Applying the Change Leadership Toolkit to MTEP NICs

By Wendy M. Smith, Colby Lamb, Sarah Hartman, MTEP 2.0 Research Hub members

Have you seen the Change Leadership Toolkit 2.0: A Guide for Advancing Systemic Change in Higher Education (Elrod et al. 2024)? In addition to having great resources to support transformation efforts in higher education, MTEP has been involved in the Building Change Leadership project in two ways: MTEP leaders contributed to earlier pilot efforts to create this toolkit, and the MTEP research hub used the categories from this toolkit as the core for coding MTEP interview transcripts. Read on for a few highlights of what we are seeing in MTEP data, along with some questions you might ask with your NIC:

• Context: We have many responses related to human capital and capacity, particularly related to folks getting credit for MTEP work (or not) and prioritizing MTEP-related efforts among competing demands on their time. The context category also includes financial resources, including internal or external grants to support change efforts, such as travel support or course buyouts to support NIC efforts. Context also incorporates dimensions of culture, particularly statements related to norms, values, or beliefs from a department, college, school, or other institution related to power dynamics and structures of NIC transformation efforts. Although we saw fewer instances of people talking about dimensions of culture, the leadership, governance, and politics of institutions are also part of the context, particularly related to policies and processes that impact NIC efforts. Leadership, governance, and politics would also include local and state contexts.
  
  • Key questions: How might your NIC members get (more) credit for transformation work? How might you position NIC work with respect to people’s current responsibilities to help them prioritize transformation efforts
  
  
• Create vision and develop strategy: Although Elrod et al. separate create vision and develop strategy into two categories, we found lots of overlap when MTEP folks discuss different aspects of aims and change strategies. For instance, folks often situate change efforts in the context of their NIC aims.
  
  • Key questions: To what extent do your NIC members hold a common vision for your transformation efforts, and to what extent can they articulate the vision? Whose voices contribute to your strategy development? How do you (re)develop a common vision when NIC members turn over?
  
  
• Foster diversity, equity, and inclusion: Improving diversity, equity, and inclusion in the secondary mathematics teacher profession is a core value for MTEP. Despite being very generous in coding, we were surprised to find relatively few incidences of MTEP members talking about how their transformation efforts are addressing diversity, equity, inclusion, or related concepts such as access, identity, and belonging.
  
  • Key questions: How are your transformation efforts broadening participation in the secondary mathematics teacher profession? How is your NIC discussing these efforts (and maintaining your commitments in these areas) in the current political climate?
  
  
• Lead people and teams: Building foundational trust among NIC members, particularly across institutions, is a key responsibility of NIC leaders. We find lots of discussions of the challenges of such leadership in MTEP interviews, particularly since relatively few of us have formal training in leading change efforts.
  
  • Key questions: How are NIC leaders ensuring all voices are heard? How does your NIC authentically onboard new members when there is turnover in people and/or institutions?
  
  
• Advocacy and politics: Scarcely any mathematics educators or mathematicians have formal training in advocacy and politics. This lack of preparation is reflected in the very few instances when interviewees talked about how they advocate for NIC efforts with administrators and policymakers or how NIC leaders navigate departmental and institutional politics to advance NIC goals. Activities in this category are key to successful and sustained transformation efforts as advocacy and politics are related to understanding power dynamics, working with influencers, changing the minds of skeptics, and advocating to appropriate audiences.
  
  • Key questions: How are NIC members and leaders working with influential education leaders, changing the minds of skeptics, or understanding and addressing power dynamics? If you feel unsure of your skills in these areas, how might you engage in professional learning to gain more skills or confidence?
    NOTE: engaging in the MTEP NIC Support Workshop in June will provide some opportunities to build your advocacy skills!
  
  
• Communicate effectively: This category refers to communication within and external to a NIC. Change efforts require effective communication both among its members and outside the NIC with other parties such as department chairs, deans, principals, superintendents, and policymakers. We have ample evidence of how challenging it can be to communicate across institutions as so many educational institutions raise high firewalls that make document sharing evermore challenging. Sometimes, change efforts are suppressed when key thought leaders aren’t kept in the loop or when change leaders don’t communicate enough about their rationale to convince others that the costs are worth the eventual gains.
  
  • Key questions: How does your NIC communicate (e.g., emails, group text, shared agenda documents, shared PDSA documentation, etc)? How do your NIC members communicate the work of the NIC to policymakers and thought leaders outside of your NIC?
  
  
• Sensemake and learn: Elrod et al. use this category to refer to uses of data (qualitative and quantitative) to inform change efforts, both as part of root cause analyses and as part of ongoing PDSA cycles (the “study” part of plan-do-study-act). Knowing that MTEP centers NIC work around improvement science and PDSA cycles, we were surprised to have very few interview excerpts discuss how NICs are using data to make decisions.
  
  • Key questions: What data do your NIC members have or collect, and how do those data inform your NIC strategies (driver diagram, aims) and PDSA cycles? Whose voices are represented in the data you have or collect (e.g., if there are no teacher voices, how can you change that)?
  
  
• Prepare for success: This category is about positioning your transformation efforts to be sustained. We’ve experienced some folks talking about preparing for success as changing processes or policies (such as course coordination of multi-section mathematics courses), so that it is easier for subsequent folks to continue the new way than to revert to old ways. This code occurred relatively infrequently in our interview coding, potentially because we didn’t ask many questions about long-term plans. The code was applied when there was a clear plan of action or next step mentioned.
  
  • Key questions: How has your NIC been able to affect policies and processes in ways to sustain your transformation efforts (particularly through changes in institutional leadership)? What institutional leaders do you need to garner support from in order to change policies or processes to sustain your transformation efforts?