June 07 Convening Home 

Big ideas and general impressions

Goal of CPED: To design, develop, pilot and evaluate new professional practice doctorates in Education. The ultimate goal is the transformation of doctorate education in this country.
Rationale of CPED: Research extensive doctorate programs must confront the challenge of preparing the next generation of school leaders and educational faculty with creative solutions to persistent problems.

Why this? Why now?
We are in the midst of a movement for change that we can embrace and be leaders in. Why the initiative?
• Preeminence challenged with competition from alternative providers (Carey Report) – Nova SE, Capella, and Argosy are three of largest providers of doctorates in the country.
• Quality assessment and accountability/advocacy for standards
• Emerging discussion about professional practice doctorates
• Funding issues at state and federal levels
• Employer and Candidate dissatisfaction
• The ultimate reason is we want to make our programs better to better serve schools and children.
• Foster new “stewards of the discipline” to examine the “scholarship of teaching and learning”
Outcomes of the Convening
• Create an intellectual community
• Gain a commitment of CPED sites into the “big ideas”
• Engage Multiple Voices in the Reconsideration of the Professional Practice Doctorate
• Create High Expectations for Campus Activity (It’s a window.)
• Work on distinction between doc programs
• Gain Involvement in Building a set of design elements
• Appreciate what others are doing and why our efforts are important (learning community)

Big Ideas / Questions
1. Candidate admissions – who are the candidates that come to the program, who can come, who should come, how do we draw people into the program.
o Reasonable time to completion. (3 yrs/4 years) Why does it take so long? Should it?
o Candidate selection, how is it driven, are we missing people that could be successful with proper support.
o Important for the graduate students to know expectations up front.
o Degree of cognitive load: When people have no prior experience in an area, if they are placed in an unstructured situation where they have no experience, then the cognitive load is untenable. We have to provide the structure and support to help them proceed. We can’t just blame them if they don’t know what to do. We need to focus on the outcomes and then support the process to achieve them.

2. Distinctions between Ed.D and Ph. D
o Differentiate types of professors (clinical and active research)
o Need to make different types of scholarship matter
o To make practice more important and recognized

3. Development of a signature pedagogy (what is a signature pedagogy that defines us, maybe it is more than one, maybe they are bundled together to describe our doc program)
o Blended approach – cohort, online with two to three face to face meetings each semester. EdD in four years of pt study.

4. Core courses: methodological, theoretical/foundational
o Ed.D and Ph. D cores and then specialization cores (k12, higher ed., etc.)
o What do people who are successful in these fields know how to do and how did they learn it? (relevance and transfer)
o Faculty members work in a team and the team will develop the course. Individual faculty members will not develop individual courses.

5. Capstone Experiences – What ought to be a set of capstone experiences for students who should go out and be school leaders? Where does the dissertation fit?
o Client centered capstones – differentiation

6. A culture of evidence – Carnegie is committed to this. What is the evidence that we gather and can use to demonstrate to prospective candidates and others to demonstrate that what we do matters?
o It’s a hard thing to build; this metaphor helps understand what we are doing.
o Need to look in the mirror to see if we are doing what we are trying to do.
o We need to look closely (magnifying glass) to see if the details are in the right order.
o Need windows so others can look in and see what we are doing and we can compare to what they are doing.
o This was hard because in many higher ed programs there are not many mirrors, magnifying glasses, or windows. Teaching is a very private thing.

7. Designing laboratories of practice. – Lee’s notion
o Need to work on practice based problems.
o All EdD. Students are fully employed professionals; they are taking on the challenge of bringing in scholarship of teaching and learning in their own school while we are trying to build it at a higher level (Imig).
o Some students in ed. leadership have been described as episodic. Many professors could be episodic as well because of the structure of graduate teaching. Most educational leadership students are fully employed and cannot give 100%. This is mirrored by the professors.

8. Rethinking the Dissertation
o Getting rid of 5 chapter structure – put into clear problem structure, provide solution option recommendations, review recommended options and questions for future research.
o Considering a different model – fine arts instead of social sciences.
o Are dissertations inconsistent with goals of Ed.D
o USC thematic dissertations—Thematic dissertation construct is more similar to how people function or work in the real world. Dissertation support center to help with writing issues, mechanical issues of dissertations such as IRB.
o How to get away from faculty being involved in doing double duty as Ed.D and Ph.D advisors?
o Discussed different product than traditional dissertation and faculty letting go of traditional structure. Are culminating capstone projects still called dissertations? Does that devalue the Ed.D?
o The dissertation – totally avoided tackling the discussion on it. What are the alternatives to a dissertation that remain rigorous, relevant?

9. Collaborative Knowledge building: learning communities
o FD: Harold Keller – Its important when the focus is on the program it requires a community of learners and scholars. Something we are not encountering much in higher education. We are not getting together to compare notes.
o Scholars from a range of fields explore the seminar as a signature pedagogy of liberal education. There is a need to go public, otherwise it is not as truly collaborative as it should be Intellectual communities Our challenge is how do we create communities of students when you have disparate groups of individuals in various times and places on a program.

10. Backwards planning: Start with what do we want students to know and be able to do. None of the other questions can really be answered until the outcomes have been defined.
o What are the constituents of our programs looking for? What should we be teaching that we are not? What do they need?
o Rethinking ownership of the programs (out of the hands of individuals, possibly cross-departmental).
o What should be assessed? Before deciding what should be assessed, shouldn’t it be decided what the students need to know?
o We as faculty are engaged in a mirror of what we are preparing our students for. We are modeling that for our students so that they might do what we are preparing them to do. – Shulman
o From discussion: Maybe we aren’t teaching the right things because we are looking towards the research to see what we should be teaching instead of looking to the field problems to see what our students need to learn.
o From Discussion (FD): “Not just the problems of existing practice, but shaping what you want the environment to look like. For example in educational leadership, as we produce future leaders, we need to ask questions about where we are we going.” David Marsh

11. Strategic Planning – need to consider why we do the things we do –
o Barnacles of encrusted habit
o External analysis – studying the political and economic reality that impacts the school
o Should not be just tenure track faculty on the planning committee, clinical faculty should have equal status. However, in many schools there are grad school policies that prohibit clinical faculty from participating fully. Tenured faculty members do not have all of the experience/knowledge necessary for developing the Ed.D program. Need to bring in high quality clinical people.
o Important point: Giving the governance committee the authority to develop the degree.
o Circumvented the “I wasn’t in on the planning so I don’t know what is going on.” Got around it by going and briefing them and bringing them in and keeping them involved and informed. Change requires outreach.
o Must include internal and external stakeholders, must include vertical stakeholders. (Broad base of involvement)
o Will work through the discussion of “who’s included, who’s excluded, and whose territory is it?” Hutchins
o FD: The phrase of “design experiments” conjures up very different things for most people that is not what we are aiming for. Maybe we don’t have the right language for it yet. Shakeshaft
o Time to degree – Sometimes we take too long. Why does it take so long? Have we critically examined why it takes so long?
Implications for CPED
• Its hard work, moving target, many political issues.
• Needs and helps build communities of practice, you can’t do it by yourself. Intellectual community doesn’t get built by itself.
• Not “a project” but ongoing, iterative routines. It wrongly frames this work as terminal, a periodic episode.
• A tools agenda. – Don’t think about findings in the traditional sense, think about things others can use from your product and what you build along the way.
• New genres, forms, formats for sharing.
• Our collective contexts for discussing this are all very different.
• There are many interesting pilots out there. Does anything they are doing fit into our needs?
• There is much practical advice for structuring the planning and reform from previous projects, specifically the Carnegie project on the Ph. D

Dr. Lee Shulman –,Comments on the first day discussion
Part of my discomfort yesterday, was that we were spending much too much time talking about the nuts and bolts and not talking about the big ideas. “What counts as knowledge in your fields?” If you want to grow a new set of stewards of the discipline, what do they need to know and be able to do? If you didn’t already have all of the traditions you have about educating people what would it look like.

Cautions/ Questions/ Notes
o Do you have a consistent written list of program objectives?
o Do you have department objectives that are not just course or professor objectives?
o Programs can easily become too departmentalized. Need some system-wide goals and objectives.
o Need to clarify distinction between Ed. D. and Ph. D.
o Who benefits from making this change?
o Who is the audience?
o Is the degree serving the purpose that it was put in place for?
o Is it serving the practical audience?
o Committee representative of all stakeholders – incl students and customers (districts hiring grads)
o How do learning communities, distance education, cohorts, and online courses fit into this program?
o Interested in practical problems that have application to local area school.
o Concern about professional practice students being seen as episodic, less serious, must be full time to demonstrate commitment to program or to take away serious learning/development.
o Need to consider how to foster virtual learning communities that last more than a semester and build on difference, experience, practice based problems, and reflection in action (an online cohort possibly).

Outcomes were recorded by Monica Lamar, Duquesne University Graduate Student.