CPED’s Impacting Education Journal Celebrates Its 10th Anniversary
In the past 10 years, CPED’s journal Impacting Education: Journal on Transforming Professional Practice (IE) has
established itself as a vital forum for scholars and practitioners committed to strengthening the preparation of leaders who work in PK-20 education and beyond. Publishing research articles, essays, dissertations in practice research articles, and book reviews, IE advances scholarship that speaks directly to the design of professional preparation programs, or EdD degrees. Over its first 10 years, the journal has impacted policies, practices, and teaching within schools of education both within and outside of CPED membership.
When Jill Perry, Executive Director of CPED, proposed creating a new scholarly publication in 2015, the idea came from a place of practicality. CPED members were producing meaningful research on EdD programs, covering everything from cohort models and advising to group dissertations in practice, but that work had no single home. It was scattered across dozens of publications with no central location.
“There wasn't a single place where you could go and learn about what it means to design EdD programs,” Perry recalled. “People would write about it, but they’d be all over the place, so you wouldn't know about them unless you started searching.” Her solution, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal hosted through the University of Pittsburgh's
Open Library Publishing.
The early years of IE were a learning curve, Perry admitted. She has a small team of five faculty members that helped her build the journals' original infrastructure, and they navigated the difficult backend of an academic publishing system.
An early milestone was the inaugural issue lead with an article co-authored by Perry and CPED Founder, Dr. David Imig, titled “What Do We Mean by Impact?” This piece established the intellectual tone for the issues that would follow. Perry points to this piece as a foundational read when it comes to understanding IE’s purpose.
The journal’s first editor after Perry was Dr. Stephanie Jones, a faculty member at Texas Tech University, who served as the Editor in Chief of the journal for three years. She formalized the journal’s structure and worked tirelessly to attract submission and reviewers. During this time, IE published one issue in 2016, one in 2017, two in 2018 and one in 2019. The early years were a period of establishing the journals' identity, especially within the CPED world.
In 2019, a new chapter of Impacting Education started when Dr. Rhonda Jeffries and Dr. Suha Tamim took over as co-Editors in Chief of the Journal. Both serving as faculty members in the College of Education at the University of South Carolina, they were selected to lead the journal toward the next level of expansion and innovation.
The two brought a shared commitment of structure, rigor, and community to the journal. “We wanted to get issues out on a regular basis and position the journal to be indexed, to elevate the journal in that way.” Jeffries stated. They established a consistent publishing schedule of four issues per year, a significant change from the journal's earlier publication calendar. The regular publication is needed for academic indexing, which became a major goal for the co-editors.
Under their leadership, Jeffries and Tamim developed a signature cover design, introduced guest-edited issues, and built a team of graduate student editorial assistants.
During its 10 years, certain issues of IE have stood out for their timeliness, depth, or resonance within the CPED community.
In 2018, a special issue on the CPED Principles which emerged directly from a writing retreat held at the annual convening was released. This issue gathered faculty voices together to articulate the foundational ideas that guide the EdD program design. Two years later, as the nation was grappling with social unrest, Jeffries and colleague, Dr. Yasha Becton, co-produced a two-part series on student activism and energizing community engagement. This issue was the first to feature a distinctive cover design which visually marked a new era for the publications.
Tamim noted the excitement from working with guest editors on issues they were passionate about: “The level of excitement we see from our guest editors is a testament to their passion about the issue’s theme.”
Since 2020, Impacting Education has published 254 articles, averaging 27 per year, with output growing from 16 articles in 2020 to 53 in 2025, and readership peaking at nearly 7,000 monthly views in early 2026. Jeffries and Tamim also credit Publication Coordinator Yuechen Sun and Publication Assistant Sherisse Jackson for their significant contributions to the journal's growth during their term.
Among the volumes Jeffries found a themed issue produced by a team of faculty from the University of California Davis to be particularly meaningful. This issue featured contributions from EdD program graduates who were working in the field. “It was nice to realize that when our time with graduates is over and they return to their educational settings, the time they’ve spent with us has been significant to their professional development,” she said. “They’re not just getting a degree and a raise; they are taking the fundamental things we taught them and continuing to use the knowledge.”
For Tamim, the most rewarding part of her six years as co-editor has been the relationships. “The networking and interaction with authors, reviewers and guest editors for me was professional growth,” she said. “Otherwise, I wouldn't have met those people and had those relationships. We can't forget the graduate assistants who have worked with us and some who contribute even after their term ended. This became a kind of family.”
That sense of community extends to how the editors approach the submission process. Rather than sending quick rejection to articles that do not quite fit the criteria, Jeffries and Tamim offer authors the opportunity to revise and resubmit, sometimes waiting a year for a resubmission. “We are a small community,” Tamim explained, “We try to be supportive.”
As IE marks its tenth anniversary, it does so in transition. Jeffries and Tamim, whose term run through December 2026, have worked proactively to onboard a new editorial team coming from Sacred Heart University in Connecticut. Recognizing how steep the learning curve can be, “they thought ahead,” Perry noted. “They know how hard it is to onboard someone to just the technology side of it, so having time to learn before they jump into their term will be helpful for the new co-Editors in Chief.”
As Impacting Education enters its next chapter, leadership passes to Wesley Henry, PhD, and Kat Wallace, EdD, both faculty members in the EdD in Educational Leadership program at Sacred Heart University. Henry's research focuses on leader preparation and democratizing school leadership, while Wallace brings expertise in improvement science and equity in leadership development. What seems certain is that Impacting Education will remain what it has always been, a space where the CPED community thinks out loud together and documents what EdD programs can do and why it matters.
As Perry put it, the archived issues of IE are not relics. “It has only been 10 years. It's very relevant knowledge. You could learn as much from what we were writing in 2017 as you can from what was published last month.” That is the journal's most enduring achievement: building a body of knowledge that continues to speak to the work year after year.
If you want to learn more about Impacting Education, you can read the issues here.