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Among the many conclusions of the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate (CID) was one with important consequences for the field of education, namely that graduate schools of education needed to resolve the confusion over the degree titles Ph.D. and Ed.D. According to the National Research Council, some 142 graduate schools of education award both degrees, with little differentiation between the preparation of future faculty and researchers and that of “leading practitioners.” Having two degrees with dual purposes has long perpetuated misconceptions about the quality of education doctorates and led to accusation that both are “second-rate degrees” (Shulman et al., 2006).
With this conclusion, CID acknowledged the need to find the proper balance between preparing professional practitioners and future researchers in education. While the CID project focused on ways to improve the Ph.D. in education, it also evidenced the need for more thinking about the ways that graduate schools of education could prepare leaders for the world of practice—currently, the Ed.D. is simply not adequately preparing “leading practitioners” for the challenges that confront America’s schools and colleges.
The participants in CID were neither the first nor the only ones to recognize this problem. With a national education system under fire, many criticisms about the role and purpose of the Ed.D. have surfaced. Among them is the assertion that current Ed.D. degrees often fail to provide leaders in K-12 and higher education with practical knowledge and the capacity for expert leadership. The conclusion is that the profession needs more rigorous and relevant professional training. Indeed, some scholars have called for abandoning the Ed.D. and casting the preparation for school and college leadership in an M.B.A.-type mold (Levin, 2005). But others have argued that it is time to “reclaim” the professional degree (the Ed.D.) and make it into the degree of choice for practitioners (Shulman et al., 2006).
So what is the best course of action? How do we produce the highly qualified professionals required for tomorrow’s educational leadership? Where do graduate schools of education begin?
In January 2007, the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED), modeled after the CID project, was launched. Following nearly two years of planning, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching announced its intent to have two dozen schools and colleges of education engage in a national, inter-institutional dialogue aimed at improving the preparation of advanced educational practitioners. The project focuses on developing stewards of practice in doctoral education—professional practitioners who are committed to the highest standards and prepared to take on the challenges of teaching in and leading schools, serving as administrators and clinical faculty in colleges and universities, and leading organizations that serve education. To do this, the project seeks to define what a steward of practice should know, value, and be able to do, as well as design the course of study and experiences that can develop this type of practitioner. As a companion effort, the project will simultaneously strengthen the Ph.D., with its goal of preparing stewards of the discipline.
CPED is a three-year initiative (2007-2010) that is divided into three phases: concept and design, experiment, and dissemination. Teams representing a broad cross-section of the faculty at each of the participating education schools convene twice a year to deliberate about the form and function of the professional-practice doctorate. They then bring results of these deliberations back to their home institutions, where they have each piloted new professional-practice programs in one of three areas: school leadership, organizational leadership, or teacher education.
The basic question being asked is this: What are the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that professionals working in education should demonstrably have? Mapping backward from the answers to that question, teams are determining what types of assessments, teaching, experiences, and scholarship will meet the needs of future practitioners. For the remainder of the project, the CPED initiative aims to produce several institutional examples that others can look to as models of exemplary practice.
Conversations and progress are centered around four design concepts—creating capstones for assessment, identifying a signature pedagogy, constructing laboratories of practice, and developing a scholarship of teaching and learning—that have grown out of the expansive work of Lee Shulman, former president of the Carnegie Foundation, who has long challenged education schools to improve every facet of their programs. Each of the participating institutions takes these ideas and engages colleagues in a far-ranging debate about ways to incorporate them into the redesign of their graduate education programs.
What Have We Learned Thus Far?
One and half years into the project, institution teams have participated in three CPED meetings involving rich discussion, creative thinking, and deep reflection among peers, guided by the prior work of the Carnegie Foundation. Institutional teams have then brought the fruits of those deliberations back to their home institutions and continued the discussion there. Each site has experimented with various signature pedagogies and/or laboratories of practice, in the process facing the challenges of developing professional-practice programs.
Capstones
During the first year, CPED teams examined the culminating project of the professional-practice degree, asking whether practitioners should be expected to pursue the same dissertation requirements as future researchers. This has been the toughest design component for most institutions. On the one hand, a common sentiment has been, “We don’t know what good criteria for a capstone are.” On the other, many faculty who were trained in traditional ways are determined to break the mold of the traditional six-chapter dissertation and replace it with something that meets the demands of leading 21st-century schools, colleges, and other organizations. What are the merits of a group project or one rooted in an ongoing practical problem faced by a school or college or other learning institution? Should the emphasis be on “original knowledge” (and the generation of a dataset), or should skills be developed to interpret and analyze data that might be generated by a school system or district or other source?
As a result of these conversations, new forms of the capstone project are emerging. For example, the program at the University of Southern California has introduced thematic dissertations, wherein students conduct individual investigations of field-based problems as part of a group organized around a set of related problems. The University of Houston has put together a candidacy paper task force, which is considering capstone models such as a needs analysis for educational institutions, the development of institutional-change plans, and a critical analysis of a district program. Both the University of Missouri–Columbia and the University of Florida are considering the role that solving “real-world” problems might play in a capstone piece. As a result of the focus on problems of practice, some institutions have suggested that the dissertation committee should include professional as well as academic members.
While CPED teams recognize the need for continued discussion about capstone projects, they have already demonstrated a strong commitment to rethinking how degree candidates should demonstrate that they are ready to assume educational leadership positions. Upcoming meetings will continue discussions of how we might build upon current ideas and generate new thoughts about the capstone.
Signature pedagogies
If the end product of a professional-practice program is an exceptionally well-prepared steward of practice, then what kind of teaching helps foster the essential skills and qualities for that role? CPED members view signature pedagogies as the route to cultivating the habits of a true professional and, as a result, have made the most progress in this area.
Signature pedagogies reflect “what counts as knowledge in a field and how things become known” (Shulman, 2006, p. 2). CPED teams have been challenged to consider these epistemological issues as they think about what their signature pedagogies could be. The Pennsylvania State University team, for instance, has started with the understanding that the “identification of signature pedagogies involves considering the variety of pedagogies that are evident in instructional, research, and field settings.”
Other CPED teams are working toward cultivating the habits of critical reading and the curiosity that leads to investigation. At Duquesne University, the inquiry process takes the form of talking papers—annual student papers that outline their thoughts on key readings and eventually form the basis of the culminating project. California State University, Fresno, is developing a list of crucial readings that serve as a frame for the qualifying exams. The University of Connecticut educational leadership program focuses the first two semesters on creating consumers of research and on teaching about the role of both quantitative and qualitative research in the inquiry process, case-study write-up strategies, and question formulation.
Because professionals typically work with colleagues to solve real-life problems, developing practical skills through collaboration is a prominent signature pedagogy. The University of Nebraska–Lincoln's teaching, learning and teacher-education program uses the introductory seminar to “initiate and cultivate program continuity and community,” which begins by developing “a common language” between students and faculty. At the University of Kentucky, the executive doctorate program faculty and students come together in a mixed-methods, research-based program to collaborate on scholarship. The University of Missouri–Columbia’s transformative collaboration uses action research in projects involving both faculty and students as researchers. Building on what Schwab (1970) called the arts of the practical—practitioner debate, deliberation, and choice—the University of Nebraska–Lincoln team has created a set of cross-disciplinary courses that will “cultivate a culture of collaboration among scholars and practitioners [as a means to] promote reflective practice.” Challenge-cycles at the University of Maryland involve a cohort in thinking and making decision about practice-based problems.
An attention to diversity, culture, and social justice in leadership and teaching has also been introduced as an element within signature pedagogies. Washington State University’s statewide program is working across the institution’s branch campuses to create culturally relevant pedagogies that meet the needs of both its doctoral students and those whom they will serve. University of Oklahoma faculty are addressing types of learning in the state’s three demographics—rural, urban, and suburban—to prepare practitioners to understand the educational needs in each.
These are rich beginnings for building a reflective process that prepares students for leadership and offers them the opportunity to learn from experience. In the coming year, as CPED teams experiment with these different approaches, they will move closer to understanding the best ways to develop learning in the field of education.
Laboratories of practice
Laboratories of practice are structured experiences of, as the University of Connecticut team put it, “messy, real-world practice,” which are designed to teach ways of doing. Such laboratories provide an important opportunity for students to view work in situ and to work alongside practicing professionals. Models come from other professional fields: one example is medical rounds, where students examine patients while supervised by a physician.
But this has been a difficult concept for CPED teams to grasp, and they have had to think hard about what type of structured experience meets the needs of practitioners. The teams are now analyzing their current fieldwork components and discussing how they could be redesigned. Targeting districts (Houston); face-to-face meetings with state and district leaders (Kentucky); residencies and purposeful apprenticeships in the profession (Pennsylvania State); and rotations through rural, urban, and suburban settings (Oklahoma) are some of the strategies that are being piloted.
The University of Missouri–Columbia recognizes that most Ed.D. candidates work full-time in professional settings and has made the students’ workplaces their laboratories. The student experience is evaluated by the “extent to which students are able to set problems of their own organization into action research.” Rutgers University follows the apprentice model of connecting students to practitioners in a learn-by-doing model. Northern Illinois University is developing a series of “extended, embedded, and integrated internship experiences” that provide students with “hands-on” experiences throughout the program. The University of Kentucky executive doctorate program has cohorts meet monthly with district and state-level professionals to gather field-based problems and learn from practitioners. CPED teams are vigorously experimenting with these and other models of laboratories for professional-practice doctorates. As they experiment, we anticipate the development of more examples that will contribute to the ongoing discussions.
The scholarship of teaching and learning
Work on the scholarship of teaching originated in Ernest Boyer’s seminal piece, Scholarship Reconsidered (1990) and has continued through the efforts of the Carnegie Foundation Academy for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL). CASTL goes beyond Boyer in drawing “the line between excellent teaching and the scholarship of teaching,” the latter of which requires faculty to both “frame and systematically investigate questions related to student learning” (Hutchings and Shulman, 1999).
The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) gives students a way to reflect on and critically think about their own teaching (whether as a teacher or as an administrator, they are going to teach). Still, they have grappled with this design concept and are deliberating and experimenting with various forms of SoTL to enhance their programs and nurture good practice. Examples include team teaching that brings together faculty and practitioners at Virginia Commonwealth and Virginia Tech. University of
Missouri–Columbia faculty are investigating their own teaching practice; California State University, Fresno, is looking at a theory-of-action model to frame such an inquiry into its own faculty’s teaching. At Rutgers, faculty members are defining a variety of pedagogies for teaching. The University of Connecticut adult-learning-centered educational leadership focuses on the attributes of the non-traditional student who is learning in challenging environments. The University of Florida is relying on the work of Boyer to map a connection between the curriculum and student learning outcomes.
CPED teams have decided that through investigating teaching as it leads to student learning and by engaging in faculty self-reflective exercises, steps can be taken towards creating a scholarship of teaching and learning for the preparation of stewards of practice.
Bringing it home
The processes by which CPED institutions have brought the CPED initiative to their home institutions have proven beneficial to understanding how the field of education might successfully reclaim the practice doctorate.
Several institutions have designed their pilot projects around their institutions’ themes, theories of learning, or identities and missions, all of which can provide a framework for programmatic change. Responding to state demands and struggling with ways of providing successful educational leaders and educators, the Universities of Kentucky and Louisville are partnering to design a professional doctorate that will address the state’s “P-20 policy problem.” Duquesne University stresses its university-appropriate mission—a scholarship for schools—in redesigning its program, and the program at the University of Southern California is built around the theme of the educational leader as change agent. Missions and themes not only provide the framework for change—they can also motivate faculty to discuss the “hows” of redesigning Ed.D. programs.
Information-gathering has played a leading role in fostering change at several institutions. Through a set of surveys, Rutgers University is engaged in a “fact-finding process with stakeholders” to gain a better understanding of what skills and knowledge a steward of practice needs to possess. Survey populations range from faculty to current students and alumni to current and potential employers. Committees that present a variety of perspectives because they include education faculty, faculty from other disciplines, and professionals at the state and district levels have been formed at many CPED institutions. Virginia Commonwealth University has developed such work groups to investigate all aspects of their first-practice doctorate (from admissions and capstone experiences to reflective practice). The University of Missouri–Columbia has created a student-faculty committee to assess its current programs. The University of Oklahoma has made a concerted effort to include committee members who represent the cultural diversity of the state.
Campus teams continue to seek new ways to generate interest and involvement. Finding effective ways to engage home-institution faculty in the change process is a common problem for all the CPED institutions. Colleagues who are not part of the initiative and who are pursuing their own teaching and research agendas are being asked to take on program-wide responsibilities, which require time. They are being asked to critically examine practices that some believe represent the highest quality doctoral training, particularly the traditional one-to-one apprenticeship and dissertation. They may also see inter-institutional assessment development or comparisons of outcomes as threatening rather than as a way to make programs more transparent.
Still, CPED teams are forging ways to nurture home-institution faculty involvement, since most believe that general faculty buy-in is necessary for creating institutional change. Pennsylvania State University, for example, is conducting a self-study with faculty leadership that will benchmark the program’s progress. Washington is organizing design retreats for faculty. The University of Missouri–Columbia is conducting faculty retreats to teach action research, a major component of their program design. The University of Houston has monthly faculty meetings to discuss program directions.
Bottom-up efforts reflect the CPED commitment to reclaim the education doctorate through collaborative discussion and action. Faculty and students from across the nation have created a community that shares common ideas, offers friendly criticism, and tries to define the future of their profession. Despite the effort involved, this can be exhilarating, since participants find themselves in a situation where they can start with a clean slate and be creative, and students welcome the opportunity to contribute their voice.
Next Steps
The CPED initiative is in its second year. During this experimental phase, teams are testing and documenting the successes and challenges of their pilot projects. In October, they came together for a successful convening to share their progress and to seek friendly criticism from peers. During the year, they remain engaged through the CPED interactive website http://cpedinitiative.org), which includes home-institution faculty.
During the project’s final year, CPED institutions will disseminate their restructured pilot projects and continue to deliberate and document their successes and challenges until they have developed programs that meet both their institution’s and constituents’ needs, as well as those of education leadership in the United States.
CPED teams have shown a willingness to reconceptualize the education doctorate but also recognize that this journey is by no means mapped out. Rather, they understand that success depends on each institution and the collaborative efforts among them. They recognize that the issues that face the education doctorate require immediate attention, and they are leading the way. In the next year, we anticipate having several proofing sites to serve as examples of how we might better prepare future stewards of practice.
About the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate
The 1990s saw several blue-ribbon commissions and sponsored research reports that offered recommendations to make doctoral education more effective. In their wake it seemed timely to move from talk to action, and so the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching partnered with the Atlantic Philanthropies to undertake a five-year project, called the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate. The initiative, which ran from 2001 through 2005, was designed to be both an action project and a research project. Its objective was to support selected academic departments’ efforts to improve the effectiveness of their doctoral programs. The project invited participating departments to create local solutions suited to what they themselves identified as their needs and problems. The project involved 84 Ph.D.-granting departments in six fields—chemistry, education, English, history, mathematics and neuroscience.
Over the five years of the program, the participating departments made a commitment to examine their own purposes and effectiveness, to implement changes in response to their findings, and to monitor the impact of those changes. Many used their participation to continue plans and activities that were already begun but would benefit from the structure, prestige, and interaction provided by a national initiative. Carnegie’s role, in turn, included visiting the departments, interviewing campus team members, and bringing project participants together (sometimes by discipline, sometimes by theme) to report on their progress, to learn from one another, and to help the project make sense of their experiences in ways that others could build on. In addition, both faculty and students participated in project-wide surveys, the results of which served as grist for rich discussion and debate about the preparation of scholars in the broadest sense, whether they work in industry, government or academe. The final book from that project, The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century, was published by Jossey-Bass in December 2007 (www.josseybass.com).
CPED Institutions
Arizona State University
California State University System
Duquesne University (PA)
Lynn University (FL)
Northern Illinois University
Pennsylvania State University
Rutgers University (NJ)
University of Central Florida
University of Connecticut
University of Florida
University of Houston (TX)
University of Kansas
University of Kentucky-Lexington
University of Louisville (KY)
University of Maryland
University of Missouri-Columbia
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
University of Oklahoma
University of San Francisco
University of Southern California
University of Vermont
Virginia Commonwealth University
Virginia Tech University
Washington State University
Resources
Golde, C., Walker, G. and Assoc. (Eds.) (2006). Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education: Preparing Stewards of the Discipline. Stanford: Jossey-Bass.
Shulman, L., Golde, C., Conklin Bueschel, A., and Garabedian, K. (2006). Reclaiming Education’s Doctorates: A Critique and a Proposal. Educational
Researcher.
Walker, G., Golde, C., Jones, L., Conklin Bueschel, A., and Hutchings, P. (2008). The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century. Stanford: Jossey-Bass.
Jill Perry is the program director of the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED). She is a doctoral student in the department of Education Leadership, Higher Education and International Education at the University of Maryland, with 14 years of experience working in large public universities and large and small private colleges. She has also held adjunct faculty positions at two small private colleges. David Imig, project director of CPED, is a professor of the practice at the University of Maryland and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He brings twenty-five years of leadership of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education to the CPED initiative.