The Improvement Science Dissertation in Practice

A Guide for Faculty, Committee Members, and their Students

Jill Alexa Perry, Debby Zambo, Robert Crow

• Publisher: Myers Education Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781975503222
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Leadership in der Bildung

"Addressing the needs of the scholar-practitioner doctorate, Perry, Zambo, and Crowe provide an invaluable resource to guide faculty and students' implementation of the Dissertation in Practice. Expanding extensively on improvement science fundamentals that support the teaching and scholarship of the EdD, this important book provides clear principles and guidance for improvement science dissertations in practice that support the journey of all scholarly practitioners."Elizabeth C. Reilly, Chair & Professor, Loyola Marymount University

CHAPTER ONE

Designing a Professional Practice Doctorate

From the beginning of the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) in 2007, the most questioned component of EdD program redesign has been the culminating research project. The CPED consortium began with the idea of a “capstone,” but it was unsure of what that meant. Members debated the name. Capstone sounded too much like undergraduate work. The term seemed to diminish the importance of a doctorate. Members suggested sticking with the term “dissertation,” but they then grappled with the question: How is an EdD dissertation different than a PhD dissertation? In those early years, CPED faculty members were unsure of what the final product should be called or what it should look like. They could, however, agree on some central tenants of this culminating product: the major focus should be problems of practice, the research should be applied, and development of the product should be built throughout and across the coursework. With these tenants, CPED faculty members set off to distinguish the EdD capstone from the PhD dissertation.

The work to distinguish the capstone from the dissertation produced various models—thematic dissertations, action research projects, case studies, and group or team evaluation products—that played out in different contexts with different kinds of student practitioners. Members spent bi-annual CPED convening time actively discussing the purpose of this experience, the ways to assess it, and if it was needed at all. In fact, in 2014, Joe Murphy of Peabody College of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University challenged CPED faculty to consider eliminating the dissertation/culminating product altogether. He argued that it served no purpose in preparing leaders to change practice. Yet, despite not quite knowing what the answer should be, members pushed back and agreed that a dissertation was both necessary and important in EdD programs.

The EdD and the Dissertation

According to the Council of Graduate Schools’ (CGS) Task Force Report on the Professional Doctorate (2007), professional doctorates fall into two categories: those with a dissertation and those without. The degrees that have a dissertation have “no direct relationship to licensure and have a significant relationship to clinical, translational, or engaged research” (p. 12). Because the field of education does not have a licensure body, some product or experience is needed to demonstrate to the faculty that the student is qualified and has done the work worthy of earning the education doctorate degree. Colwill (2012) has termed any professional degree that requires a dissertation as a Professional Research Doctorate, one that focuses on both research and practice and that requires a dissertation to “investigate a particular professional topic or existing problem” (p. 13). CPED members have strived to reframe the dissertation in their EdD programs to make them align with Colwill’s definition. This task, however, has not been simple for a variety of reasons.

First, historically, the dissertation is synonymous with doctoral education. The idea stems from the German university Doctor of Philosophy model, or PhD, that was adopted in the United States in the late 1800s. The PhD had a significant research component, and preparation for this degree was meant “to confer expertise by winnowing out the amateurs from the experts” which was done through the writing of an “elaborate thesis … a rigorous test of intellectual mettle” (Loss, 2015, p. 3) known as the dissertation. At the end of the nineteenth century, the professions of law and medicine sought to adopt a similar credentialing model to demonstrate an individual’s professional competence. Education followed suit by entering the academy and seeking to establish itself as a profession with a doctoral degree. Teachers College, Columbia University created the first PhD in Education in 1893, which was aimed at preparing school administrative professionals. Harvard College also sought to prepare administrative professionals but wanted a different degree title and created the Education Doctorate, or EdD, in 1920. Unlike law and medicine, however, the training in these new doctorates in education were very much modeled after the Doctor of Philosophy which traditionally was awarded by the graduate school of arts and sciences. To distinguish the EdD from the PhD, coursework was reduced, and dissertations emphasized research on technical problems rather than research for knowledge generation. Though the goal was noble, rather than solidify the profession of education, these early actions merely confused the two degrees and caused the EdD to be viewed as the lesser of the two degrees. Consequently, the professional practice of education never gained the respect that other professions, like medicine and law, have.

Second, most educational faculty are not prepared to design EdD programs and don’t always know what practitioners need. Holding a PhD in Education does not require that one has had practitioner experience, nor do PhD programs teach prospective faculty members how to design preparation programs for practitioners. As a result, faculty members in schools of education have tended to prepare practitioners as they were prepared in their own PhD programs but with less strict requirements and lower expectations for the research generated by these practitioners. Over time, the confusing beginnings of the EdD combined with weak program designs diminished the value of the EdD.

Third, for educational practitioners who have sought a doctorate (whether it was an EdD or PhD), the dissertation experience and product have generally been viewed as a hoop-jumping exercise. Even though the investigative work of the dissertation provided information and learning, it rarely resulted in skills to advance careers (beyond a credential) or to improve one’s ability to impact the problems faced daily (Mehta, Gomez, & Bryk, 2011; Perry, 2013). Programs have neglected the fact that practitioners are a different kind of student with different kinds of needs. In general, those who seek a doctorate are “experienced practitioners” (Tupling & Outhwaite, 2017, p. 154) that are older and generally have between 10 and 20 years of professional experience. Many are highly qualified, successful leaders who carry an immense amount of professional expertise into their program of study (Perry, 2013; Willis, Inman, & Valenti, 2010). Additionally, these students want to remain on their career trajectory and look for part-time programs to earn their degree while they continue to work. This type of student presents the “inverse of other fields” (Shulman, Golde, Beuschel, & Garabedian, 2006, p. 26), which generally sees younger students who continue from their undergraduate program through to their doctorate without having spent time working in a professional field.

Furthermore, in many cases, these educational practitioners face the dilemma of needing to obtain a doctorate to advance in their careers but encounter doctoral preparation that isn’t suited to their professional needs. They enter doctoral study eager to gain stronger skills and abilities that will help them address the pressing issues they face in their daily practice. Frequently, however, the only program options are traditional doctoral programs that don’t necessarily offer practical skills, nor do they offer the knowledge of how to apply theory and research to practice. These practitioners sacrifice time away from work and family, spending hard-earned money (part-time students do not qualify for financial aid) to obtain a degree that does not support their professional development beyond credentialing. As students in traditional programs, they write dissertations that are theoretically based and struggle to apply the experience and knowledge to their practice settings. The dissertation experience is very different from what students in other professions find. Often professional training in other fields teaches methods and acumen that are contextualized in applied, experiential, and utilization-focused ways of practice. For instance, medical students work in hospitals alongside licensed doctors to learn diagnosing skills and behavioral interventions. Surgeons learn to sew as part of their curriculum and practice over and over. Lawyers practice arguing and debating through the Socratic method that teaches them necessary critical thinking. Clergy learn to console. Engineers practice methods of design. In contrast, educational doctoral students who seek to remain in practice typically received no such hands-on training. Rarely have traditional programs provided practical application of theory to practice. The end result of such preparation was a credential that supported career advancement but offered little in the way of useful skills to help practitioners improve the practice of education (Perry, 2012a).

When the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching offered funds in 2007 to create a consortium that would undertake the examination of the EdD, it did so at a crucial point in U.S. educational history. Years of educational reforms, calls for accountability, and pressure from inside and outside of schools of education to improve the way practitioners were prepared made the EdD an apt target. Lee Shulman, then-president of the Carnegie Foundation, and his colleagues spent the five years prior to this initiative examining signature pedagogies in PhD and professional preparation programs across several fields. Education was the only field that crossed both projects that prepared researchers and professionals. They concluded with a call to schools of education to clearly define both the EdD and PhD degrees or “risk becoming increasingly impotent in carrying out their primary missions—the advancement of knowledge and the preparation of quality practitioners” (Shulman et al., 2006, p. 25). CPED was created as a result. Faculty from 25 schools of education were tasked to clarify and define the EdD as the professional practice doctorate in education. Though a seemingly easy task, members found early on that a one-size-fits-all model would not work in education as it had in medicine, engineering, and other professional fields. The profession of education spans PK-12 schooling, post-secondary education, out-of-school learning, non-profit leadership, and beyond. Attempts to create one EdD program design failed as members realized not all educational practitioners needed the same kind of preparation. For example, a superintendent in Houston could not be prepared in the same way as a community college leader in rural Kentucky because their needs and contexts were so vastly different. What emerged was groundbreaking. Members suggested that a set of principles could offer guidance but remain flexible enough to accommodate various types of programs, practitioner needs, and local university regulations. Over two convenings in 2009, original CPED faculty members pooled together the defined outcomes for their programs and worked collaboratively to develop the CPED Guiding Principles and a new definition of the Education Doctorate. Combined with the design concepts that were developed over the first three years of the project, CPED members created a framework to guide the design of professional practice doctoral programs and to reestablish the EdD as the professional doctorate in education.

Beginning with the End

The CGS Task Force Report on the Professional Doctorate (2007) states the professional doctorate should prepare someone for “the potential transformation of that field of professional practice, just as the PhD represents preparation for the potential transformation of the basic knowledge in a discipline” (p. 6). Seeking to apply the Task Force’s conclusion to the EdD, CPED members developed the following definition: “The professional doctorate in education prepares educators for the application of appropriate and specific practices, the generation of new knowledge, and for the stewardship of the profession” (CPED, 2010). This new definition requires that EdD program are not designed by subtraction of requirements but rather are redesigned around the needs of the profession. Such program redesign requires two components. First, faculty must define the skills, knowledge, and habits that a graduate will have as a result of attending the program. Second, faculty must create a cohesive program design where components and assessments build upon each other to ensure the graduate earns the defined skills, k...