Guiding principles for change in undergraduate education: An analysis of a departmental team’s change effort

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.

Figure 1

Coding frequencies for meeting minutes and facilitator journals. The unit of analysis for coding the meeting minutes and facilitator journal entries was a single DAT meeting. For 32 meetings across four semesters, there are 31 corresponding meeting minutes entries and 25 corresponding facilitator journal entries. The frequencies in this chart represent the percentage of the total number of entries that contained evidence of each principle.