Sustained department-wide changes achieved by Departmental Action Teams

The Departmental Action Team (DATs) project developed a new model supporting departmental change and ran seventeen DATs across the time period of 2014-2021. DATs were based in a wide variety of academic departments, including STEM, social science, and humanities. Members of each DAT typically included faculty, staff, graduate students, and undergraduates. DATs were externally facilitated by project staff for a period of up to two years, and supported in training internal facilitators to continue their work if desired.

Long-term impacts of DATs were recently investigated by qualitatively analyzing interviews of former DAT members that took place 1-4 years following the end of external facilitation for their DAT. In this presentation, we will describe the development of a departmental change-focused codebook, drawing from these rich interviews. To date, qualitative analysis has revealed that following external facilitation, most DATs or another group in the department sustained change by continuing to work on the DAT's original project.

Impacts of DATs routinely involved sustained structural changes within DAT departments, skill development of DAT members, and the spread of DAT-related skills or cultural features within other departmental groups. DAT departments also often experienced department-wide growth with respect to one or more core DAT principles for supporting change, such as engaging "students as partners" or demonstrating "a commitment to equity and inclusion through their work". Following a DAT, other departmental groups sometimes replicated part or all of the DAT model. This finding demonstrates that the DAT model can support the institutionalization of sustained change effort within academic departments.