Focus

Welcome to Nashville and the second convening of the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate! This meeting signals a commitment to “recapturing the education doctorate” and making it into the degree of choice for practitioners and professionals in education.

The focus for this convening is the assessment of candidates and programs with particular attention on the capstone experience. A committee of your colleagues has advised us since we last met and they have helped to fashion the agenda for this convening. They have led us to attempt to closely examine the capstone used by the school leadership program of Peabody College and to seek to understand how that experience might inform the work underway at our member institutions. We will seek to understand how faculty and students at Peabody College define and use their capstone and the expectations held for both students and faculty. We will also revisit the practice of preparing students with signature pedagogies that are particular to the fields of study encompassed by our work.

We have much work to accomplish in the coming days. We want to make sure that individuals from both current CPED institutions and those observing us from other institutions and organizations have good experiences. We have planned time for campus teams and “critical friends” groups to meet as well as arranged time to interact with both Vanderbilt faculty and Carnegie leaders. We also want to spend time considering the path ahead and the work we want to complete before we gather again at the Carnegie Foundation in Spring 2008.

Agenda

INTERROGATING ASSESSMENT AND THE CAPSTONE EXPERIENCE & ENVISIONING SIGNATURE PEDAGOGIES
October 24-26, 2007

Wednesday, October 24: Making Connections & Looking Ahead

2:00pm Making Connections: Stanford to Peabody

Sharing our work:
1. Institutional teams share with Critical Friends enhanced proposals/pilot descriptions with June Convening add-ons:
• Components for including a laboratory of practice
• Components of a scholarship of teaching & learning

2. In Critical Friends teams, gather/discuss/explore three suggestions/strategies for contextualizing these additions.
- What is the design strategy of these components?
- How will these strategies be implemented?
- How will outcomes be assessed and evaluated?

3:45pm Looking Ahead: Brainstorming facilitated by Jill Perry and Kim Heuschkel

Given what we know from our institutional experiences and our discussions, and as we think about understanding the Peabody experience we’ll brainstorm how we envision the capstone courses, experiences and artifacts that lead to the development of the professional practitioner.
Guiding questions include but are not limited to:
A. Who:
- What do we want our doctoral recipients to know and be able to do?
- What are the processes, skills and knowledge they should have learned?
B. What:
- What are the properties of the capstone?
- What kind of artifact best demonstrates practitioner readiness to perform at the highest level?
C. How:
- How should we assess their learning at early, middle and end program points to enhance their potential to practice education at the highest level?
(Our ideas will provide the base of our work over the next two days)

6:00pm Opening of Peabody Convening

• Welcome - David Imig
• The Peabody Capstone Experience - James Guthrie
• Dinner compliments of Peabody College of Education

Thursday, October 25: Interrogating the Capstone & Setting an Agenda
9:00am Framing the Day – David Imig
Peabody Panel Discussion: Faculty and student experiences - moderated by James Guthrie

10:45am Setting a Plan of Exploration – Facilitated by Jacqueline Edmondson & Charol Shakeshaft
In Critical Friends groups—taking what you learned from the group brainstorming, your institutional team pre-work, and lessons taken from Peabody — build upon your team’s pre-work and aim for a clear vision and set goals for your institution.

Start with the end in mind and design a plan to explore assessment and/or the capstone experience for your institution.
1. What is an outcomes component (assessment in core knowledge, middle program courses, capstone) that your institution can focus on right now and begin to collect informational data?
2. What research questions are you asking your institution about these components?
3. What is the research design for collecting this data?
4. What will data collection look like?

5. How does this component report on program goals?

12:00pm Lunch & Graduate Student Presenation

1:15pm From Learner Assessment to Program Assessment – Lee Shulman by video

2:15pm Assessing Outcomes – Facilitated by David Marsh
Continuing with the morning’s work, we’ll take a closer look at program assessment.
In institutional teams—think about your plans for student assessment utilizing the following questions to:
Create a rubric to judge the quality of your program using student performance data
-What are some program assessment ideas that will serve your research design?
- How will your program collect data about a cohort or group of students?
- What will that collection look like?

3:45pm Assessment Continued – Facilitated by Rick McCown

Is it possible to create common assessment tools to be used across CPED institutions in each of the separate strands (Ed leadership, Organization leadership and Teacher education)? How do we create robust assessment protocols that could be shared? Is there a common framework within and across these strands that could be used at any institution?
In groups by strand, develop a model that uses such protocols that we can pilot, and analyze.

4:45pm Wrap Up: 1 minute feedback from participants and closure

Friday, October 26th: Envisioning Signature Pedagogies

9:30am Starting at the end, working our way back to Signature Pedagogies, Lee Shulman by video
10:45pm Mapping Back to Signature Pedagogies – Facilitated by David Imig
Continuing to create a clear vision for the next year, we’ll take a closer look at the signature pedagogies that will be key to your program.
In institution teams—utilizing your June work – consider ways that Capstones can be entwined with Signature Pedagogies:

What is the Signature Pedagogy you are prepared to use to describe your model or pilot program:
- What key components are essential for this to be a true signature pedagogy?
- What will your institution do to promote and describe this signature pedagogy as a key element of your program?

12:30pm Summing up Peabody and Looking Ahead – David Imig

1:30pm Building Institutional “Buy-In” – Camilla Benbow, Dean of Peabody College

Prework

The outcomes of the Stanford convening should now be included in your proposals and pilot descriptions. Teams should bring these modifications to their proposals/pilot descriptions (the Base Document) and share them with their Critical Friends. Your proposals/pilot descriptions should now include consideration of:

These enhanced documents should be brought to Nashville (with copies provided to the CPED organizers and others) to be used as a base document for designing next steps. This work will be used in Wednesday’s work on Making Connections

Your pilot or model program has a set of learning outcomes that have been well articulated and provide coherence and direction for faculty and students. What are those outcomes? What data do you gather to inform you and your colleagues as to whether students have met those expectations? How do you gather, analyze and report those data? Bring examples of the data you gather and use regarding student performance. Looking at this data, be prepared to answer the following questions:

1. How do you know whether the program outcomes are met? Who analyzes them and how they used? What measures of student performance are most valued in program assessment and review? How are the performance data used to strengthen and redesign courses and experiences?
2. How does this information inform your consideration of capstone courses and experiences? How do your students address substantive problems collectively and individually? What is the artifact that they produce that demonstrates mastery of concepts that span several topic areas in education policy and practice and require interaction with other disciplines and fields of study? What oral and written reports are expected?
3. What research questions do the data generate that will further your institution’s work and inform consideration of the capstone properties?
This work will provide a baseline to show where your program is. We will use it on Thursday and build upon it as we move forward.

Outcomes

• Day One Summary
• Day Two Summary
• Day Three Summary