2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Innovation Training and Its Impact on Faculty Approach to Curricular and Pedagogical Changes

Presented at Faculty Development Division (FDD) Technical Session 5

This Evidence-Based Practice paper presents the results of an innovation mindset training effort as part of a National Science Foundation funded RED (Revolutionizing Engineering Departments) Adaptation and Implementation (A&I) grant focused on changing the culture of a large traditional mechanical engineering department at Texas A&M University (TAMU). The goal of this project is to shift the departmental culture from one that generally devalues teaching and relies on sporadic, undocumented individual intuitive innovations to one that values and focuses on identified student outcomes achieved through a sustained process of incremental experimentation, measurement, and sharing. Based on the substantial literature on institutional change, we investigated the effectiveness of a different strategy based on assisting faculty with curricular or pedagogical changes through an innovation training workshop series and the creation of a learning, sharing community of practice so that they can self-regulate their teaching innovations. We introduced a workshop on educational innovation, to improve faculty approaches to curricular or pedagogical changes. This included the initiation of educational innovation teams and the framework to encourage innovation. Faculty were asked to create groups and propose changes to their curriculum or pedagogy before the innovation training workshop. They were asked to resubmit their proposed changes after the workshop. We evaluated the changes in their approach by scoring their proposals based on a rubric that was created for assessing the evolution of faculty's mindset and behavioral changes. The results were used to inform what changes were needed to the innovation training. In this paper, we report on the results of two rounds of innovation training (with approximately 11 faculty in 4 teams in the first round and 15 faculty in 5 teams in the second round) that were performed in the summer of 2020 and 2021 and the resulting changes in the workshop structure. From the assessment scores, it is found that faculty consciously follow the innovator mindset methodology to formulate their teaching plans and each team has a common sense of iterative teaching innovation. However more work is needed in other aspects including the ability to develop measurable formative “lead indicators” of the teams' progress (as opposed to a final evaluation of whether they achieved their goals) and also on the faculty's ability to explicitly consider how inclusive their pedagogical changes were.

Authors

Prof. Arun R. Srinivasa Texas A&M University [biography]

Dr Arun Srinivasa is the Holdredge/Paul Professor and associate department head of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University and has been with TAMU since 1997. Prior to that he was a faculty at University of Pittsburgh. He received his undergraduate in mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India in 1986 and subsequently his PhD from University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include continuum mechanics and thermodynamics, simulations of materials processing, and smart materials modeling and design. His teaching interests include the use of technology for education, especially in the area of engineering mechanics and in effective teaching methodologies and their impact on student progress in mechanical engineering.
Rujun Gao http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3095-8215 Texas A&M University [biography]

Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University.
Prof. M. Cynthia Hipwell http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7500-9785 Texas A&M University [biography]

Dr. Hipwell has been working in the area of technology development based upon nanoscale phenomena for over 20 years. She received her B.S.M.E. from Rice University and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Upon graduation, she went to work at Seagate Technology’s Recording Head Division in Bloomington, Minnesota. During her time at Seagate, Dr. Hipwell held various individual and leadership positions in the areas of reliability, product development, and advanced mechanical and electrical technology development. In these various roles, she established new business processes and an organizational culture that focused on developing innovative solutions from root cause understanding, improved pace of learning, and discipline in experimentation and configuration management. She was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2016 for her leadership in the development of technologies to enable areal density and reliability increases in hard disk drives and was elected a National Academy of Inventors Fellow in 2018. Dr. Hipwell is currently the Oscar S. Wyatt, Jr. ’45 Chair II at Texas A&M University, where she has developed new classes on innovation and technology development as part of her leadership of the INVENT (INnoVation tools and Entrepreneurial New Technology) Lab. She is Co-PI on a National Science Foundation engineering education grant to develop a culture of and tools for iterative experimentation and continuous improvement in curriculum development.
Dr. Mindy Bergman Texas A&M University [biography]

Dr. Bergman is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Executive Director of Interdisciplinary Critical Studies at Texas A&M University. She earned her PhD in industrial-organizational psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include workplace safety, occupational health, and fairness and mistreatment in the workplace and in STEM classrooms and programs.
David Christopher Seets Texas A&M University
Emma Edoga Texas A&M University
Luis Angel Rodriguez http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4679-2739 Texas A&M University
Guillermo Aguilar Texas A&M University

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