Webinar: Departmental Action Leadership Institutes (DALIs): A scalable model for supporting departmental change efforts
published Nov 4, 2021 2:27pmThursday, February 24, 2022 - 1:00pm PT | 2:00m MT | 3:00 pm CT | 4:00pm ET
How can individual departments gain expertise in leading change locally? The American Physical Society (APS) Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) initiative aims to help physics programs respond to challenges with a collection of knowledge, experience, and proven good practice derived from the physics community and disseminated via the EP3 Guide. As part of this initiative, we are piloting Departmental Action Leadership Institutes (DALIs), which provide intensive support for departments in implementing changes to their undergraduate programs. DALIs are designed to scale this intensive support to the national level; the same model could be used to support multiple departments and programs at a single institution as they engage in change efforts. To accomplish this scaling, two change leaders from each of five departments join the DALI. These change leaders are charged with leading cross-constituency teams in their departments to engage in a change effort, following the Departmental Action Team (DAT) model. Two cohorts of five departments each are currently participating in a DALI, the first of which launched in January 2021. Each DALI begins with a virtual kickoff workshop followed by twice monthly meetings and the opportunity for individual consultations with the DALI facilitators. These activities are designed to help the DALI participants engage in a change effort, support a high-functioning team, interface with external stakeholders, and develop change agency. In this presentation, we will describe the goals and structure of the pilot DALI, present some initial feedback from our participants, and provide opportunities for the audience to reflect on how this model might be useful at their institutions.