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Engineering education has faced significant and deep-rooted challenges, including outdated curricula and pedagogical practices, limited access for underrepresented groups, and persistent diversity gaps, that collectively undermine its ability to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. 

In 2020, Montana State University initiated a five-year NSF-funded Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) project with the vision of transforming the traditional topic-focused course structure in environmental engineering into an integrated project-based curriculum (IPBC) that supports a climate of collaborative and continuous learning among faculty and students. The curriculum redesign process engaged faculty in an extensive consensus-building process to define desired student learning outcomes for the program. In the transformed curriculum, faculty collectively agreed to integrate systems thinking, sustainability, and professionalism competencies and to cultivate students’ identity as environmental engineers throughout the degree. To achieve these goals, there must be a level of shared meaning around the four constructs of interest—systems thinking, sustainability, professionalism, environmental engineering—to guide pedagogical decision making among faculty. A qualitative cultural assessment was conducted to investigate, analyze, and describe the shared meanings faculty hold around the four constructs. The goal of the assessment was to uncover areas of shared meaning with the strongest consensus within and across constructs. By eliciting and describing “definitions by consensus,” faculty will be able to generate consistency in teaching and assessment practices throughout the curriculum. The culture assessment process undertaken by the department and its outcomes will be of interest to other programs seeking to foster collaborative teaching and to enhance collective ownership of degree program learning outcomes.