The Communities of Transformation (CoTs) framework is a variation on Communities of Practice that models groups aimed at changing existing practices within institutions by challenging underlying value systems. As new initiatives are developed within Physics to promote institutional change, the CoT framework has the potential to help provide insight into these organizations. We will share our results from applying this framework to the Departmental Action Leadership Institute (DALI). DALI supports physics faculty in leading change efforts in their departments. DALI change leaders are apprenticed into effective change strategies through sustained DALI programming while enacting these strategies within their own Departmental Action Team. In this presentation, we share how DALI aligns with the three core elements of the CoT framework; (a) challenging existing values and adopting new philosophy, (b) offering space for observing and living the new practice, and (c) networking with a community to help enact new practice. Drawing from DALI, we will present specific examples that speak to these core elements and reflect on what implications this may have for DALI going forward. We will also share our reflections on the affordances and constraints that come with applying the CoT framework in DALI and other spaces beyond DALI.

Physics departments may face challenges regarding student retention and a lack of diverse student representation. In an effort to address challenges, many engage in programmatic change efforts that are challenging and may require a second-order change to be effective. Physics faculty who are responsible for carrying out these efforts may not be prepared with the necessary experience and support to do so. Moreover, there is a limited understanding of the culture within physics programs, a critical aspect that shapes change efforts. The American Physical Society (APS) developed the Departmental Action Leadership Institutes (DALIs) to support physics faculty in learning to effectively design and implement departmental change. In this project, we developed case studies of five DALI-active physics programs across two cohorts. We see evidence of DALI participants becoming aware of taken-for-granted assumptions about educational change processes and assessment practices within their departmental cultures and coming to recognize and value alternative ways of collaborating and enacting change in their local contexts. This study lays the ground to explore critical aspects of the dominant physics culture that may constrain enacting particular forms of programmatic change and how specific forms of professional development can build departments’ capacity for pursuing second-order change.

At the University of New Hampshire, peer coaches are undergraduate peer educators who help facilitate learning in introductory STEM classes, either as learning assistants or peer-led team learning leaders. Peer coaches’ facilitation is generally focused on specific content knowledge, but their pedagogical skills could be applied to different content as well. Metacognition, an individual’s awareness and management of their own thinking and reasoning, is an important skill for undergraduate students to learn, though these practices rarely receive the explicit focus required for sustained implementation. Peer coaches could potentially act as facilitators for metacognitive practices with their introductory STEM students, acting as “metacognitive coaches.”   As a first step to investigating this new role, we collected written artifacts over a semester from the peer coaches’ pedagogical training course. Using this data, we analyzed the metacognitive perspectives of two peer coaches to derive a preliminary operational definition of a metacognitive coach.

Building and sustaining equitable partnerships between researchers and partners at two-year colleges (TYCs) takes active and intentional work that is often hidden and unarticulated (Eddy & Amey, 2010). We have been engaged in this partnership work  in coordination with a National Science Foundation S-STEM grant for the past 6 years across two TYCs within Michigan. We are now embarking on building a new partnership with a TYC as part of a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Inclusive Excellence 3 project. Establishing this new partnership requires us to name the principles we have used to build and maintain relationships with our existing TYC partners. Some of the principles we have articulated include follow the leader, ask ask ask/listen listen listen, and balance sustainability across sites. In this presentation we will describe these three partnerships and the principles we have used in the relationship work. Our aim is to share these principles as a guide for ourselves and others in the intentional work of building partnerships with TYCs.