I hope your spring semesters of 2026 are going as well as they can. We know that some of the PROSPECT S-STEM hub members are in regions with significant ICE presence, and appreciate that basic needs like safety take precedence over teaching and learning college courses. Although I have many strong opinions related to the actions of the federal government, I want to focus this message on a different topic relevant for every collaborative project: planning for turnover.
Some of the PROSPECT propagation teams are looking at how S-STEM teams nurtured and sustained partnership trust, particularly through turnover (see related article, this issue). I am currently involved in a relatively new NSF I-USE project called, Sustaining Undergraduate STEM Transformation And Improvement Networks through Change Agent Turnover (SUSTAIN-CAT, NSF #2518434, 2025-2028). We proposed to use data we already have on hand from 118 collaborative teams across the past decade, to see how they handled personnel turnover. You would likely not be surprised to know that 100% of local PROSPECT S-STEM teams experienced turnover during their funded award. Our SUSTAIN CAT team was surprised to find that all 118 teams experienced personnel turnover, even in projects that lasted as little as 18 months.
We have focused on three categories of personnel turnover that can impact collaborative teams: team leaders, team members, and peripheral members (the latter are typically not involved directly in the effort, but can impact the effort, such as department chairs, deans, academic advisors, financial aid staff, etc.). We have also noticed that following personnel turnover, teams may sustain their efforts, ramp up or expand their efforts, or fizzle out. I invite you to ponder some of the teams you’ve been part of (whether for S-STEM or something else), and consider whether any of this resonates so far. What do you think contributed to the sustaining, expanding, or fizzling of a team after some type of personnel turnover?
Since turnover is inevitable in academia, what might your team (and PROSPECT) do to plan for turnover? How have you captured or sought to share institutional knowledge of people who were leaving your S-STEM leadership team? How do you go about convincing a new dean or financial aid person to support your S-STEM efforts? How does your team make space for a new person to bring new ideas or strategies to your team? Some researchers--including PROSPECT’s own Dr. Matthew Boyer at Clemson--study knowledge management, which is a key part of planning for turnover. Borrowing from Matthew’s work and preliminary SUSTAIN CAT investigations, here are five areas where you might focus some planning efforts; each is listed with some reflective questions:
1. Culture
a. How are we intentionally building relational activities into our team’s work?
b. How are we establishing foundational trust with new people?
c. What norms or community agreements does our group operate with, and how do we communicate those to new people?
d. How flexible is our team to be able to incorporate new ideas from new people?
2. Communication
a. How does our team communicate internally? Externally?
b. How transparent is our team communication, especially internally?
c. How do our communication practices include multiple modalities for different people to share thoughts, feedback, priorities, questions, etc.?
3. Processes
a. How do we set team agendas?
b. How does our team make decisions, particularly if there is not initial consensus?
c. What processes does our team have in place to hear from different voices?
d. What processes does our team have in place to regularly revisit our goals and strategies?
4. Documentation
a. What shared files/folders does our team have?
b. Who has access to team files? Who controls that access?
c. How does our team take notes and document our decisions?
d. How does our team document institutional knowledge, particularly of current team members (in advance of anyone potentially leaving the team)?
e. How well organized/indexed are our team’s files? How could a new person make sense of our documents?
5. Recruitment
a. For a new team member or team leader, if membership is not based on formal positions (e.g., the dept chair changes but the next dept chair will take the same role as the previous chair), who might you target to recruit to join your team?
b. How might you “sell” your team to convince a member to join or support your efforts?
c. What is the “currency” of the person you need to convince? (e.g., data, compelling stories, knowing the resources entailed, invoking hierarchical power structures, etc.)
When I think about PROSPECT S-STEM as a hub, I think we are doing pretty well in these areas, although there is always room for improvement. We have a great file organization and sharing system (mostly thanks to our amazing project manager, Camilla!); our various sub-teams take notes to document decisions; we have established routines for relational activities, hearing from different voices, revisiting goals, and incorporating new ideas. We could do more to consider how to document institutional knowledge of our current members, and ensure our project norms are regularly revisited.
Last summer, I (with colleague Dana Pomykal Franz from Mississippi State University) presented a poster about turnover at a conference; the poster and a video explanation are online here. Although the poster focused on turnover for collaborative teams seeking to improve secondary mathematics teacher preparation, the principles are the same for S-STEMs (and other collaborative teams).
Finally, later this year, SUSTAIN CAT will be drafting a set of modules to help teams in planning for turnover, containing practical steps/worksheets for working through the above ideas. Once the modules are ready for piloting, we will extend an invitation to PROSPECT teams to consider being among our paid piloters.
One reason turnover is on my mind is that as of January 2026, I have taken a different role at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I am now the director of UNL’s Center for Transformative Teaching (our version of a teaching and learning center). However, my role with PROSPECT remains the same. I will have less time overall to devote to research projects, but PROSPECT remains one of my top priorities. UNL has made great strides in the past five years to be a better transfer partner, but we still have more we can do, so I am glad to prioritize translating our PROSPECT work into practical local changes.
Wendy M. Smith