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The practices of a departmental action team (DAT) are examined to characterize their change effort in their undergraduate program. The DAT’s effort was guided by the DAT model’s six core principles. The core principles are grounded in best practices for higher education and organizational change literature. Meeting minutes, facilitator journal entries, and exit interviews are analyzed to identify ways in which the core principles influenced the change effort. This analysis provides insight into how the core principles can be leveraged to enact positive change in education. Furthermore, this work provides a method for researchers to characterize other complex change efforts.

Cultivating institutional transformation has been of recent interest in education research. This theoretical paper presents six principles for supporting sustained change efforts at the department level. Considering change efforts at the level of “principles” is valuable because principles are grounded in theoretical and empirical knowledge, but are abstract enough to be adapted to many contexts. For each principle we argue for its value, drawing on previous literature in higher education, organizational change, discipline-based education research, and design thinking. We then give illustrative examples of how each principle was embodied within the Departmental Action Team (DAT) project. The DAT project facilitates the implementation of effective changes within university science, technology, engineering, and mathematics departments. We conclude with a discussion of how these principles can be applicable across a variety of institutional transformation efforts.