Supporting change in physics undergraduate programs: Lessons learned from the DALI initiative

The Departmental Action Leadership Institute (DALI) is a community engagement activity of the Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) initiative, led in partnership by APS and AAPT. DALI works with undergraduate physics programs to pursue departmental change. 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 based on the Department Action Team (DAT) model. In this poster, we share the essential factors for the success of DALI through experiences of ~25 change leaders and their DATs across four cohorts of DALI. The outcomes of this program are tracked by interviews and surveys of DALI change leaders and DAT members. These outcomes span areas such as change leaders' facilitation skills, ways that students are partnered with, and how joint sense-making about data is informed by DALI. Additionally, we will share change leaders' experiences of factors that support or challenge the sustainability of their change efforts. We see that this work has implications for the development of change leadership and the evolving efforts within the physics community to improve undergraduate education.