Explanation of progress report model

The goal of CPED is to design, develop, pilot, and evaluate a new professional practice doctorate in education. CPED institutions report their progress twice per year. Using a combination of the logic model and empowerment evaluation, CPED teams create a framework for assessment and accountability that takes advantage of the diversity of CPED institutions and yet helps account for our efforts to reclaim education's doctorates within and across programs, strands, and institutions. Reports will be listed here and on the Consortium Partners page as they are submitted.

Logic models ¹

• interrogate your institution's CPED efforts
• are built with the end in mind
• change over the course of the project
• are unique to each institution's project, but…
• provide a common framework, so…
• can help us document progress across institutions and across strands

Empowerment evaluation ²

• Is the use of evaluation concepts and techniques to foster improvement and self-determination
• Employs both qualitative and quantitative methodologies
• Has an unambiguous value orientation—it is designed to help people help themselves and improve their programs using a form of self-evaluation and reflection
• Is necessarily a collaborative group activity
• Desensitizes evaluation and ideally helps organizations internalize evaluation principles and practices, making evaluation an integral part of program planning.
• Creates an opportunity for capacity building
• Allows for varying ways of knowing, multicultural perspectives
• Allows evaluation to change with and adapt to environmental changes
• Acknowledges and respects people's capacity to create knowledge about, and solutions to, their own experiences

Together these two models provide a framework that fairly engages our academic community and allows for clear documentation of progress toward creating “proofing sites” (Goodlad, 1984) for the new professional practice doctorate.

Explanation of components

A. Preparing for Change: Training and facilitation

Training is part of the self-reflective process of self-assessment that is built into all parts of the change and redesign processes. For institutional members, training maps out terrain of the program design, highlights CPED design-concepts and components, makes preliminary assessments of program components, defines concerns, and illustrates needs for goals, strategies to achieve goals and documentation to indicate or substantiate programs. The training process is similar to developing an evaluation or research design. It is also on going, as new skills are needed to respond to new levels of understanding. The facilitator, generally the CPED primary investigator, serves as a general guide who offers direction and monitors and facilitates as needed—creation of facilitation teams, work with resisting units, refresh sessions, solve protocol issues, etc.

B. Assessing Inputs: resources and community concerns

Take stock of the inputs, or the resources that are needed to create and operate your program design. These are the human, financial and organizational resources available to your program design. Each resource and its value should be clearly identified and assessed. Questions to ask in this process are:

• What do you have and what do you need?
• What concerns exist?
• What human resources are available?
• What administrative resources are available?
• What community resources are available?
• What financial resources are available?
• What organizational/political supports and barriers exist?

C. Defining Activities: setting goals, creating strategies and developing processes

Activities account for what you are doing at your institution to develop and launch your program.

What are you doing at your institution?

• Planning processes
  • Setting mission & goals: Determine what outcome your institution wants from your program; set goals to reach that outcome. Goals should be realistic and include—initial conditions, motivation, resources, and program dynamics.
• Design and Implementation processes
  • Developing strategies and action plans: Participants are responsible for developing strategies to accomplish program objectives—brainstorming, critical review, and consensual agreement used to establish strategies.
  • Communicate with relevant audiences: Stakeholders as well as other relevant audiences should be kept appraised of the evaluation and change process.
• Documentation processes
  • Documenting progress: Participants determine what type of documentation is required to monitor progress. Each form of documentation is scrutinized for relevance to program. Participants must defend why each form of documentation contributes to program goals.

D. Monitoring the change process: Outputs

Outputs of the new program design are the changes that will take place in your program and ultimately lead to your outcome, or professional practice doctorate. Participants should determine a method for monitoring and documenting the process of evaluation and change. Outputs should not only be documented, but also evaluated to determine if they are furthering established goals.

What changes in your program design do you hypothesize will lead to your outcomes?

• New core learning experiences?
• New laboratories of practice?
• New scholarship of teaching experiences (for students as well as faculty)?
• New signature pedagogies?
• New capstone experiences?

E. Identifying Outcomes

Outcomes are the major changes that will take place once you have completed the above work.

• What changes in attitudes, behaviors, skills, status, and/or level of functioning do you intend to see in your professional practice doctoral candidate?
• What capacities, characteristics, and character do you expect to see? See Lee Shulman's Seven Pillars for examples.

F. Creating Impact

Impact is the change that your program will contribute to your institution, educational practice, research, and policy.

• Promoting adaptation, renewal & nstitutionalization: Participants will make a significant effort to promote institutional adaption to new processes and to promote continual evaluation to renew current programs.
• How will your outcomes enhance educational practice, research, and policy?