Fixing the Potholes on the Road to Academic Success: A Curriculum for Engineering Educators to Create and Sustain Meaningful Change

Abstract

Engineering education has faced significant and deep-rooted challenges, including outdated curricula and pedagogical practices, limited access for underrepresented groups, and persistent diversity gaps, that collectively undermine its ability to equip future generations of engineers for a rapidly evolving world. The changes that are needed to reform engineering education are monumental and highlight not only the need for systemic transformation of educational structures but also a fundamental shift in the mindsets of those leading the change. Faculty, professional staff, and administrators must develop knowledge and skills that go beyond their disciplinary training to drive sustainable reform. This article presents a professional development curriculum that has, for over a decade, equipped academic change agents with the tools to implement lasting change. Drawing on experiences from teams supported by the National Science Foundation’s Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (NSF RED) program, the article highlights proven strategies that academic change agents can master and situates them within the broader literature on change in higher education. Specifically, we focus on how academic change agents can develop capacity for systems thinking, build their ability to communicate effectively with various community members, leverage strategic partnerships to increase impact, and cultivate a supportive community of practice with other change agents.

1. Introduction

The literature on engineering education contains numerous calls for the reform of both the educational practices as well as the underlying mindsets within the fields (A. Kezar et al., 2015; NSF, 2010; ASEE & NAE, 2024; NAE, 2004; Burke & McNeill, 2011; AAU, n.d.). And yet, despite the numerous calls for reform, many years of funding through a variety of foundations and organizations, and a staggering number of small-scale pedagogical advances made by individual faculty members, “engineering education has failed to substantially change its educational practice and mindset and fails miserably in most measures of diversity and access” (ASEE & NAE, 2024). The report sponsored by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) and the National Academy for Engineering (NAE) states (ASEE & NAE, 2024):

“We are at a crossroads in engineering education, where we can either continue to incrementally improve a system handed to us by our past or create a movement to design a new system that addresses the challenges we face now and into the future.”

The same report provides recommendations on how engineering education could be improved to address those challenges, including the following: creating flexible program structures to remove barriers to improvement; employing evidence-based pedagogy; creating inclusive and diverse learning environments that support broader demographics and addressing the racial and gender disparities pervasive in higher education; revising institutional and disciplinary structures/processes to better prepare campuses for student-centered education; developing and utilizing strategic partnerships; and changing the engineering mindset. These recommendations are much broader than small innovations at the course or program level that impact the manner in which faculty deliver content and students learn, and they point to the need to reimagine the structures, policies, processes, and human-development approaches that universities currently utilize, and to fundamentally change organizational cultures.

The magnitude of the required changes is monumental. Based on the firsthand experiences of the authors of this paper, the skills that faculty will need to succeed in this effort include, among others:

• Capacity for systems thinking: This includes the ability to work collaboratively across disciplinary and departmental silos, and understand and work within the constraints of the existing structural and procedural systems within institutions of higher education to deliver sustainable outcomes that are meaningful and beneficial to all community members.
• Ability to communicate effectively with various community members: This includes the ability to apply knowledge of cultures, values, and motivations to communicate effectively with a variety of community members and deliver persuasive arguments that go beyond the presentation of hard data (culture is used in this discussion in reference to learned and shared values, beliefs, and behaviors of a group of people (Bennett, 1998)), as well as the ability to drive the development of a shared vision.
• Ability to leverage strategic partnerships for impact: This includes the ability to identify potential strategic partnerships and build and maintain necessary relationships.

The skills required to implement solutions that effectively address these needs significantly exceed the typical training of most engineering faculty members. In the context of creating meaningful and sustainable changes in engineering education, this paper focuses on the role of an academic change agent (e.g., faculty, administrator, staff) and considers the skills academic change agents need to acquire and practice to become successful catalysts for change. Fullan (1993) suggests that “educators need the tools to engage in change productively.” Reinholz et al. (2021) provide a comprehensive review of how change theory has been used in implementing educational change in STEM between 1995 and 2019, and they conclude that discipline-based education researchers play “a primary role in initiating and sustaining change efforts in STEM higher education, but many lack formal training in educational or organizational change.” Grupp (2014) suggests that faculty change agents need to develop skills that enable them to “understand how the institution works, anticipate faculty needs, and collaborate with campus leaders.”

On that basis, we present a few highlights from a professional development curriculum that has been used since 2012 to support the professional development of academic change agents, and since 2015 to support the academic change agents funded through the National Science Foundation’s Revolutionizing Engineering Departments’ program (NSF IUSE/PFE:RED). We discuss the value that the curriculum has had on RED teams, with a specific focus on the experiences of two RED teams, University X and University Y. Both University X and University Y are public R1 institutions, with more than 15,000 undergraduate students. The RED program at University X is housed in an engineering department that offers two majors and supports 650 undergraduate students, of whom 46% are female. The department has over 50 faculty members, and 10 of them are core members of the RED team. The RED program at University Y is housed in an engineering department that also offers two majors, and supports 687 undergraduate students, of which 20% are female. The department has over 30 faculty members, and 5 of them are core members of the RED team. The RED grant is focused on one of the offered majors, which supports 143 undergraduates, approximately 30% of whom are female.

Through a formal interview process with two RED teams, which have been involved in their change efforts for 3+ years, we explore various barriers and difficulties that those teams have encountered along the way, and suggest how academic change agents can utilize elements of our professional development curriculum to better prepare themselves to deal with such issues. The initial presentation of the Making Academic Change Happen (MACH) curriculum has been shared in Williams et al. (2022). This paper, in addition to highlighting some new elements of the curriculum, positions the value of the overall curriculum with respect to the professional development needs identified in change literature.

NSF RED projects provide a unique setting to study large-scale changes in engineering education as they place a particular emphasis on cultural change as a means for propagating and sustaining curricular change, and are focused on department-level efforts. As part of this paper, we identify learnable skills that have been particularly useful to RED teams during their change implementation periods, and offer recommendations that can help change agents, regardless of their disciplinary or professional background, make broader and more sustainable impacts with their change initiatives.

2. Literature Review

A lot has been written about why change efforts frequently fail, yet relatively little has been said about the specific knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) that academic change agents should have to overcome the common barriers to change in institutions of higher education. While not focused on academic institutions, Kotter (1995) provides a comprehensive overview of the common reasons behind failure of organizational change efforts, and implies that successful change efforts should include, among other elements, the involvement of multiple individuals who are working together toward a common vision for change. Vlachopoulos (2021) also highlights the importance of including as many individuals as possible in the planning process, ensuring transparent decision-making processes, and practicing “communicative competence” that reflects the respect of the organizational values, as well as the values and expectations of the change agents. Tagg (2012) provides a detailed history of academic change efforts and highlights the need for change agents to develop a unified vision of change. Henderson et al. (2011) synthesize strategies for implementing change in undergraduate education into four main types, and discuss the value of ongoing faculty development and support to overcome common barriers to change. Borrego et al. (2010) suggest that successful change results from change agents maintaining a focus on internal and external community groups, rather than attempting to implement a specific innovation. Many other researchers have examined barriers to change, ranging from structural barriers (e.g., institutional history, organizational silos, decentralization) to more active barriers (e.g., hesitancy of faculty and administrators to engage in change efforts) (Børte et al., 2020; Breen et al., 2025; Kang et al., 2022; A. J. Kezar & Holcombe, 2020). To address some of these issues, scholars have developed toolkits for change leadership to help leaders overcome the barriers and struggles in change (Elrod et al., 2024).

A. Kezar et al. (2015) identify common and problematic implicit theories of change that faculty believe to be true and that limit the success of academic change efforts. Those include, among others, the beliefs that: (i) change can be started without a deep understanding of the underlying problems; (ii) change is a fully rational process, devoid of the political influences; (iii) meaningful change in engineering education must happen at the department level, not the institutional level; and (iv) data is sufficient to convince people to change. These implicit theories of change are commonly held by faculty members, occasionally even by experienced change agents, and suggest a need for academic change agents who are good systems thinkers who can envision their change projects in the context of more complex institutional systems, which include organizational cultures and politics, in addition to established structures and processes. Reinholz and Andrews (2024) point to the increased interest in formal theories of change in STEM education and suggest that “learning about and using theory is challenging because many of us have no formal training in this area and relevant scholarship comes from many different disciplines.”

Verhulst and Lambrechts (2015) cite a number of studies that look at the reasons for resistance to change efforts in organizations. They imply that resistance is “considered as the most important obstacle in Organisational change management, whereby it forms a key element of the study of organizational change” and conclude that literature is lacking in “specific guidance on the content of communication, channels and frequency” that change agents should employ. Tibi and McLeod (2011) provide an overview of the common misconceptions that faculty often hold about change efforts, and suggest that “continuous professional development” is very important. Furthermore, they suggest that “successful organizational change depends on making changes to the organization’s culture, which involves changing the attitudes, values, and beliefs of individuals within it” (Tibi & McLeod, 2011). This need for individual and organizational change is supported by more recent work by A. Kezar et al. (2023). Balogun and Jenkins (2003) highlight the notion that “change cannot be reified as something ‘done’ to individuals … yet in practice it is still common for change to be seen as something that can be placed on individuals.” This again implies that change agents need skills that enable them to connect with people, and be able to build a shared vision with an adequate representation of the individuals that will be impacted by the change effort.

Creating a shared vision for change (Doten-Snitker et al., 2021), and being able to work collaboratively with different stakeholders who will be impacted by the change effort, requires skills that faculty and other academic change agents typically aren’t trained in, including skills like, being able to develop and maintain psychologically safe teaming environments where individuals can openly share ideas and resolve conflicts and disagreements in a constructive manner, and being able to craft effective stories for why change needs to happen that will be persuasive to broad groups of stakeholders.

Long-lasting and effective changes to engineering education that will address the needs outlined in ASEE and NAE’s (2024) report must include structural, cultural, and organizational changes in support of curricular innovations. While the literature hints at the importance of providing academic change agents with continuous professional development and support, what that development and support should look like has not been addressed widely. The purpose of the following sections is to describe the highlights of a research-based curriculum developed for academic change agents, which helps them to build knowledge, skills, and abilities that enhance their capacity to carry out successful and sustainable change efforts.

3. Background

The development of the original framework for the Making Academic Change Happen (MACH) curriculum, offered since 2012 (Ingram et al., 2014), was influenced by major findings from Borrego et al. (2010) and Henderson et al. (2011). Initially offered as a multi-day in-person workshop, targeting change agents ranging from emerging engineering educators to Deans, the curriculum focused on helping workshop attendees develop a shared vision for change, learn tools that could help them implement change efforts, develop a new mindset regarding change, and create a plan for action on their home campus (Ingram et al., 2014).

Table 1. Overview of the topics from the original MACH curriculum (circa 2015).

Session Title	Session Goal
Personalities and Identity	Identify personalities and traits (both personal and professional traits) that influence how faculty engage with organizational change.
Cultures	Explore how departmental and institutional culture, traditions, and rituals influence faculty engagement, resistance, and adaptation in academic change projects.
Elevator Pitch	Equip participants to craft concise, compelling messages that clearly communicate the purpose, impact, and urgency of their academic change initiatives.
Building Teams	Guide participants through the stages of team development—forming, storming, norming, and performing—to build resilient, collaborative teams that can effectively drive academic change.
Difficult Conversations	Identify and practice skills for navigating difficult conversations that arise during academic change with an emphasis on fostering trust within and outside change teams.
Buy-In	Develop strategies to build stakeholder buy-in by proactively identifying and navigating barriers to academic change.
Partnerships	Equip participants to identify, initiate, and cultivate strategic partnerships that support academic change.
Identifying and Managing Risks	Help participants identify strategies for managing risks in academic change through an interactive game.
Engines and Anchors	Help participants capture factors that inhibit/enable success of their academic change initiative with a visual metaphor to a boat’s engines and anchors.
SMART Goals and Action Plan	Enable participants to set SMART goals and develop actionable plans that drive focused, measurable progress in academic change initiatives.

includes an overview of the topics covered in the original MACH curriculum.

Over time, the curriculum was augmented based on research literature on change agency and theories of academic change (Hyde, 2017; A. Kezar & Lester, 2011; A. Kezar et al., 2015; Ngai et al., 2020, etc.), and literature related to organizational change management (Kotter & Cohen, 2002; Kotter, 2012; Heath & Heath, 2010; Grenny et al., 2022; Heen & Stone, 2010; etc.), but the focus always remained on translating the research findings into specific learnable skills that academic change agents can continually practice across various academic contexts.

In 2015, the MACH curriculum became an integral part of the National Science Foundation’s Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (NSF IUSE/PFE:RED) program through the funding of a separate project called the RED Participatory Action Research (REDPAR) project. The purpose of this effort was to prepare faculty and staff engaged in RED projects to create academic change on their campuses, to build and support a consortium of RED teams, and to study the process of academic change. REDPAR, is a collaborative effort, bringing together practitioners from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, and researchers from University of Washington’s Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity (CERSE), and it represents a unique practice-research partnership that links practical, applied professional and faculty development focused on making academic change, with research that identifies important change practices that emerge in RED projects.

The REDPAR team has been able to work closely with 30 teams focused on engineering education reforms in undergraduate education (RED Consortium), with several more teams being added to the Consortium at the time of writing of this paper. Our team has had a unique opportunity to study how change happens in engineering education, as RED projects go beyond curricular reform and also consider the cultural and organizational aspects that are critical in supporting curricular innovations. Furthermore, the RED program has allowed the REDPAR team to observe RED cohorts working over periods of five or more years, and has provided opportunities for cross-cohort interactions and mentoring. Through our work with the RED teams, the MACH curriculum has evolved to include more topics addressed in the literature as critical elements of successful change, from communicating across organizational cultures to establish stronger strategic relationships, to developing shared vision and realistic goals, to exploring institutional barriers to change and strategies for mitigating those barriers. The MACH curriculum is continually evolving, reflecting the research-practice nature of our work, and it plays a central role in our work with the RED teams.

The REDPAR team engages with the teams through a number of different touchpoints, all of which provide opportunities for professional development of the faculty and staff change agents. We begin working with RED teams through a StartUp Session (Williams et al., 2020), which helps newly funded RED teams to start scaffolding their shared vision for change and building a successful collaborative team. We also hold regular virtual meetings where the entire RED Community of Practice (RED CoP) is invited to engage in discussions around common topics of interest, and we host the annual RED Consortium in-person meetings where teams can engage with new curricular materials on change making, and exchange experiences of successful and unsuccessful change efforts. Through these opportunities, RED teams are continually exposed to professional development opportunities and supported by members of the REDPAR team and other RED teams. Newer RED teams also benefit from mentors, members of more experienced RED teams, who can offer guidance and reassurance to novice change agents. As the following sections of the paper suggest, while the MACH curriculum is important in helping change agents develop individual skills necessary to implement their efforts, the presence of an active Community of Practice (CoP) and mentors adds considerable value to their efforts. This finding is consistent with the results reported by A. Kezar et al. (2018).

The MACH curriculum as applied to the RED projects is reflective of the constructivist theory of learning, which “suggests that individuals will need to engage in an experiment with change processes, and once they hit a barrier, they will be more open to examining alterations in their perspective” (A. Kezar et al., 2015). The RED Consortium is a perfect place to engage in this type of learning because facilitators can offer continuous training and create opportunities for discussion and sense-making throughout the process. Each team can engage with the training in a context relevant to their change project and can revisit the curriculum at times when they hit specific barriers and need additional support. As suggested by the Principal Investigator from University Y, one of the two RED teams interviewed for this paper,

“When I think about it, it’s like, when you start you need some help, but you don’t really know what you need. And so you kinda have to flail around for a little bit before you recognize. Oh, because you know it’s all just theoretical stuff until you start, right. No, we’re not gonna have conflicts. No, that won’t be us. We won’t have any conflicts. No, we’ve got that. We’ve got that figured out. So once we get into it for a little while, then it becomes clear about where you need help. But I do think there is a time [where] you just gotta go in and kind of flail around a little bit until you realize that you’re kind of stuck, and you need somebody to help you.”

This idea is further emphasized by a faculty member from University X, the other RED team interviewed for this paper,

“I think these questions asked in retrospect assume we knew what we needed to learn to carry on effective changemaking, and there was some consensus around these factors. From my perspective, I think we discovered things that worked organically as we moved through the process and latched onto what was valuable given what we needed at various times. I also do not think perceptions were uniform from individual to individual—there may have been some common perceptions on what was needed at different times, but much like the vision—my sense is that these perceptions may also have varied.”

4. Methodology

The interview protocol was created via a collaborative effort between the REDPAR team’s research and practice members. The research is covered by an exemption from the IRB at the research team’s institution. A member of the REDPAR’s research team conducted two interviews (Interview Protocol is included in Appendix A), which lasted for 45–53 min, with a total of 3 RED team members. Interviews were recorded and transcribed via Zoom. An additional team member from one of the institutions responded to the questions via email and answered follow-up questions. The transcripts were reviewed and coded by the REDPAR team’s practice members to identify main themes. Following the thematic coding of the interview data, REDPAR team’s practice members applied a systematic process to select representative quotes for inclusion in this paper. For each major theme, coded excerpts were reviewed to identify quotes that most clearly articulated the core idea of the theme. Special emphasis was placed on identifying quotes that captured participants’ experiences in their own words. In cases where multiple quotes were available to highlight a theme, the selection was made based on clarity, succinctness, and contextual relevance.

This paper highlights narrative data that reflects the perceived benefits of the MACH curriculum on the RED teams. It does not include quantitative data on the impact that the RED change projects have had on students or institutions at large. However, many RED teams have examined the effectiveness of their change efforts in more quantitative ways, particularly in terms of how they benefited students or aligned with broader organizational change efforts at their institutions. For example, RED teams have reported impacts of their change efforts on: increased sense of belonging of engineering students (Chen et al., 2021; O’Hara et al., 2020; Haas et al., 2025); increased retention (Haas et al., 2025); development of engineering and professional identities (Han et al., 2022; Rover et al., 2021; Thomas et al., 2023); increase in students’ funds of knowledge (Chen et al., 2021); increase in the ability of students to work collaboratively and gain a sense of ownership in engineering knowledge (Gomez et al., 2017); increase in ability of students to develop a debugging mindset (Duwe et al., 2022); improvement in educational experiences of neurodiverse students (Chrysochoou et al., 2022); improvement in professional proficiency of engineering students (Trinh et al., 2024; Radhakrishnan et al., 2023); and the ability to align the RED project work with the broader strategic planning process for an institution (Webster et al., 2025), among other impacts.

5. Results and Discussion

5.1. Teaching Change Agents How to Build Capacity for Systems Thinking

5.1.1. The Common Problem

When asked about some of the difficulties their change team faced in the early years of their project, Principal Investigator from University Y discussed the need to broadly understand their university context and institutional barriers better, which would help them be realistic in terms of their plans. They suggested they needed to understand “what’s in the realm of possibility from a time/money [perspective]” and the need to understand the problem from the perspective of institutional barriers. They concluded by expressing a wish that their team had done a better job with understanding the “broader context within which the department has to operate, and even other programs within the department” because “sometimes there was kind of a lack of understanding of the reality of the Institution that we have to work in.”

Academics often underestimate the difficulty of implementing and sustaining change within their institutions. What often appears to be a straightforward alteration, even to a single course, can create widespread ripple effects, with intricate, individual-level impacts on people, daily processes, and underlying systems that impact many community members. Additionally, when change efforts are long-lasting, it can be difficult for change agents to accurately identify the connections between various direct and indirect impacts, further complicating the effort. For change projects to succeed, it is crucial for academic change agents to build capacity for systems thinking, which in turn can create a deeper understanding of the nuanced impacts that a single change effort can create.

Systems thinking is challenging to acquire, especially for highly specialized faculty and staff who may lack the broader institutional perspective necessary for such an approach. A. Kezar et al. (2015) suggest that STEM faculty are often “quite independent and autonomous even from other departments”, but that successful change initiatives require a broader institutional perspective. They provide an example in which some of the change teams they studied struggled even with relatively simple things like “considering ways to bring in professional development from centers for teaching and learning when their initiative focused on professional development became problematic” (A. Kezar et al., 2015).

5.1.2. What Change Agents Can Do

In our work with RED teams, we have found that Bolman and Deal’s four-frame model of organizations (2008) can serve as a valuable framework for systematically considering the various dimensions of institutions of higher education, relative to a specific change project. Bolman and Deal (2008) consider four fundamentally different frames (or lenses) of looking at organizations, namely the structural, political, human resources, and symbolic frames. These frames serve as cognitive lenses and help leaders and organizations direct their attention to what they consider important.

The structural frame views the change unit like a machine, organized by roles, responsibilities, practices, routines, and incentives. These manifest as formal positions (e.g., faculty ranks), committee assignments, course loads, research expectations, and institutional policies like tenure and promotion. These structures define what individuals do and what’s considered important. The human resources frame sees change units as collections of individuals with unique goals, needs, and identities. It recognizes that even within a shared discipline, people have diverse personal and professional commitments. When considering change, it’s crucial to attend to these varied individual experiences and perceptions. The political frame highlights that interactions within a department are shaped by power, status, positioning, and political coalitions. Power can stem from formal roles (e.g., chair vs. professor), professional success, or aspects of identity like race or gender. Power dynamics are ever-present and influence decision making. Successful change, whether top–down or bottom–up, requires building coalitions, negotiation, and influencing competing groups to ensure efforts aren’t wasted. Finally, the symbolic frame focuses on the cultural artifacts, language, knowledge, myths, values, and vision that guide a department’s members. It’s about the underlying ways of thinking that give meaning to formal structures. For example, while department meetings are a common structure, their actual meaning and practice can vary wildly based on departmental values.

This four-frame approach can help change agents broaden their understanding of their organizations, therefore enabling them to develop change initiatives that are more responsive to the needs and constraints of the overall institution. However, by helping to shape what individuals see and how they interpret issues, these lenses can also act as what Vuori (2018) calls “cognitive blinders,” preventing change agents from seeing other viewpoints.

The process of applying Bolman and Deal’s model can be relatively simple, especially if conducted in a group setting where multiple individuals engaged in the change process can collaboratively identify potential obstacles, by focusing on one frame at a time, before synthesizing findings. This exercise should be revisited at different stages of a long change effort, as contextual circumstances might change. We recommend that change agents, regardless of where they are in their change making effort, identify potential obstacles and barriers that might impact the success of their project, without immediately trying to identify solutions, by focusing on:

• Rules, procedures, processes, policies, hierarchies, chains of command, and technologies at their institution [Structural frame],
• Needs, skills, problem-solving processes, training, and relationships among employees at their institution [Human resources frame],
• Power, conflict, and competition for scarce resources at their institution [Political frame],
• Cultures, values, rituals, traditions, shared meaning, ceremonies, other forms of symbolism at their institution [Symbolic frame].

Initially, this can be very hard to do, especially for change agents who are working alone and might not be well-informed about the overall institutional structure, and this is where the value of collaboration (including multidisciplinary) can be emphasized. The more people are involved in this identification process, the richer the list of potential barriers will be. Putting together teams that involve key members with different disciplinary backgrounds also helps. The teams should be appropriately multidisciplinary for the tasks at hand. Teams may include a change expert and/or learning scientist, for example.

It is also important for change agents to first focus only on identifying barriers, because by trying to articulate solutions immediately, they will limit their ability to identify barriers for which they currently have no good solution. The barriers that are of concern across multiple frames might be prioritized because of their wide-ranging impact. Any successful strategies for managing some of these challenges will have to be reflective of the broader institutional contexts and circumstances. For more information about the use of this model in this context, readers are encouraged to look at (Andrijcic et al., 2024; Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, 2024).

5.2. Teaching Change Agents to Become Better Communicators: Cultures, Values, and Motivations as Key Elements of Communication

5.2.1. The Common Problem

Building what Vlachopoulos (2021) calls “communicative competence” is critically important for any change agents. The ability to communicate effectively becomes essential not only when change agents have to collaborate with others in psychologically safe ways to effect change, but also when they engage in the process of building strategic relationships, when they seek to develop a shared vision, or when they engage in the process of obtaining buy-in. Effective communication reflects knowledge of and respect for the values of various micro-cultures (cultures present in small organizational units that comprise a larger institution).

Kotter, Kezar, and many other scholars of change discuss the importance of building a shared vision as a foundation for transformational and sustainable change (Doten-Snitker et al., 2021; Kotter, 2012; A. Kezar, 2023; A. J. Kezar et al., 2022). “Shared vision brings a group of people into alignment as a coalition and force for change. Shared vision is inclusive and empowering. Rather than focus on buy-in, successful change agents create opportunities for the coalition to develop goals and plans together.” (Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, 2018a).

When discussing the importance of the process of building a shared vision, a faculty member from University X suggested that a “key takeaway for me was the importance of continually developing a shared vision.” They also highlighted the importance of obtaining buy-in from their colleagues, and suggested that the REDPAR team’s training on how to deal with buy-in was “very important in shaping my thinking about how to approach buy-in from the perspective of the values of the stakeholder of interest—thus finding common ground where mutual values could be advanced.”

Successful change agents are those who can engage a large range of interested parties in the shared vision development process. But having the ability to successfully engage many community members in the process of sharing ideas for what the vision of change might entail requires skills that many faculty members do not have. It requires an understanding of the cultures, values, and motivations of various groups.

5.2.2. What Change Agents Can Do

Becoming a better communicator who can effectively talk about the desired change with a range of stakeholders, bring together people with potentially differing ideas of what the change effort should achieve to create a unified vision, and deal with the ever-present naysayers, takes a lot of practice, but these skills can be learned by change agents.

Our curriculum contains multiple elements that are focused on communication, and only a few will be highlighted here. The best practices for building a shared vision, identified through our work with the RED teams, are available in (Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, 2018a; Doten-Snitker et al., 2021). The process of building a shared vision takes time and effort, and will require brainstorming sessions, collaborative efforts, and communication with individuals and groups that might hold differing values and have different communication styles. For the best brainstorming, it is important that individuals engaged in the process feel safe to share their opinions and concerns, and that requires that change agents are also able to develop psychologically safe environments and manage potential conflict effectively. These skills can also be learned and practiced, and are described in (Andrijcic et al., 2025; Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, 2025).

When it comes to communicating about change with various impacted groups, a faculty member from University X reflected on several aspects related to communicating change that their team encountered. They suggested that being able to “articulate overarching objectives in ways that aligned with various stakeholder values” was critically important in their conversations with impacted groups, and that “communicating change with different stakeholder groups was also very important.” They concluded that “thinking about what types of changes needed to be communicated to which stakeholder groups, by whom and when” is essential for continued project effectiveness.

This suggests that communication should be planned carefully and intentionally, because not every group will need to know about the same aspect of the change effort, not every group will respond to the messenger in the same manner, nor will every group be motivated in the same way, but all groups will want to know that the proposed change reflects the shared values of the group. Therefore, communication efforts should never be left as last-minute efforts, but should be planned and executed carefully. Best practices on how to communicate change, identified through our work with the RED teams, are available in (Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, 2017).

Change agents need to practice becoming versatile storytellers who can discuss the project with various audiences in a “manner that appeals to various motivations, to allow stakeholders to find elements of interest to them” (Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, 2017). Tools that can help change agents become effective communicators include: prepared versions of talking points that will be presented to different audiences, designed so that each version will be reflective of a particular group’s values and needs; a communication plan that outlines who will be contacted, through which mode, when, and what will be discussed; when possible, connections between the proposed change and existing efforts (e.g., strategic plan, aligned funded opportunity, etc.).

The best communicators are those who can appeal to shared values, understand how their own values and experiences influence their change efforts, and respectfully navigate the differences between their own values and priorities and those of the groups that will be impacted by their change efforts. This requires successful change agents to engage in the process of discovery of self and others. Our curriculum includes elements through which change agents can explore their identities and values, and identify how those influence their assumptions and behaviors, as well as their change efforts. The curriculum also introduces change agents to the concept of cultures and asks them to identify ways through which they might learn about subjective cultures of others (i.e., about the informally learned and unconsciously shared ways of being and doing).

Being able to understand those shared ways of doing and being is critically important for change agents since successful change projects must operate within existing institutional contexts and cultures. In the words of the Principal Investigator from University X,

“thinking about our values and how they play into what we’re trying to do with the curriculum change and the cultural change around our educational programs made us pause and reflect and think about the effort in a way that we hadn’t done earlier.”

Another critical element related to communicating change is the common belief among engineering faculty that data alone can be very convincing to others and can motivate change. Heath and Heath (2010) oppose this notion, and A. Kezar et al.’s (2015) research findings suggest that “STEM faculty downplayed the human dynamics (e.g., developing personal relationships for persuasion) involved in change and assumed data and research would drive the change process.” Our curriculum addresses this challenge by encouraging change agents to practice active listening to gain a deeper understanding of the needs of various groups, and by urging change agents to develop more persuasive arguments for the value of their change efforts. It does so by guiding them to consider how aspects of personal and disciplinary identities and cultures may contribute to resistance, and by helping them reframe their efforts in terms of shared values that resonate with their colleagues. Emphasis is placed on appealing to personal and shared values, which are often more compelling than potentially contentious data or metrics. Similarly, encouraging students to communicate what they are gaining from the ongoing change can be very compelling for buy-in from faculty and other community members. Student storytelling backed with supporting data can be a very effective tool for change agents.

5.3. Teaching Change Agents How to Leverage Strategic Partnerships for Impact

5.3.1. The Common Problem

In his book “Leading Change,” Kotter suggests “No one individual … is ever able to develop the right vision, communicate it to large numbers of people, eliminate all key obstacles, generate short-term wins, lead and manage dozens of change projects, and anchor new approaches deep in the organization’s culture” (Kotter, 2012). If we consider the types of changes that are called for in the ASEE and NAE’s (2024) report on engineering education, we can see the critical need for academic change agents to develop skills in building and maintaining strategic partnerships. It is important for change agents to realize that, unlike ad hoc collaborations, strategic partnerships are intentional and build on mutual interests and complementary strengths. Consider a faculty member who wants their institution to become a leader in employing evidence-based pedagogy. Alone, this faculty member will struggle to create a deep and long-lasting impact. However, by developing relationships with: a Dean who shares their passion for evidence-based teaching; with the assessment office that can help develop meaningful assessment tools, collect and analyze data; with the Office for Teaching Excellence that can help promote faculty development workshops; and with the Marketing Office that can help promote stories about happy and successful students, suddenly the impact of this faculty member’s work becomes much wider.

5.3.2. What Change Agents Can Do

A faculty member from University X commented, “Building strategic partnerships was important in honing my thinking on finding win-wins with colleagues as we moved forward to make a case for curriculum change.” But, how does one go about creating and maintaining strategic partnerships?

Anecdotal evidence from our broader work with change teams suggests that faculty often work together with those they feel comfortable with, rather than with those from whom they might derive the most added value. For any meaningful strategic partnership to work, a change agent must consider not only the specific benefits that they would achieve by forming a new relationship or strengthening an existing one, but also the reciprocity and relationality involved in sustained partnerships. As indicated by the quote above from University X, the potential relationship must be mutually beneficial, a win-win, so a change agent must also consider how they might be able to benefit the other individual or group, now or in a definite future period of time. The benefit might include new skills, new resources, new connections, or perhaps access to something that is not currently available to change agents or to their partners.

The MACH curriculum utilizes a model that suggests that strategic relationships need to be actively managed by identifying individuals who can have the most impact in advancing a specific change effort at a specific point in time. Impact, in this case, is measured in the form of two variables: influence that a potential partner might have on implementing or promoting a specific change effort, and support that a potential partner might have for a specific change effort or for a change agent. An academic change agent might have a large number of strategic partners (e.g., research collaborators, department colleagues, industry connections) but it would be a waste of time and resources for that change agent to indiscriminately reach out to all connections for help, without understanding which partner might be in best position to help (if any), and which may have sufficient enough incentives to help at the particular time. A consideration of reciprocity should always be a key factor in identifying the level of support that a strategic partner might have at a specific point in time. If a change agent asks a strategic partner for help in promoting/propagating their change effort, what can they offer in return, now or in a definite future period of time?

In our model describing the strategic relationship-building process, potential partners are mapped into 4 quadrants: high influence/high support, high influence/low support, low influence/high support, and low influence/low support. The premise of the model is that not all individuals in a change agent’s network are equally prepared and positioned to help advance a specific change effort at a specific point in time. The goal then for a change agent is to identify those who are critical in helping to promote and advance a specific change initiative at a particular point in time. Our curriculum provides change agents with tools to help identify, establish, and sustain strategic partnerships (Margherio et al., 2018; Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, 2018b). With that in mind, our model suggests the following strategies for developing strategic relationships:

• High-influence and high-support quadrant: Change agents should make time to manage these relationships, but they should preserve the overall time spent and develop focused advocacy for assistance. Change agents should utilize the “Help Them Help You” strategy, providing strategic partners in this quadrant with the necessary resources and tools to advocate on their behalf. For example, change agents can prepare a set of talking points that can be shared with these partners, so that if an opportunity arises, the partners can advocate on their behalf, utilizing consistent messaging.
• High-influence and low-support quadrant: Change agents should increase the overall time spent on trying to develop better relationships and practice behaviors that can neutralize the lack of support from these individuals. Change agents should cultivate relationships with these individuals immediately and practice active listening skills to gain a deeper understanding of the lack of support.
• Low-influence and high-support quadrant: Change agents should use time to thank individuals in this quadrant profusely and cultivate them as institutional allies, but they should reduce the overall time spent on relationship management.
• Low-influence and low-support quadrant: Change agents need to remain polite, but greatly reduce time spent on relationship management. Change agents should remove individuals in this quadrant from the realm of concern for the change effort in question.

This model provides an intentional approach for identifying new strategic partnerships (if the high influence quadrants are empty) and for managing existing partnerships. The model is dynamic, suggesting the need to periodically update the levels of influence and support that specific individuals or groups have on a specific change project.

5.4. Beyond the Individual: The Power of Community of Practice in Professional Growth

A. Kezar and Gehrke (2017), Buckley and Du Toit (2010), and many others advocate for the establishment of academic Communities of Practice (CoPs). Generally speaking, CoPs are groups of individuals who share common concerns or passions, and interact regularly to help each other do better with their shared interest (Wenger, 2011). One of the key elements of our work with the RED teams has been the establishment and management of the RED CoP. Our REDPAR team supports the RED CoP through regular virtual calls, an annual in-person conference, as well as by providing consulting and mentoring to RED teams.

Our work with RED teams has indicated that while developing individual change agent skills is important, having a community of support that can serve as a sounding board for ideas, provide reassurance, and offer opportunities for new idea generation is critically important. In addition, it has been important to the RED community that the CoP is interdisciplinary, inter-institutional, inter-cohort, long-standing, and supported by facilitators (Güler et al., 2024). In addition to facilitating change agency among participants, the CoP creates a sense of collective agency, solidarity, and shared identity among change agents, supporting continued change (Güler et al., 2024). To achieve changes in engineering education that can meet the demands outlined in ASEE & NAE’s 2024 report, academic change agents will have to start working together in more collaborative ways and recognize the value that comes from being able to share experiences, successes, and failures. An interviewed faculty member from University X suggested that:

“The willingness of other RED teams to be honest about where they had failed was extremely valuable in the [CoP] meetings. It cut through superficial talk to the nitty gritty of what had worked and what had failed, enabling newer teams to learn lessons and avoid paths they may have pursued.”

Another faculty member from University X reflected on the CoP by saying:

“And it’s been validating that there’s a lot of similar approaches and similar thought processes in parallel. So kind of the evolution of engineering education is happening very broadly.”

The PI from University Y also reflected on the value of the CoP by suggesting:

“One of the most valuable things is the connections to the other groups. You know certainly the scope of change that we’re trying to do, and looking at what other programs are doing. I think it gave us some confidence that we were doing something meaningful, and that the struggles that we had were not unique in that other folks who had made important changes had done the same thing. And you know we keep at it. We’re gonna be successful. So I think that was very helpful.”

Participants from the interviewed RED teams also reflected on the value of individualized consultations and mentoring. A faculty member from University X suggested that mentoring of newer teams by more experienced teams is a good strategy to preserve institutional and group knowledge. Another value of the CoP for the interviewed RED teams has been the opportunity for members of different RED teams to collaborate on new initiatives. A faculty member from University X suggested that while they didn’t find value in all CoP virtual calls, they appreciated the opportunities for discussion of shared interests, as they sometimes resulted in new cross-institutional opportunities: “One of the direct end results was, I’ve actually partnered with a couple of people I never would have before on some AI stuff.”

6. Conclusions

This paper presents some research-backed strategies that academic change agents can employ to become more successful, and which have been used to support the change efforts funded through the NSF RED program. The MACH curriculum was developed and is continually revised in response to the common change-making problems articulated in the higher education literature and as seen in the barriers unearthed through our collaborative research. Assessing the full value of the MACH curriculum remains challenging in the multi-factor setting of academic departments and is compounded by the absence of control groups that did not receive the curriculum, limiting comparative analysis of its effectiveness. Additionally, some RED teams reported that certain components of the curriculum initially seemed irrelevant to their circumstances, only recognizing their applicability later when they faced specific challenges requiring further support or skill development. This is in agreement with the aforementioned constructivist theory of learning (A. Kezar et al., 2015).

A faculty member from University X concluded the following:

“I think the whole RED Consortium idea develops culture-and-curriculum change capabilities and an individual within the consortium becomes different over time—with a range of capabilities that serve culture change for curriculum transformation. To me, the cumulative impact of the Start-up Workshops, Conferences, monthly virtual calls and individual consulting/discussions have left me with a broader set of knowledge, skills, mindset that supports evidence-based program-and-cultural transformation.”

We conclude this paper by offering the following insights to empower change agents in academia: The difference between a good idea and a successful change effort is in the ability of a change agent to see and manage a problem from multiple perspectives, understanding how a proposed change might impact intended and unintended individuals and groups (e.g., students, department colleagues, colleagues from a service department, Alumni, employers, etc.), and how it might fit within the existing institutional structures and processes. This usually calls for many players and thus requires a change agent who can guide the development of a shared vision for change, communicate effectively with various groups, manage sometimes difficult group dynamics, and develop and manage valuable strategic partnerships, among other things. Everyone can learn and practice the skills to become a more effective change agent! However, the development of individual skills and abilities only goes so far, and change agents can significantly benefit from participating in Communities of Practice where the support and mentorship of others can help change agents feel less alone and more hopeful in their ability to successfully implement and sustain change. A PI from University Y said:

“But I think beyond that it was a bit of a validation that the things we’re struggling with are not unique. Everybody else struggles with them. We’re not, you know, we’re not abnormally dysfunctional, so I think kind of having a shared sense of, you know the fact that other folks have done it and been successful is helpful in that.”