Leaders in effective and inclusive STEM: Twenty years of the Institute for Scientist & Engineer Educators

It seems intuitive that effective learning experiences in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) should be inclusive and should mirror authentic STEM as practiced by professionals. However, it is less intuitive what an authentic, inclusive STEM learning experience (AISLE) should look like or include. Over the course of 20 years, the Institute for Scientist & Engineer Educators (ISEE) has grappled with this question, developing and refining a framework of six key elements of authentic and inclusive STEM learning experiences. Here, we present this framework, which grew from an exploration of what “scientific inquiry” means in the context of teaching and learning, and expanded to include practices and norms that are valued in engineering fields. ISEE’s framework is the cornerstone of its Professional Development Program (PDP), which trained early-career science and engineering professionals to teach STEM effectively, primarily at the college level, from 2001-2020. In addition to presenting the six elements of this framework, we describe how PDP participants implemented the elements, and we provide recommendations for putting the elements into practice through the design, teaching and assessment of STEM learning experiences.

In teaching for experiential learning, we measure our success not by how well we presented the material or designed an activity but by how well our students learned. Facilitation, the moment-to-moment twists and turns of live interactions between educators and learners, is a critical tool for student learning. Over the 20 years of the Professional Development Program (PDP), we have refined our articulation of the desired learning outcomes and have developed a set of strategies and “moves” that contribute to attaining those outcomes. Here, we examine these as well as describe materials and training developed in the PDP to build the skills of novice facilitators.

In many organizations (e.g., higher education, non-profits, small companies), individuals are called upon to lead small groups of people to complete one or more tasks both in formal roles and in informal settings. For example, department heads, committee chairs, project leads, and program managers are all roles that require an individual to utilize leadership skills to lead their team to the successful completion of the tasks at hand. However, in many science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields and their associated jobs, training and support in leadership development are often lacking. To meet this need, the Institute for Scientist and Engineer Educators (ISEE) at the University of California - Santa Cruz (UCSC) made supporting and mentoring leadership de-velopment a key component of the Professional Development Program (PDP) for graduate stu-dents and postdoctoral scholars in STEM, which ran for over 20 years. Building off of the ISEE leadership development model (ISEE 2020), this workshop is designed to give professionals an opportunity to learn about and practice important leadership skills that can be used in their organi-zations. In this workshop, participants learn to apply three elements of effective leadership that are useful in practice and inclusive of multiple perspectives on leadership. Participants apply actiona-ble leadership practices to their own challenges at work and develop the language to discuss their own leadership skills. Workshop duration: 15 minutes individual reading, 2 hours in-person work-shop, 15 minutes follow up.

We describe how to facilitate an organizational Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) cultural trans-formation utilizing The Transformation Trifecta (TTT) leadership model which includes three steps: learn, integrate, act. The differentiator of this model is the integration step which is often left out of DEI education yet necessary since the majority of behaviors that propagate oppression are unconscious and manifest through implicit bias or microaggressions that are subtle yet impact-ful. It is necessary to engage an approach that goes beyond the thinking mind in order to shift un-derlying beliefs through rewiring neural pathways that inform the creation of new behaviors in re-sponse to embodying new information. This exploration applies the Transformation Trifecta model to the first phase of an organizational DEI cultural shift meant to increase inclusivity and belong-ing. Additionally, the exploration will include the research-backed education tool of backward de-sign included in the Institute for Science and Engineer Educators (ISEE)’s Professional Develop-ment Program (PDP), which was an instrumental aspect in multiple authors’ training and devel-opment. The Transformation Trifecta utilizes backward design in the assessment creation process in order to clearly articulate the desired outcomes and goals for behavior change. There will be a discussion of the top areas of assessment and benchmarks including: belonging, psychological safety, inclusion, growth mindset, equity, and equitable leadership development.