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Not AvailablDuring the NSF-funded “Exploring Change in Two Year Colleges” workshop series, eleven participant teams across the United States learned about team-based unit-wide change and developed an organizational change project. The project addresses a gap in the organizational change literature with respect to team-based departmental change in community colleges. This article describes the concepts, resources, and key activities of the workshop series; the wide variety of projects that participant teams developed; and a set of recommendations for supporting change in community colleges developed by participants. 

It is important that change in physics programs is deliberate, evidenced-based, and engages multiple stakeholders. To assess the state of departmental change practices, the Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) Initiative regularly runs a survey of department chairs to measure departmental cultures of assessment. The 2023 survey received 163 research-consenting responses. This paper presents two claims based on these survey results: (1) assessments are largely not seen as leading to change, although chairs aspire for them to do so, and (2) chairs see substantial room for improvement in how they go about changing the undergraduate physics program, especially when it comes to engaging multiple stakeholders and using data effectively. The significant difference between current and ideal points to areas where shifting the culture within departments could have support from departmental leadership. 

The Departmental Action Leadership Institute (DALI) engages physics faculty in professional development centered around improving change efforts within physics programs. As a part of the Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) Initiative, DALI participants participate in a year-long cohort typically made up of two physics faculty representatives from five physics departments. The first cohort of DALI began in the Spring of 2021. Since then, there have been four complete cohorts of DALI with a fifth cohort currently underway. In this paper, we investigate who has participated in DALI as well as the participant outcomes of DALI. The physics programs that participated in DALI often serve small student populations and are primarily undergraduate-focused physics programs. We also find that at the end of DALI, participants feel well prepared to take on many aspects of change work, but report less experience with later stages of the process. 

The Communities of Transformation (CoT) framework is a variation on Communities of Practice that models groups aimed at changing existing institutional practices by challenging underlying value systems. The CoT framework has the potential to provide insight into STEM initiatives designed to promote institutional change. We share results from applying this framework to the Effective Practices for Physics Programs' (EP3) Departmental Action Leadership Institute (DALI). DALI supports cohorts of physics faculty (change leaders) in leading change efforts in their departments. Change leaders apprentice into effective change strategies though sustained programming while enacting these strategies within their own Departmental Action Team (DAT). Through analysis of interviews with change leaders, we identify ways in which DALI aligns with, and departs from, the CoT framework. We present the results of this initial study to showcase which aspects of STEM change initiatives can be highlighted, and what may not be captured, by a CoT lens. 

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.