Author(s):
The Departmental Action Leadership Institute (DALI) is a community engagement activity of the Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) initiative, which is led in partnership by the American Physical Society and the American Association of Physics Teachers. This project is important as it addresses physics departments’ needs for support and guidance when pursuing large-scale, complex changes to their undergraduate physics programs. Each participating program sends a pair of faculty members (change leaders) who attend ongoing DALI meetings for one year to learn about and implement effective change practices. During that year, these change leaders facilitate local teams to pursue collective change efforts. As part of our research on DALI, we seek to understand the essential factors that lead to the success of DALI for training physics faculty in effective change practices. We answer this question through an analysis of quantitative and qualitative data (including DALI exit surveys and multiple interviews) that capture the experiences of about 25 change leaders and their local change teams across four cohorts of DALI. These interviews and surveys also shed light on the outcomes experiences by change leaders and their departments through their participation in DALI, including improvement in change leaders’ facilitation skills and shifts in departmental culture on change related to partnering with students and effectively using data for joint sense-making. Additionally, our data captures change leaders’ experiences of factors that support or challenge the sustainability of their change efforts. Both the DALIs themselves and what we are learning about how to support change in physics departments will support the development of change leaders and improvements in undergraduate physics programs across the country. This has the potential to impact thousands of physics students and the evolving efforts within the physics community to improve undergraduate education.
Coauthors
Chandra Turpen, University of Maryland, College Park, MD; Diana Sachmpazidi, University of Maryland, College Park, MD; Joel C. Corbo, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO; David A. Craig, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR
