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.

There is a pressing need to improve the sustainability of educational improvement efforts, but sustainability remains undertheorized in science education. In this article, we draw upon frameworks from organizational culture and sustainability to characterize change within a single undergraduate science department. This in-depth longitudinal case study over 15 years provides careful documentation of the types of changes that are required to make improvements over time. In particular, we argue that cultural shifts are an important aspect of sustainable improvements. As we show, even a department that was considered an educational improvement "success story" was unable to sustain the improvements made through its initial effort. Nonetheless, we do argue that the initial effort resulted in shifts to multiple aspects of the department's culture (e.g., ways of thinking, the status of education in the department), that we characterize with Bolman and Deal's four frames. These cultural shifts provided the groundwork for a later effort, to ultimately create sustainable structures in the department resulting in sustained improvement. To conclude, we provide recommendations for how to improve the sustainability of change efforts and describe important methodological considerations for future studies of sustainability.

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Understanding departmental culture is important for sustained change, so the Departmental Education and Leadership Transformation Assessment (DELTA) survey was developed to characterize departmental culture around undergraduate education. A five-step process was used to develop and validate the items in the DELTA survey. This survey can be used to quantitatively characterize a department’s culture.

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