By Wendy M. Smith and Sarah Hartman, MTEP 2.0 Research Hub members
Greetings from representatives of the MTEP 2.0 Research Hub! The hub has been busy, and we wanted to provide a few updates and reflection prompts/action items. A huge thank you to everyone who has submitted data for MTEP 2.0 in the past year, particularly for the Program Progress/Completers Survey and Team Reports this summer. Look for future newsletter articles to provide some updates on what we are seeing in 2025 survey data, along with longitudinal trends.
The Research Hub seeks to be responsive to your requests, so we created a database of PDSA cycles (available in the Files section of Groups.io); all networked improvement community (NIC) members have access to an anonymized version, so you can see what PDSA cycles other NICs have been completing. MTEP 2.0 coaches have access to a version of the PDSA cycle database that includes NIC names, so if you want to connect with a particular NIC based on having comparable PDSA cycles, talk to your coach!
A focus of the Research Hub in the past year has been to create storylines for each MTEP 2.0 NIC; the storylines sought to both tell the story of each NIC and were accompanied by timelines (mostly with information gleaned from annual Team Reports). We synthesized this information into Partnership Profiles, which have been sent to all the NIC leaders in the past few months. These syntheses reflect the data provided by NICs, organized along some of the major categories in Elrod, Kezar, and Gonzàlez's Change Leadership Toolkit (NIC as community, leader characteristics, role of equity, culture/institutional contexts) as well as connection to MTEP, alignment of NIC work with MTEP goals/AMTE standards, timeline, challenges, and tensions.
Our goal is for these partnership profiles to be useful for the NICs. Thus, each profile concludes with some research reflections/questions. These reflections provide great opportunities for discussion in NIC meetings and talking with your MTEP change coach about potential responses. We are not expecting NICs to respond directly to the Research Hub related to these reflection questions; rather, we hope these questions are useful to your NIC in moving your work forward.
In the most recent interviews with some NICs and NIC leaders, we realized that no MTEP 2.0 NICs have well-documented or defined plans for handling turnover (of NIC leaders, NIC members, institutional partners, administrators, etc.); simultaneously, 100% of MTEP 2.0 NICs have experienced turnover of some type, even if that was mainly in adding more members to a NIC. Thus, one reflection question we added to all of the profiles was "How might your NIC document your efforts, processes, and decisions to plan for future turnover in NIC members?"
MTEP 2.0 will also be providing some resources to support strengthening plans for handling turnover (save the date for the NIC-Cast on Oct. 6, 3:30-4:30 p.m. CDT). In our August newsletter, the recap of the June 2025 Transforming Institutions Conference included a short video of Wendy Smith narrating a conference poster presentation, which had a more expansive set of questions related to planning for turnover. The video also explains that from our research data, we are seeing four interrelated domains for handling turnover: culture, processes, documentation, and communication.
Using what we are learning from MTEP 2.0 research data to translate research into practical NIC supports is a key purpose of MTEP 2.0 research. Across the coming year (which is the last year of our current NSF grant), we’ll be reaching out to ask for some additional interviews of NIC leaders and NIC members, along with spring/summer requests for a last round of Program Progress/Completer Surveys and Team Reports. We also anticipate more supports for helping NICs tell your stories with the Partnership Profiles as tools.
We hope everyone is having a great start to their school year, and thank you again for providing us with data to help us improve MTEP 2.0 and share resources with you.