AGENDA ITEM: Administrators' Roundtable

DR. FERRINI-MUNDY: Okay, Karl is looking at me. That suggests that we are shifting to the next piece. I mean in this conversation we will be able to move to the next stage. Obviously this next component, an administrators' roundtable is meant also to keep focusing on the same general issue of kind of what is the motivation for a department or a center or an organization inside a university to actually create and support this kind of a position, an educational research position based within a disciplinary unit. Why do administrators, why have administrators supported the creation of such structures and such positions and then finally once we are clear about why such positions have been created how have administrators and people in positions who make decisions in the universities been able to actually achieve those goals; how have you been able to take your idea about having such departments or such faculty in these positions and make it work out, and so we will hear from four folks from different kinds of organizational levels and structures in universities, but I would like to begin just a little bit by making a couple of remarks myself.

At Michigan State University it turns out that the dean of natural science has a very strong interest in discipline based educational research work and has been a great supporter of trying to grow that.

At our place mathematics education faculty have been in the math department for more than 35 years in a strong and well-established group and so what I am learning both in my work at MSU and also through this conversation is that I think the context for mathematics and the science and engineering are quite different and have evolved very differently in different universities. So, at our place although we have a history of math ed in the math department we don't have a history of science ed in the science departments. We have a dean of natural science who wants to see something like this happen and so structurally where we are headed actually is toward a new cross-college department of science and mathematics education.

That would be a place that would be a sort of an intellectual home for scholars interested in research in the STEM disciplines and probably only a partial home for some in that there would be joint appointments and people would be connected both with disciplinary departments in natural science as well as departments in the college of education.

So, organizationally we don't have that in place but very strong steps toward making that happen and a lot of interesting issues that you are raising here I think will be issues for that new entity but in any case let us go to our panel and ask for 3 or 4 minutes of remarks about your situation in the position that you are in and then we will turn this into an overall general discussion.

Christopher, you are first.

DR. GOULD: I will start. Basically I think this is a pretty mature discipline and it also doesn't hurt that Carl Wieman who got a Nobel prize a couple of years ago has been out there very publicly talking up these issues.

I feel that since we have made the breakthrough to a community of scholars, how did it work for us? I think originally we did think we were going to hire somebody to take care of the labs but --

(Laughter.)

DR. GOULD: It was Karen Johnston actually and she walked in the door and suddenly she had a lot of very bright ideas and took right off in directions we hadn't understood and the same thing happened with Bob Beichner and I think with John Risley. They all were very creative and going in directions we didn't expect. I feel the key for us, and I am really concerned about some of these comments. The key for us was that they would be treated exactly the same as all other faculty. They would be judged by the same metrics which is publications, generating grant money. Thank you, thank you, thank you NSF. I think you have created this field by delivering the money and once people have got publications money student interest because it is an exciting field as we heard, drawing very bright young people and new disciplines pop up all the time, women's studies, gender studies. Will they make it? I don't know, but they will make it if they attract in bright students to work in these areas. I think we are seeing that happening in physics, with the publications. Physical Review has a section on educational research. It is amazing that that could happen, I mean for those of you who know this world of publishing.

So, having that infrastructure there is really critical. Joan, your comment I think was really important to bring all these groups together because I worry about people being picked off one by one in science departments. We have got to find a way to bring all of them together.

So, again a quick comment on the impact issue, I mean when people first came in the issue wasn't the okay teacher, but that certainly wasn't a critical point. I do think that there is this extra burden. We actually do have to have an impact on the department on its educational mission. So, to go and sort of hide off in the corner and doing your project I don't think that would work anymore for us. I am in the middle of a huge revitalization of our introductory calculus sequence and somewhat along the lines of McDermott that actually is in some sense the purview of the physics education research group.

I don't think we could have pulled that off if we didn't have, you know, just one person. It would be impossible. I would say we have a group of nominally three or four people involved in that. So, maybe it is sort of size issue when you get big enough that you can really have an impact and so I certainly would urge the people who are sitting in departments where they think they are just going to hire one person to fix their problems like Melanie was hired and we have got to find a way to kind of bundle that group together.

One final comment, I mean when I asked around on campus who else was going to be doing this kind of thing I got a big mix of responses but clearly the heavy lifting, the large numbers was of concern for people and I did get this sense of a push towards professors of the practice or instructors moving away from tenure track lines and one of the deans in the college of agricultural life sciences really didn't worry about what this meant for tenure if you start basically breaking up the traditional triumvirate of teaching, research and service and I don't know where that is going. I have 30 years as a tenured faculty member. Maybe it is easy for me to say that tenure is going to be gone in 10 or 20 years but I have to say it sure looks like that and if you count the numbers it is less than 50 percent of the people who are teaching are in a tenured position now and it is going to survive in the select institutions but I worry about where that is going.

One last comment that these two people need to file a grievance on tenure actions, Mike.

(Laughter.)

DR. WITTMANN: One of them did and lost. I don't understand how that could have happened actually.

DR. SIMMONS: As I mentioned, Lyman Briggs is completely interdisciplinary. A lot of our students are going to take their scholarship in the ordinary disciplines but what binds us all together is our common interest in undergraduate education and so we see it as quite natural that some of the faculty will direct all or part of their scholarship towards science and mathematics education and so we have had instances where we did a search a couple of years ago for example where we advertised for both chemistry and chemical education and said, "Whoever the best person is that is who we will hire," and we got one best in chemistry and one best in chemical education and we managed to hire both of them because they make a great team. We needed to sort of restart our chemistry group due to retirements and we have been very happy with that .

I should say that there are some faculty now tenured who started out primarily doing research in biology. That happens to be their discipline and their science education work counts at Briggs for tenure, promotion, merit raises but not in the disciplinary department. The other department recognizes their biological research and publications but completely ignores the other and so that is a balancing act that we have to do. We have to make sure. Luckily because, as Joan mentioned, the dean is very supportive, we are able to get them merit raises and tenure and promotion and all these things and that works out.

So, our theory of action is to have a good mix of people doing scientific research, people doing research on the science of science and math education because that creates the best community for us. In some ways we try to be a laboratory for creating best practice that can be then disseminated in the university but to know what the best practice is we have to do actual not just assessment as you say but actual research to know what works and test and try and have control groups and really prove what is working.

So, we just think it really is part of our community and part of who we are.

DR.BOYLAN: May I ask for just a quick point of clarification? Are the faculty in Lyman Briggs hired as pre-tenured faculty and do they get their tenure from Lyman Briggs or do they always get their tenure from disciplinary departments?

DR. SIMMONS: Yes, I should have said. Each tenure stream faculty member at Lyman Briggs has a 75 percent appointment in Briggs. We are the tenure home and they have a 25 percent appointment in the disciplinary department. We are part of the college of natural science. Many of our faculty have their 25 percent in another natural science department but some are in the social science college, the arts and letters college, engineering and what have you as depends on their discipline.

DR.SMITH: Myles, you weren't part of Lyman Briggs when you were at Michigan State?

DR. BOYLAN: It didn't exist when I was at Michigan State.

DR. SIMMONS: We have been around 38 years.

DR.BOYLAN: The salary line is all in Lyman Briggs?

DR. SIMMONS: Seventy-five percent is with us and 25 percent is with the discipline.

DR. HEPPERT: I think as far as a strategy I think it wouldn't be entirely disingenuous as many of you have already said to say that part of the strategy I think is to wheel the horse up to the gates and let the administration take it inside.

(Laughter.)

DR. HEPPERT: I say that from the following perspective. The way that educational research in the science disciplines has developed at our institution and I think this is true of many chemistry institutions has largely been driven through need, through as you suggested the benefit that the outcomes of the research can have for the department and for the institution and then it has been allowed to flourish and move off to a certain degree in its own direction, in our case more rather than less fortunately although I know that that is the reason I asked the question of whether the issues of promotion and tenure are well defined because it can be that those opportunities for moving off in your own direction will run up against barriers.

The kinds of opportunities that we have had develop at our institution that have helped to foster a very interdisciplinary perspective on science education and from our perspective by interdisciplinary I mean this crosses not only between the college and the school of engineering and pharmacy but it also crosses over into the school of education, have really been opportunistic. You know, initially it was the need, the strong feeling that there was need for disciplinary reform within our own content courses. That immediately ran up against 1999 which for Kansas was the Phase I evolution debacle which immediately drove an institutional need to be seen to be making an impact in the science disciplines throughout the state and that was an opportunity to engender collaboration with the school of education, the school districts and so from the disciplinary focus of undergraduate education there then came a very strong thrust into the area of K-12 as well.

We focused a bit in some collaborations that I developed with individuals in technology distance learning and Internet delivered content and research, student research for K-12 but then came to a whole new perspective when we were successful in getting an engineering research center and had to ask the questions now how do we apply some of the lessons we have learned in cooperative learning and remaking educational forms in graduate education and so a number of us who had been working in other areas began to think about how to innovate in graduate education in the very interdisciplinary research center that again crossed the barrier between the engineering disciplines and traditional college of liberal arts and sciences disciplines.

Well, we have come full circle on this. We are back to evolution debacle No. 2 and accompanying that again we have a number of individuals within the community in the whole Kansas City region that have banded together to put together a research consortium on K-12 education and that is very exciting. It is being led by the Kauffman Foundation and so there is major external support for that activity and it looks like that is going to develop into a very interesting and dynamic research focus in the Kansas City area.

As I said I think our focus has been to bring people in who have the opportunity to connect to these activities and to contribute to these activities if that meets part of their research focus but the perspective that we have always tried to establish and we tried to establish that very strongly in our department when we made a disciplinary hire of an educational researcher and we tried to establish this throughout the institution is that as folks come in they define their own scholarship and they have to be free to follow that even if it means going off by themselves and apparently not contributing directly to a department's mission. They have to be free to define their own scholarship. Then as opportunity arises and common interest arises if they can contribute to some of these other more mission oriented opportunities and can construct part of their research around that, that is the kind of synergism that we would like to see develop.

So, a large part of what we have done has come through building collaborations with existing disciplinary faculty bringing them to understand better what science education research is and involving them along with drawing on the expertise of educational researchers through the education programs to help build that community.

DR. FOX: I want to first start by saying how I backed into this arena. About a decade or so ago we had a president who was interested in the university's relationship with statewide K-12 and asked me to sort it out and figure out what our strategy should be and not knowing any better we said, "Okay," and we did quite a bit of research to try to understand sort of what the needs were out in the community but also what the history of the institution's engagement in K-12 was and it turned up about 250 different science outreach programs which seemed to be a theme but found that many of these programs could be in the same school and not know they were there and so I suggested that one of the things that we do is introduce the left and right hands at the university and so was able to get some colleagues, Leroy Hood who was then the chair of molecular biotechnology and Lillian McDermott from physics ed and George “Pinky” Nelson who was in the provost's office before he went to AAAS and Ed Lazowska, chair of computer science to put together and institute for STEM both looking at STEM disciplines outreach as well as sort of research on undergraduate education as well and I mean the first thing we started looking at was which of these things are any good because it seemed to me that no one really asks that question. Most of the programs wanted to be known by their intentions as opposed to any specific outcome and so there was a couple of groups that emerged pretty quickly as being exceptional. One was physics education. The others, the group in engineering helped, the center for engineering learning and teaching. So, anyway that was sort of my introduction to these folks. I went through the process of asking deans and department chairs and faculty the questions that we were assigned to ask and sort of came up, I was trying to figure out are there a certain, what is the set of conditions that have allowed these particularly successful programs to exist in the institution, and the first thing I should mention is when I asked people about a theory of action I had two distinct responses. From the college of arts and sciences most people looked at me like I had been dropped a number of times as a small child.

(Laughter.)

DR. FOX: And they said that there was no theory and that was basically where these things succeeded was it was really because of one or another leader, a tenacious individual who sort of brought things forward.

The college of engineering it was different. There it was clear that leadership was key and that was the previous dean, Denise Denton who is now at UC, Santa Cruz and it was Denise's sense that this was a very important thing for engineering and there was a couple of other elements on the engineering field that were important. The ABET's response to industry was one of the things that was cited when folks in industry said, "Your graduates are inadequate for these various reasons, and how do you know that they are learning the things that you say that they are learning?" and so on and that was an important driver as was the leadership.

The third thing that everybody cited and this was true in arts and sciences or in engineering was NSF funding and leadership was key to this.

Another interesting thing that was cited by both arts and sciences and engineering was the ability to work across disciplines and how low the bar was for interdisciplinary and particularly interdisciplinary research being an important factor to the success of these research groups and then one thing that I have observed is that some of the individuals who get involved in this, it is a sort of a messianic character. They are willing to forge ahead sort of regardless of the views of their colleagues and I think in Lillian's case over time I think her group is seen as one of the core groups in the department of physics but that was three decades plus worth of work to get to that point.

So, I guess leadership and the interdisciplinary character and NSF support and then in engineering the industry driving the accreditation group was key.

One last comment, when I spoke to a number of deans about education research in the disciplines most said something to the effect that we wish we could do more of it and if we were in more robust times we would be investing in this but since times are tough right now we have to focus on the core disciplinary research. So, I mean there was still a sense that I got that this wasn't as important as what mathematicians do, what chemists do, what biologists do in the view of many deans.

DR. FERRINI-MUNDY: Thanks. We will replicate what Karl just did because after all this expertise about how to get groups to work together and to talk and be productive we ought to drawn on. So, let us try a minute or two of discussion where you might formulate questions or comments for this panel and then we will have a discussion about it.

So, you need to speak with your neighbor again, please?

(Pause.)

DR. FERRINI-MUNDY: We will now direct our questions to the panel, questions or comments. Would anyone like to begin?

Yes, Michael?

DR. WITTMANN: I had a question about the issue of promotion and tenure in situations when there are joint appointments and neither department gives up enough of its requirements to make space for the other department and how you would adjust for that.

DR. GOULD: I did comment in my write up that there is actually more support for these kinds of positions the further up the line you go in our institution and I am a little surprised again at some of the comments about running into trouble with deans and provosts who normally as I also said and it is a great way to point to when the legislator comes and says, "What are doing about education?" It can inoculate you from the class of criticism that researchers don't care about education. So, I found it works much better higher up but it is not just in this area, in any area it is just a killer for an untenured faculty member and I don't think universities have done any job at all in figuring out how to deal with that issue.

DR. FERRINI-MUNDY: I would like to chime in on that one. I agree with Chris. However, it remains a killer even beyond tenure because you have promotion and reward issues to worry about and so eventually I think places have to figure out this joint appointment business and one thing that I have seen in some places is that when there is enough of a critical mass of people who are if not in the field of STEM education research but supportive of it and aware of what it is in the disciplinary department or wherever the other part of the appointment is it is a way better situation than if it is just this single person coming up through the system without any kind of core of people who understand what this discipline is. I mean the discussion in the first part of the morning was interesting to me because there was this sort of tension between people wanting STEM education research to be in a sense a part of the field of chemistry or physics or mathematics and others saying that this is really a different discipline that needs to co-exist well with these disciplinary fields but the methods in the social science approaches in these fields are different and so I think it really means having strong faculty at the department level and then all the way up into the administration who get what this field is supposed to be about. I don't know you build that into a place but it is highly visible.

DR. SIMMONS; Just to make things interesting I will disagree. I completely agree about the risks. Michigan State has a long history of having lots of joint appointments even at the junior faculty level. So, there are a lot of procedures set up to deal with it. What I make sure is that the letter of offer is very explicit about expectations and not when the faculty member reaches campus. We write a memorandum of understanding between me, the joint appointment chair, the faculty member, the dean or deans of the appropriate colleges sign on. So, everything is laid out about expectations for evaluation, promotion, tenure, where the lab space comes from, and the office space. We work out all the details and if I have a suspicion that the other department is not really into this that the other department is not going to treat the joint appointee as a full faculty member I won't hire with that department. We involve them in the search and the interview process and we make sure that they are serious about it and otherwise if they don't seem to be serious about really accepting this person whether they are a scientist or a science education person we will look for another joint appointment home. We don't want to bring anybody in and set them up for failure after 4 years is what I am saying.

DR. ZOLLMAN; May I ask a quick question? Since you have got 75/25 splits is that the way the vote is counted also if you vote for tenure? I mean suppose the department votes no and Lyman Briggs votes yes, does Lyman Briggs win?

DR. SIMMONS: It is a good question. It has never happened. The joint appointment department has always voted yes. We haven't encountered that. If they voted no for tenure and we voted yes, it is a good question. We might have to find them a different joint appointment home because if the other --

DR.SMITH: Go to Bob Banks .

DR. ZOLLMAN; I don't know who you guys are talking about.

DR. SIMMONS: The vice president for human resources. I think in that case we have to try to find a different and more suitable joint appointment because I don't think something like that could just sneak up on us though because we have mentoring all the way along and a lot of communication with the other department. So, I don't think that they would just suddenly up and say, "No, we don't want them anymore," and we wouldn't have known that things were going badly.

DR. GOULD: My comment was about 50/50 splits.

DR. FERRINI-MUNDY: Dan has a comment.

DR. LITYNSKI: I was just going to say that part of it may be whether there is funding as well as the question of tenure. For example you are talking about you have the line available having seen some of these you know you may be able to get tenure within one place but you would lose the joint appointment obviously. I think in the memorandums that we have written particularly recently and we had some problems in the past, we ensured that there was a primary department and a secondary department. There is input from the secondary department but the tenure decision really depends on the primary department. So, we wanted to get away from 50/50 splits.

DR. SMITH: The tenure is with the university.

DR.SIMMONS: But your home.

DR. HEPPERT; We commonly do make joint appointments across disciplinary departments. The last joint appointment across a disciplinary department in education was 15 years ago. That tells you something about, and that person was tenured but that tells you something about the quality of the experience that that individual had. It was a 50/50 appointment and of course the expectations were at least 150 percent because of that 50/50 split and that is the situation we don't want to find ourselves in, but I would say that I honestly think that our administration, our upper administration is still extremely concerned about these kinds of appointments. I think they still see the perspective that if one department has not completely thought through what the scholarly responsibilities of this individual will be and how and whether they will contribute to the department as well as develop their own independent scholarship that they see this as being a quasi joint appointment as opposed to a real joint appointment, that is they worry that there will be an expectation on the part of the faculty and the department that this person will do all sorts of wonderful things for the teaching whereas it is clearly the focus of the individual being hired to do their own scholarship and apply their efforts to that.

So, we have had a situation where the administration has been in the position to have the opportunity to stimulate these kinds of additions and they tended to want to see the impetus come from the department rather than from the administration to stimulate these kinds of positions precisely because they want to see the department articulate, fully articulate a plan and be really committed to the individuals that they hire in these positions.

DR. FERRINI-MUNDY: One thing that we have tried in mathematics and science education is to have cross college search committees that frequently are filled predominantly with science and mathematics education faculty both from the disciplinary departments or from the college of education but we always include faculty members from the disciplinary departments that would be the likely homes of whatever sort of person we are trying to hire.

So, we have got a committee now that has a biologist on it and a physicist on it. We are looking for science education and those turn out to be really educative opportunities for those faculty as we are reading the papers of candidates and so forth. It gives a good chance and it is a little bit lower stakes than the tenure time because you are talking about a group of individuals and not any one person and so part of it needs to be an ongoing education I think of the faculty across the university.

DR. ZOLLMAN; I want to add one thing to that because I have been on such committees, also, and it is good. You learn a lot about the culture of the other colleagues as well as the discipline that you are looking at.

DR. FERRINI-MUNDY: That is right.

DR. COOPER: You mentioned 150 percent expectations and I think particularly, well, not particularly but definitely in chemistry that is the case. I know we are here to talk about science education research but if a person is hired as a chemical educator in the chemistry department very often what comes with that is a whole boat load of administrative duties directing a general chemistry program, being the face of the department, allowing the rest of the faculty to abrogate their responsibilities.

(Laughter.)

DR. COOPER: And so on and so forth and the reason I asked, it is not really a question but the reason I am bringing this up is we have a promotion decision when I get back on Wednesday morning. There is a promotion decision first thing and it will be a bloodbath because the expectations for this person have changed halfway through. We changed department heads and we now have a department head who says, "Oh, yes, absolutely I am very supportive of education research in the discipline. I totally support it and we will evaluate you in exactly the same way that we evaluate everybody else in the department. So, write down how many research dollars you brought in, how many papers you wrote," and that is it, essentially and that is what was sent out to the external evaluators and it is going to be unfortunate and I know what the answer is that expectations should have been written in stone at the beginning and stuck with.

DR. FOX; Even for senior positions because the leadership changes in departments and colleges and so on and I think some of us have come to believe that the best way to ensure that these programs are perpetuated is by creating them endowments and endowed chairs and that is really the way and that doesn't really help on the tenure decision side but even for senior faculty.

DR. COOPER: What about this idea that a lot of the expectations for people like this don't in fact produce traditional scholarship in the way that most faculty understand it but yet it can be considered as scholarship?

DR. HEPPERT: I can tell you that we had a hire about 6 or 7 years ago but the expectations for scholarship and the expectations for job performance at the promotion and tenure committee hearing absolutely did not change from the time that we had a 2-hour knockdown, drag-out before we actually went and filled the position.

At that time at the department level we got out all of the issues, in our case we got out all of the issues that we expect this person to direct a laboratory program; we expect them to innovate in our courses and do all of these things. The expectation was that they were going to come in and pursue their own scholarship.

I do very much believe that while it happens academically and I am not even sure based on the way some promotion and tenure guidelines are written that it is necessarily illegal for it to happen academically for the sort of expectation to change throughout the promotion and tenure process for a junior faculty member. I think it is pretty unethical to hire somebody. I mean this happens and I am not talking about you, Melanie. You understand this but it is pretty unethical for a department to hire somebody under one set of expectations and then ultimately without continuing mentoring and without continuing input into the idea that at some point along the line we think things are changing and we need to talk to you about this. We have a new dean or we have a new department head and we are concerned about this.

It is hard for me to say about any one particular situation but if there is a sudden sea change right before somebody comes up for promotion and tenure I have a serious problem with that. If the department has been engaged in active ongoing mentoring where they have been discussing issues with the individual and talking about how people perceive this position is progressing I am a little more comfortable with that and again there is a tension here because institutions have to be flexible. Institutions have to embrace change but I just am very disquieted by the situation you are talking about and if I were you I would go back to your colleagues and say, "Damn it, you know this person was hired with the expectation that they could apply border-type scholarship in addition to publications and research dollars to their promotion and tenure packet and we need to honor that commitment."

DR. COOPER: I will and I will write a dissenting letter as it goes up the line.

DR. HEPPERT: I think for those who are junior faculty or those who are hiring people and who are, especially for those of you administrators who are obviously in departments who are hiring people into these kinds of positions I think the idea of having ongoing mentoring as if this were in an interdisciplinary, interfacial field, the research that is going on is highly interdisciplinary and highly interfacial I think anytime that happens continuing mentoring of the junior faculty member and communication with them about how they perceive their scholarship is unfolding and how the department sees their scholarship as unfolding is really a critical issue.

DR. GOULD: Our chemistry person just got promoted but had all the classical metrics and had a lot of publications and had good letters and I think to make this disciplinary research work as a discipline we have got to be able to deliver on those metrics.

DR. COOPER: If that is the case then who directs the general chemistry program?

DR. GOULD: That is the classic question. You know how it was done in the past. You hire the lecturers. You hire the spouses of the other faculty. You have this whole cadre of underpaid, high-performing women. I think those times have changed and departments have to face up how they do this. I have this real crunch in our chemistry department and I think there is a collision coming down the road on this.

DR. FERRINI-MUNDY: Mindful of the time I think this is the time for the break but I would like to suggest that Karl is to make moderator reflections on the session, it says here.

Would you like to have the last word, Karl, and then we will take a short break?

DR. SMITH; I will say what I was thinking. Another possible path with the wonderful work that folks are doing in research in STEM disciplines in the education area is to raise the level of discourse across the board.

One of the things that I have been arguing for that I would really like to see is for everybody who works in a college or university to be a scholarly teacher. That means they pay attention to best practices. They read the literature. They have conversations about teaching and learning with their colleagues. Now, do they do educational research? No, probably not but I would like to see folks become more scholarly teachers and I think if more faculty thought of themselves as scholarly teachers it would make life easier for those of us who are trying to do STEM education research because they would start to see how difficult it is.

DR. FERRINI-MUNDY: With that we really are due for a break. Let us come back at quarter of and begin the next session.

(Brief recess.)