The role of leadership in educational innovation: a comparison of two mathematics departments’ initiation, implementation, and sustainment of active learning

Abstract

Several studies have shown that the use of active learning strategies can help improve student success and persistence in STEM-related fields. Despite this, widespread adoption of active learning strategies is not yet a reality as institutional change can be difficult to enact. Accordingly, it is important to understand how departments in institutions of higher education can initiate and sustain meaningful change. We use interview data collected from two institutions to examine how leaders at two universities contributed to the initiation, implementation, and sustainability of active learning in undergraduate calculus and precalculus courses. At each institution, we spoke to 27 stakeholders involved in changes (including administrators, department chairs, course coordinators, instructors, and students). Our results show that the success of these changes rested on the ability of leaders to stimulate significant cultural shifts within the mathematics department. We use communities of transformation theory and the four-frame model of organization change in STEM departments in order to better understand how leaders enabled such cultural shifts. Our study highlights actions leaders may take to support efforts at improving education by normalizing the use of active learning strategies and provides potential reasons for the efficacy of such actions. These results underscore the importance of establishing flexible, distributed leadership models that attend to the cultural and operational norms of a department. Such results may inform leaders at other institutions looking to improve education in their STEM departments.

A New Era of Culture Shaping Has Emerged: Here’s How It May Affect Organizations

“…Transparency is key here for collaboration so that managers and employees can collaborate with each other and add value instantaneously for customers (Adhvaryu et al, 2022). Senior leadership continuously hold meetings with middle managers and the human resources department to create maximum alignment and coordination of cultural norms (Funk et al, 2022;Moe et al, 2021). Once a pilot is aligned, the plan is rolled out to all employees (Livijn, 2019).…”