Grassroots teams for academic departments: a new way to understand culture and change

This full paper in the research-to-practice category describes a departmental structure for change organized and executed as part of a REvolutionizing engineering and computer science Departments (RED) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The recent engineering education literature provides many conceptual frameworks for thinking about change in academic organizations, but comparatively few case studies of how departmental cultural change is operationalized both inside and beyond the classroom. Our approach to change was to organize “grassroots teams” of students, faculty, and staff to tackle problems and challenges of recognized importance to the department. This paper details a number of key features of these grassroots teams, including: membership, training, leadership, problem scoping, facilitation, goal setting, formative and summative evaluations, and the outcomes of the teams work. The grassroots teams were organized according to several operating principles: (1) optimal team size is 6-8 people, and optimal project duration is around one semester; (2) to the extent possible, each team should have students, faculty, and staff representation; (3) teams generally follow our change model to complete their work; (4) all teams should strive for equity of voice, meaning that student and staff voices are equal to faculty voices; (5) the changes to be made did not require permission (i.e., approval from a curriculum committee or other formal entity; or the team members implicitly already had permission for change as a result of their job role); and (6) the teams should focus on student outcomes we care about. Our results refined our understanding of how change happens (or in some cases, does not happen) in our organization, with fascinating implications for ongoing and future efforts. The existence of these teams, and their mission around progressive change in the department, operated in tension with the prevailing attitudes about change in the department (“we tried that before, and it didn’t work”). Not every change effort was successful. The feedback from participants was nearly unanimous. They appreciated the structured and well-scoped nature of the projects. They especially welcomed the process we developed to facilitate change, which was very different from the usual committee structures in which they were used to working. And they felt excited to see that change was possible. Our specific grassroots team implementation will undoubtedly not work in all academic environments. Local context matters and some changes to our approach will be appropriate in each different setting. However, we believe the approach outlined in this paper provides a flexible platform on which to build grassroots teams in other units of our university or at other institutions.