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Rethinking the Professional Doctorate in Education

EDL Faculty

Educational Leadership (EDL) faculty photo

The Ed.D. in Educational Leadership program at WCU prepares professionals to work in educational institutions as senior-level leaders. This competitive and rigorous professional doctoral program is a member of both the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) and the University Council of Education Administration (UCEA). Leaning into the expertise offered by these organizations and national leadership standards, WCU has engaged in rethinking and redesigning the professional doctorate to develop leaders who: 1) possess a deep and critical understanding of the social construction and power relations perpetuating the unfair distribution of access and opportunity by educational organizations, and 2) demonstrate leadership competency in the scholarly execution of system-wide, research-supported, equitable and socially just practices that ensure the fair distribution of access and opportunity for all. These two program student learning outcomes (SLOs) guide the program’s continuous improvement efforts.

During the 2018-2019 academic year, program faculty assessed student achievement of these two SLOs. Educational Leadership (EDL) faculty reviewed their students’ disquisitions (dissertations in practice) and discovered less than desirable quality and progress toward SLO achievement. EDL faculty identified that there was questionable understanding around how systems produce inequity and how leaders can work to disrupt the system/status quo in order to bring about change that results in more equitable/socially just outcomes for their students and communities.  

The assessment results encouraged program re-design which included:

  1. A commitment to maintaining a diverse, knowledgeable, and highly-skilled faculty.
  2. A collective vision among the program faculty for program SLOs connected to equity and justice.
  3. Continuous, collaborative design and delivery of complex, scholarly learning experiences that center equity.
  4. The creation of a core, stand-alone course for leadership for equity and social justice provided to students in the beginning of the program.
  5. Placement of curriculum and learning experiences aimed at building a deep and critical understanding of social construction and power relations related to forms of exclusion within all courses.
  6. Increased emphasis on the requirement that students demonstrate competency in the execution of system-wide leadership practices that leverage equity for all students within their disquisition work.
  7. Designed a rubric (to be applied to the assessment of disquisitions) to assess student growth of both SLOs. The rubric went through a formal validation process by an expert panel.
  8. Additional disquisition guideline documents to make student expectations clear.

WCU’s Ed.D. program is in the process of implementing the above improvement strategies and is working through Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) to share this work with other Ed.D. programs across the country who are also re-designing their programs for the development of equitable and socially just educational leaders.

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