Interrogating the Capstone, Vanderbilt’s Peabody College Panel Presentation

Conceptual Scaffolding:

o Ed.D. of past based on application
o What role does theory testing & theory generation play in capstone project?
o What kinds of contribution is made to knowledge through capstone project?

Curriculum:

o Capstone project done with 2-4 students working with a client (i.e. school district) & referred to as a consultancy
o Consultancy characteristics

1. Problem finding
2. Negotiating entry – understanding organizations on formal/informal basis of power
3. Authentic problems – what are meaningful findings to resolve problems

o Looks traditional on paper, difference comes in pedagogy – making knowledge visible for practice
o Common core or common threads
o Analytical tools different than methods for Ph.D. students
o What level of inference can research make to schools?
o Scaffolding & support available for students before capstone

Marketing Aspects:

o Be clear about what is going to be done
o Opportunity costs related to week-end program
o Faculty engagement helpful in explaining thought process behind the project
o Defining the market place
o Know target audience
o Know the direct competitors

Grad Students:

o Program/degree opened opportunities upon graduation
o Worked with faculty in resolving issues about the unknown of the program (i.e. scheduling aspect of courses offered)
o Uses research (consumer) rather than creating research
o Learned necessary tools through the capstone
o Impacted ways to ask ?’s in own careers

Lessons Learned After 1st Year:
o Scope & intention of projects made clear upfront with clients & students
o Timing & pacing made summertime better for introducing “requests of assistance” (capstone project) by clients to students (students ranked choices)
o More regular checks made on student progress
o Faculty members meet with students more often each semester
o Audit individual effort more intensely allows for addressing problems more quickly if individual effort is not at level of expectation

Clients’ Responsibilities:
o Provide access to data
o Autonomy part of nature of work
o Spirit of cooperation
o Clarity of expectations & scope of issues

Miscellaneous:
Capstone projects generated by faculty in consultation with clients

Setting a plan of Exploration – led by Jackie Edmundson and Charol Shakeshaft

University Examples

Margaret Grogan – University of Missouri-Columbia
Revisiting the capstone, because it was too much of a replication of Ph.D doctorate. Began with input from outside consultants.
Were very interested in changing the capstone. We have undertaken to do more professional development about chairing dissertation/capstone experience. We have both had students who have done action research projects. Mostly they have been insider projects. They need to have the components necessary to make it a qualified capstone. They need to have an opportunity to turn into researchers in a limited sense. We help them by putting into the program opportunities to practice action research. We argue that they will become better institutional leaders if they practice these habits of mind, for example to be able to problem frame (we struggle with the language here – Jo uses problem setting). Rather than to decide what is the problem, it is probably not in the best interest for the leader to decide what the problem is, but to frame it. We also build in practice of working in groups with a participatory nature. The action research model is very messy, students like the idea that this is very messy. We struggle with when is enough is enough and what does the end product look like. I don’t think we have done enough about how the end product looks. We are looking at three sections: 1) information, methodology, how the org looks, 2) each student writes up a reflection about what they see the issue being, 3) what does the group think should be the outcomes of the research and a meta-analysis of their own learning. Would like to form it into a 3 year time frame so they are finishing the degree in three years.

Curt Adams, University of Oklahoma – redesigning the dissertation
We are not mapping backwards we are moving forwards. We are looking at our signature pedagogy and the labs of practice to see what our outcomes will look like. It is based on trying to conceptualize what is going on in organization – helping students develop the capacity and analytical lense so they can view the issue in multiple ways and spend a lot of time up front to frame the problem. We are in the learning phase of forming the capstone with its critical components. We are trying to build on the foundation of knowledge and skills that we have put into our signature pedagogy. We want capstone to be a continual flow through the entire program. Want to provide multiple lenses to frame the capstone experience. (Question CS: What organizational phenomena will they look at?) For example: they might look at a policy and deconstruct it to find the underlying assumptions, to look at the organizational environment to see how it inhibits participatory decision-making, to look at the role of parents, the supervisory role within the organization. Instead of looking at for example the problem of attendance in one way, but to look at it through multiple lenses – needs assessment, psychological aspect, social aspect, etc.

Margaret Latta – UNL TLTE – Arts of the practical
We are field testing a set of courses that we have labeled arts of the practical. We have asked educators what it might look like from different perspectives in terms of teaching and learning, concretely asking them to think of theory as “working notion.” We have written an IRB that will allow us to access the artifacts of these courses. They will be deliberately cross-disciplinary and cross-interest area also: example – schooling in demographically changing areas, family diversity, culture in schooling, courses around policy decisions. We are thinking about how this can be an important part of the conversation for the teacher educators.

Bill Hawley – University of Maryland – Envisioning a capstone
Let me suggest the problems we are trying to solve:
1. Transfer
2. Meaningful – staying engaged by using systematic inquiry.
3. Collaborative skills – if it were easy there would be more of it.
4. Management of faculty time – how they might better use their time
5. Student time – we need to make sure that what they are doing is an important use of time and that they move along.

Project: Client-based, problem oriented program, based in DC area. Students work as teams, work collaboratively, then individually, then collaboratively and then present as a team. The teams of students will by typically 4 students. One team will be typically considered a course for the advisor. We don’t expect the faculty to structure the situation with the client. Students will have input of their interest, we will select the clients to try to address interest and to have national interest. There need to be support systems within the client to help this work get done. This program will begin in the end of the second year. We will negotiate necessary issues with the client instead of the student being responsible for that. They will take two courses while they are working on this. It will be the duration of their third year. We have not implemented this plan yet, but we have the structures in place. Example: Education week has a research center that would love to have us do a number of projects with the data that they have on tap. The model has to fit the content you are trying to teach and the context in which you teach.

Table share: the ideas that you want to remember and take back to your faculty. 30 minutes to talk and discuss, will return to large group to share out particular ideas for the good of the group.

What problem is your capstone trying to solve?

• The transfer problem – not so much integrating what has gone before in previous years, but confirming in addition to continue to study. The idea that action research is in your own workplace that follows on to pilot studies. Most importantly it must have future. How do we increase the capacity and passion for graduate students to continue their study?

• The notion that the dissertation for many of our students might not have more relevance in their work place.

• One of the items that came up is that the dissertation is an isolated experience – that is not germane to administrative skill needs – the dissertation provided practice in isolation or autonomy rather than practicing collaboration or community.

• The way we try to solve the isolation problem is that our dissertation communities consist of 5 grad students and two advisors, the dissertations are done individually, but the design is done together in a community of practice. It is applied where the practice is. We are capitalizing on developing cohorts of 5 with the added responsibility of seeing to it that everyone finishes not just the swiftest.

• Another problem that the capstone might address that the dissertation does not for people moving along in their program?
• This group talked about the need to be public in the scholarship of teaching and knowledge.
• If the capstone experience is yielding significant learning that can impact educational practice, policy and learning is that it should be made public. How is it that we can take good work done by doc students and make that public in a scholarly way and in ways that we can learn from that and critique it and make use of it.
• Regarding the problem the capstone is trying to solve, one is the responsibility to our constitutency the other is to the field. The conventional dissertation is not helping either. This also helps organizations address real issues that some organizations could not afford to hire someone to solve. It is also kind of a public relations as to what the educational doctorate can do for the field and a courtesy of giving back to the field in addressing the needs.
• What of the issue of faculty workload? It is not unusual for a faculty member to have 6, 7, 10 advisees. The whole issue of how we think about what a reasonable faculty/student relationship is for what they are trying to learn. Often, faculty members are advising students in areas that the faculty members have no interest in – so they can’t.
• Dissertation does not provide much practice in communication skills. Capstone could provide the opportunity to work on communication and persuasion skills, and more opportunities to look at something from multiple perspectives, dimensions, etc.
• As we think of it as a dissertation replacement, we need an artifact of student learning to prove what we have been teaching them. I am not sure that a capstone can serve too many masters such as the public, the student, the institution, etc. I like that it has a residue for the future. We began to play with some of the UMaryland criteria of transfer and relevance. Programs should be unique but based on some common principals, like transfer, meaning, and collaboration. Students learn what they do (Dewey). If you are preparing students to work in a policy arena, they need to work on policy. If you’re preparing school leaders, they need to work in schools. This continued development of students is a good guiding principal for the capstone as we develop it.
• The capstone has the opportunities to solve the issue of dissertation being navel gazing exercises. These are real problems that someone has gone out of their way to seek out research on.
• We also talked about the transfer, relevancy, and collaboration and for us the spirit of inquiry was also very important.

From Learner to Assessment to Program Assessment, Lee Shulman

National Research Council unwilling to evaluate doctorates in education as there is no way to distinguish between the types of distinctions associated with such doctorates

55,000 (63,000 next week) National Board Certified Teachers’ biggest problem is that “they’re all dressed up & have no place to go”

Remember that the real lessons earned from the Wizard of Oz are those learned on the “yellow brick road”

We are not doing assessment OF OUR work, we are doing it FOR OUR work

We need to recognize that accounting begins with recounting
o Stories tied from embedded structures
o Program is one level of narrative
o One level focuses on activities led by students or professors in the program
o Create opportunities of scholarship practice
o For programs actively engaged in their Ed.D. work, envision each student having his/her own web page that is equivalent of a Facebook page

We have to do our work in individual programs, share it, & employ some kind of assessment

Recapture today’s case histories for tomorrow

Doctoral students are the secret to doctoral programs as they are change agents & will be major agents of change

As we create documentation & assessment of work, keep stakes modest & low by resisting the temptation to use data from past few years to raise rankings (i.e. National Survey of Student Engagement illustrates this concept)

Embed your assessment
o Habits aren’t developed by doing something once
o Assessments should become milestones for tracking progress
o Try to use this effort to transform quality of schools & education

Think of mirrors, windows & lenses as visual protectors
o Mirrors look at ourselves & our programs in new ways
o Windows need to be opened to see what other scholars & practitioners are doing
o Lenses introduce new ways to look at data
Projectors
o How can we build on each other’s work?
o How do we learn to tell the story of how we are doing?
o What can others learn from our experiences?

How do we use the opportunities to move our work ahead?

Lenses can take various forms, think about rubrics that are narrative in nature.

Assessing Outcomes, led by David Marsh

Task: In your teams, discuss Vanderbilt’s “capstone” assessment looking at one of the following:

1. Problem Identification
2. Organizational Analysis
3. Data Gathering and Sense-Making
4. Developing and Presenting Recommendations

Problem Identification
• Can students identify problems in their own coursework?
• What are the criteria for selecting problems (a look at unacceptable problems).
• Concern for students who had to turn in projects in January.
• Concern for faculty who haven’t been consultants.
• How clear is the statement of the problem (too unclear or too large)?
• How clear is the rationale for doing the project?
• Does the problem statement have relevance to the functionng of the institution?
• Challenge of how to engage students in the process.
• This is an opportunity for students to practice their organizational development skills.
• It may be that a student comes up with a different problem than the organization.
• Focusing on problem identification, there can be low stakes analysis.
• There is an importance of individual assessment/products/component of the literature review and along the way some evidence.
• The task for the Vanderbilt faculty is to come up with rubrics.
• Do students really do the problem selection?
• Sustainability of problem solving, did it go beyond technical problem solving. The transferability of problem solving.

Data Gathering and Sense-Making
• Where in the process data will be gathered.
• How are we going to evaluate data on a rubric (unacceptable, acceptable, and exemplary).
• Contextualization of data gathering within the problem identified.
• Identification of appropriate data for the problem.
• Source of the data and collection of data.
• Disaggregation of the data. Analyzing and interpreting the data.
• Ability to disaggregate the data would be a great assessment tool because it will show that the individual is capable of sense making.
• How can you see a culture and habit instead of just snapshots?
• Student come up with a plan and carry out that plan.
• How students position themselves and why (global, etc.) they position themselves?
• Involve stakeholders in data gathering and sense making.

Developing and Presenting Recommendations
• How do we document and think about work at all the phases and not just the recommendations at the end.
• Documenting, visibility, digital photos, forums at different stages.
• Is a good recommendation good only if someone acts upon it?

Going Forward: A Proposal for Documenting CPED Progress, led by Rick McCown

Is it possible to create common assessment tools to be used across CPED institutions in each of the separate strands? How do we create robust assessment protocols that could be shared? Is there a common framework within and across these strands that could be used at any institution?

• Need to tell the story as a whole group- a consortium of universities- based on the goals of CPED which were stated and agreed upon at the organizational meeting

• We will be evaluated, so why don’t we take over this by agreeing on a collective framework to present our accounts- a logic model- which will not look the same at each university but will unify our efforts

The logic model

• Inputs: student outcomes are what are expected from the inputs and to be measured
• Activities:
• Outputs: the design
• Outcomes:
• Impact: results of the outcomes on the students’ themselves and within practice, policy and research

Group Discussion of "outcomes we want"
Teacher Education group:

• A broader knowledge of the field, of teacher education as a whole rather than its subcategories
• Learning to problem-solve
• Seeing things from multiple perspectives
• Knowledge about the learning process, from early childhood throughout adulthood
• Ability to motivate others
• How to be a reflective practitioner
• How to evaluate data
• To think outside the box
• To understand diversity

Discussion of impacts:

• On-going adult learning and professional development.
• Creates a broader knowledge of the field.
• Helps to guide their learning.
• Able to use inquiry in politically astute ways.

Education Leadership:

Group One

Outcomes: Demonstrate ethical care in their leadership
Impacts: Transfers to school community enabling a more caring environment that enhances a variety of student areas including attendance, aspirations, and climate

Group Two

Outcomes: The development of a “habit of mind” that allows the student to view every issue from an equity frame (among other frames).
Impacts:

• Equity will always be on the table and a part of the decision-making criteria for everything.
• In practice, it enlarges the ability to meet the needs of more students and creates honesty.
• In research, it will always be a component of student research and gives equity a chance to be examined.
• In policy, expectations are differentiated and it holds us accountable.

Group Three

Outcomes: Create a critical inquiring practitioner.

Impacts:

• Educational practice improves.
• Policy improves and barriers are removed.

Group Four

Outcomes:

• Want students to be able to effectively influence policy at a state and local level through understanding action with diversity and coalition building.
• Changed labs of practice to have authentic, diversity related activities that are repeated throughout experiences.

Impacts: Reduction in the achievement gap in local school districts served by the graduate.

Summaries by Graduate Students: Kim Heuschkel, Rutgers University;
Melissa Byington & Joyce A. Lehn, University of Nebraska-Lincoln;
Katya Narozhnaya, University of Maryland; Fatima Begum, University of
Houston; Jessica Bleil, Duquesne University; Sonja Lopez, University of
Southern California

• Day One Summary
• Day Three Summary