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This study aims to understand how physics faculty seeking guidance in making departmental changes related to recruitment and retention frame the challenges in their program. We focus our analysis on one set of applications submitted to the Departmental Action Leadership Institute (DALI) in its first year of operation. DALI is the community engagement activity of the Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) initiative. It brings together a cohort of physics faculty to apprentice into strategies for sustainable institutional change and facilitation practices associated with leading change teams. Through analysis of DALI applications, we find that many applicants attribute their enrollment challenges to sources outside of their immediate control, while those that do propose solutions to these challenges primarily focus on curriculum change. By understanding how DALI applicants frame their enrollment challenges, developers of departmental change resources can better mold their recommendations and community engagement activities to what is needed, whether that be meeting faculty and departments where they are at or pushing departments to explore new strategies and frameworks for evaluating their challenges. 

Departments are now recognized as an important locus for sustainable change on university campuses. Making sustainable changes typically requires a shift in culture, but culture is complex and difficult to measure. For this reason, cultural changes are often studied using qualitative methods that provide rich, detailed data. However, this imposes barriers to measuring culture and studying change at scale (i.e., across many departments). To address this issue, we introduce the Departmental Education and Leadership Transformation Assessment (DELTA), a new survey aimed at capturing cultural changes in undergraduate departments. We describe the survey’s development and validation and provide suggestions for its utility for researchers and practitioners. 

There is a pressing need to improve the sustainability of educational improvement efforts, but sustainability remains undertheorized in science education. In this article, we draw upon frameworks from organizational culture and sustainability to characterize change within a single undergraduate science department. This in‐depth longitudinal case study over 15 years provides careful documentation of the types of changes that are required to make improvements over time. In particular, we argue that cultural shifts are an important aspect of sustainable improvements. As we show, even a department that was considered an educational improvement “success story” was unable to sustain the improvements made through its initial effort. Nonetheless, we do argue that the initial effort resulted in shifts to multiple aspects of the department's culture (e.g., ways of thinking, the status of education in the department), that we characterize with Bolman and Deal's four frames. These cultural shifts provided the groundwork for a later effort, to ultimately create sustainable structures in the department resulting in sustained improvement. To conclude, we provide recommendations for how to improve the sustainability of change efforts and describe important methodological considerations for future studies of sustainability.