Education Commons^™

Fostering sustainable improvements in undergraduate education remains a formidable challenge. To address this challenge, our team has developed the Departmental Action Team (DAT) model. DATs are small working groups of faculty, students, and staff, that work collaboratively to envision, plan, develop, and build sustainable structures in their department. To support the uptake of such structures, DATs collect and analyze data to reflect on the root causes of an issue, which they use to shift beliefs, values, and practices within their context. This paper provides a five-year status report on the DAT project. We describe the history of the model, its …

Research on institutional change says that effective change agents are able to flexibly reason with multiple

perspectives on change, depending on their local context and their goals. However, little is known about what

this flexible reasoning looks like. In this exploratory work, we conducted and analyzed interviews in which

faculty discussed departmental change. This work is part of an ongoing study to understand how to support

departmental change through Departmental Action Teams (DATs). Our preliminary analyses suggest that faculty

have multiple context-dependent ways to reason about change. This work will lead to a better understanding of

how productive lines of …