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Participant Panel Discussion

Jackie Hawkins

  • Foundations courses-grappling with this in Houston
  • Foundations may need to be used across departments
  • Focus: relevance of basic science and translation to applied science
  • Need for core and foundational work
  • Used Harvard's 4 Cs to inform process (context, culture, condition, competencies):
    • Important to consider 4cs considering diversity of student body
    • Houston will be a minority city in a minority state by 2015
  • Need to align leadership, content, and teacher ed
    • Fusion of ed leadership, curriculum and instruction, teacher ed
    • Must be fused, aligned in order to deal with challenges facing students in schools
  • Challenge because many faculty have been there for many years; passionate for what they do but hard to keep in contact with what issues are being faced by students in public schools today
  • Rather than using cases - moved to case solving process.
    • Paper doll analogy
      • Began by reading paper cases; now realize need to be similar to USC model, case solving
      • Components of process are the same
      • Issues of culture, context, and conditions, and competencies of folks on campus with whom folks will interact are different - this is the dressing of the doll
      • Anticipate different outcomes, projects, processes, outcomes across wide variety of needs in different areas
  • Have begun process of planning courses
  • Expectations of outcome = demonstrations of change
    • How do you know that what you did had an impact?
    • If you didn't have an impact, why didn't you have one, and what are you going to do about it?
  • 1st cohort will be in summer 2009

Patrick Hartwick

  • Core and its relationship to skill set/competencies; start from the end
  • Established advisory faculty committee to determine core
  • How to we establish competencies?
  • Themes: leadership, accountability, equity, diversity, learning & instruction
    • Want to integrate themes throughout all courses
  • Core courses - qualitative and quantitative methods, problem based inquiry
    • Q: How do we put themes/competencies into courses?
    • Q: How do themes relate to students and outcomes?
    • Have matrix that shows themes and competencies across courses
    • Develop universal syllabi

Tom Tretter

  • Pilot program - building their parachute as they're falling
  • Structure of delivery:
    • Courses don't fit practitioner world in some cases
    • Courses are traditionally a semester long with one faculty member.
      • Instead of these approach worked backwards, but took a detour
        • 1st - What are the purposes of programs and desired outcomes?
        • 2nd - What experiences are most beneficial to students?
      • Problem driven approach
        • No packet of case studies - instead students bring problems with them.
        • Students are interested in their own contexts
        • This approach allows us to push students beyond the boundary of their own context, yet make it relevant to them
  • Collaboration in course design
    • Students and faculty developed cohort (cohort of both students and faculty - double cohort) that didn't change
    • 4 faculty teach in the first year; teams of faculty
    • Every 2-3 weeks had all day Saturday courses
    • Need to fit within institutional constraints, using the courses that already exist - smapped problem-based experiences onto courses
    • Students may not know what courses they are taking-they know they are taking year long experiences that are organized around program themes and program outcomes
    • Have received very good feedback from students-longitundinal, integrated
    • Experiences are integrated across the problem - able to respond in the moment to issues that come up
    • Thinking more deeply about how to solve problems-not just looking to the models that have been used in the past
    • Project based instruction drives interest in statistics and literature syntheses - using an action-driven approach that is significant to practitioners
    • Presenting feedback to professors as they go - iterative cycles of the program
    • Realizing that the reasons they made decisions for something may not have been that well grounded
    • In first year - core courses, 2nd year - specific projects

Susan Wunder

  • Program is on the verge of admitting first cohort
  • Believe in core courses
    • Identified objectives for all students - core courses are way to approach this
  • 4 core courses:
    • #1: Challenges & Opportunities
      • 4 iterations of this over the course of the 4year program - meet on campus the first year, then through Blackboard in subsequent years. Pursue questions of practice on their own projects
    • Q: should pair up students who come from similar contexts or distributing them across the group?
    • Simultaneously pursuing field training
    • Inquiry course - how do we go about finding solutions
  • In addition to core, students will have choice courses
    • Ongoing courses in our department and other departments
    • In their area of interest
  • Q: how much blending is successful- in core courses and other courses that are open to everyone at the university?
    • Blending in terms of students and faculty
    • Approximately 1/3 of faculty working with 1st cohort
  • Q: What are ways to pair students with faculty mentors?
    • Will know 3-4 faculty in first year of course work, but how will they meet everyone, how to pair up?

Patrick Hartwick

  • Getting faculty engaged is a goal at this point
  • Not just education leadership faculty; faculty across disciplines are involved
    • We are encouraging these faculty to talk with us as well
  • Also talking to superintendants of surrounding districts
    • Talking about what are the problems we are going to face in the next 5-10 years
  • Q: How can faculty shift the paradigm in terms of pedagogy?
    • Start with universal syllabi & competencies?
    • Interested in hearing stories of how other programs have negotiated with faculty on case studies, readings, etc.
  • Q: What is push back from faculty?

David Marsh

  • Step 1 was to plan the ideas (Futures conference)
    • Importance of bringing in people beyond education faculty
    • At Futures conference, 50/100 were not faculty; committee members, district leaders, policy people
    • Had to decide what our focus was, don't think we would have gotten that if we only talked amongst ourselves.

3 steps:

  1. Futures conference, building the ideas
  2. Year-long design process with members across the school
    • Building layers of buy-in across faculty
  3. Collaborative faculty-only syllabi/course design
    • Didn't start with this because would look a lot like what you used to do

Myron Dembo

  • Eliminated existing structure of department
  • Greatest problems - tenured senior faculty member who says they will not do this
  • Have no budget, power, authority, only talking intellectually about the issues
  • No professor owns his/her course - courses are owned by schools of Ed
  • Overarching curricular committee
    • Gave feedback on courses; so individual faculty didn't have to give feedback that they didn't want to give each other
  • Hearings - to invite faculty members to present concerns during planning stage
  • By the time to vote on the changes in the program, it was a unanimous vote amongst the faculty
  • Need for strategic approach to change
    • Know faculty needs, wants, massage them - give them the information, plant change, be prepared for anything that comes up

Discussion Groups tied to CPED Participant Panel Discussion

What core knowledge approach makes sense? What problem solving approach makes sense?

  • Suggest: Organizational theory, leadership, research, diversity, social justice
  • Stakeholders (not just faculty) inform nature of program
  • Not a distinct set of core courses for separate areas - interdisciplinary & interprofessional
  • Core can vary based on focus of the university program
    • Ask client - public schools, etc.
  • Importance of backward mapping from desired outcomes
    • What should grads be able to do?
  • Difference between core knowledge and core courses
  • Use a problem as a way to assess the strength of core
    • Frame problem in a way that drives you to the solution
    • How to develop the problem formulation process in students
  • Is core the same as foundational?
  • Core is advanced level of professional skills - not just foundational
  • Need for model/strategy that uses problem solving
  • Settings may change the knowledge needed

How do we get there?

  • Reach out to those in schools - open up the conversation
    • Backward mapping
    • Intermix goals
  • Stick to the core
    • Practitioners may feel pressured to get EdD
    • May come in thinking they know it all already
  • Regard what other students bring to the program
  • Critical friends - like DELS at Duquesne
    • Critical friends researching the practice and preparation of those who practice education
    • Safe environment, feeling safe about discussing the issues
  • Differentiate program from other universities - make relationship with districts (helps them and helps marketing)
  • Ask potential students - what do you want to see in the program?
  • NCLB not describing outcomes correctly -what we've done to help them is getting lost
  • Broad-based input

How can we incorporate stakeholders outside of education faculty in discussions?

  • Both formal and informal ways of incorporating other voices
    • Practitioner networks
    • Partnering with advocacy organizations
    • Advisory committees
    • Ask potential students
  • Broader input helps distinguish the program (marketing tool)
  • Importance of establishing safe environment for this type of discussion
  • Potential of off-campus programs to involve new voices

Core knowledge

  • Organizational change/knowledge - how does this fit into core courses? Or is it a separate core?
  • Transformational leadership - why are you doing the things you're doing?
  • Organizational issues are what practitioners go back to everyday
    • Kentucky - assessment is focused around everything they do
  • Work as problem driven
    • Problems drive the work that we are trying to do
  • Looking for change, maybe asking yourself ‘what should that change be?'
    • Organizational level, structural changes within organizational
  • STEM issues
    • Different for districts that are or are not meeting accountability index
    • High schools not doing as well; need to reorganize high schools
  • One challenge is the relationships amongst students in the program - leaving their professional roles at the door
  • Problem-solving approach - how organizational change is woven in
    • (Kentucky student perspective) 1st semester everyone is talking about their own problems---now discussing experiences based on readings, norms in the class
  • May be different expectations for students who already have a master's degree vs. those who do not
    • Know more than their experiences, also foundational knowledge
    • Cohorts may affect the expectations, development of core courses
  • Q: Wondering where advocacy comes from?
    • Think there can be a healthy tension between preparing effective practitioners and also battling against the status quo
    • Not just capable of stepping in and doing the job that needs to be done, but also having skills, ability to be an effective leader
      • (Kentucky) in first class, set up expectations/norms, were indoctrinated
      • University alones stands for social justice

Problem solving

  • (Kentucky)
  • Take problems that cohort brings & then be able to walk out of the program with ability to solve any problem
    • Working towards a solution by first defining the problem and outcomes, sandwiching the problem
  • Practitioner not interested in just having face time with faculty - want to get the skills to make an impact
    • Why problem solving part is so important to practitioners
    • Don't have to wait for dissertation/capstone to go back and make a difference
    • Feeling of being much more effective than before