-Pilot sequence to guide LAT members through the process of reforming teaching evaluation within their respective departments. The LAT, along with the CAT, commences in the fall semester and continues into the spring semester. They meet monthly (5 meetings) in the fall and twice in the spring. The Build phase consists of two 1-on-1 meetings between each LAT member and their CAT members. The Pilot phase occurs in the second fall semester and is led by CAT members but enabled and empowered by the LAT member. LAT members are expected to do the following during their academic year of action:

• Participate in the Leadership Action Team with other department chairs
• Give your departmental advocate (CAT) the power and support to share their work with the department and enact new departmental practices
• Promote new teaching evaluation practices so they become standard practice for the full department
• Focus department on evidence from all three voices - Teaching evaluation focus (3-Voices) supported by CAT work
• Identify leadership skills needed to support LAT
• Identify potential challenges from department
  

Time progresses from bottom (Learn) to top (Pilot) and left to right.

Learn

This stage is critical because STEM department chairs have typically had few opportunities to learn about or experience evidence-based, improvement-oriented, and equity-centered teaching evaluation practices. Our work has revealed the productive ideas (e.g., teaching evaluation is most important for helping faculty improve their teaching) and the unproductive ones (e.g., peer evaluation is too time-consuming and biased) that department chairs hold regarding teaching evaluation and departmental change. As a result, LAT facilitators are prepared to elicit and respond to these ideas using questions and activities that effectively foster learning. We provide scaffolded learning opportunities that build LAT members’ expertise about teaching evaluation and leading change, drawing on the readiness for change framework. We create a sense of discrepancy by introducing LAT members to data about the shortcomings of current practices and probing them to reflect on current departmental practices. This involves the GATEs (Krishnan et al., 2022), which can help faculty see problems in their current approaches (i.e., discrepancy), and provide feasible and effective solutions to identified problems (i.e., appropriateness & valence). We foster confidence in department chairs’ capability to change departmental practices (i.e., efficacy) by providing leadership training about fostering faculty buy-in and navigating resistance. For example, we introduce the readiness for change framework as a guide for conveying messages to faculty that foster buy-in (e.g., Armenakis & Harris, 2002). We increase a sense of administrative support for reforms by keeping LAT members informed about relevant university-level policies.

Build

After learning about new frameworks and processes for evaluating teaching and reflecting on their department’s current practices, the next step is building new departmental practices. LAT members work with CAT members on this part. Each LAT member and their CAT members meet late in the first fall semester to determine what should change in the department. We encourage them to sequence their work, so that they are not taking on everything at once. Together they decided on the best first steps, next steps, etc. Concurrently the CAT members are being supported by CAT facilitators to adapt existing forms and processes to fit the needs of their department. For example, if a LAT member and CAT members decide to develop new peer observation processes, the CAT members work with their CAT facilitators to identify and adapt one of the numerous peer observation forms that have already been refined by other departments, both within the DeLTA project and beyond. See the Catalyzing Action Team (CAT) page for more details.

Alongside building teaching evaluation practices, we also support LAT and CAT members to plan how they will build readiness for teaching evaluation reform in their department. We facilitate discussions that prompt LAT and CAT members to identify the various problems that can be addressed by new teaching evaluation practices. Leaders will be more successful at fostering readiness for change if they can identify what others see as important problems and speak to how the change can help address those problems (Armenakis & Harris, 2002). For example, while LAT or CAT members may see a need to better recognize good teaching in the department, other faculty may be more concerned about the importance of mentoring junior faculty. These faculty may be open to formative teaching evaluation that helps faculty improve their teaching.

Pilot

The last phase in the DeLTA model is piloting new departmental teaching evaluation practices. This stage allows for refining new practices and fostering readiness for change among departmental faculty. The LAT member will sanction the pilot and help roll out new practices in a way that recruits supporters and minimizes resistance. CAT members will lead the pilot and revise the practices based on their experiences and feedback from colleagues. Another component of the pilot phase may be faculty meetings about teaching evaluation, which the DeLTA team supports at the request of CAT and LAT members. These meetings may aim to raise awareness, facilitate consensus-building about new practices, or foster skill building (e.g., skills for systematic self-reflection, providing high-quality feedback, conducting peer observation). The DeLTA team collaborates with CAT and LAT members to determine what support they need to foster buy-in for new practices and to support faculty member’s productive engagement with new practices. CAT meetings in this phase respond to members’ needs and include troubleshooting, returning to topics from the learning phase as needed, providing feedback, interpreting feedback from colleagues about the pilot, and making plans for next steps.