Integrating Improvement Science Into Leadership Preparation Programs: A Comparative Study of Faculty Across 10 Universities

• In Event: Integrating Improvement Science Into Leadership Programs: Opportunities, Challenges, and Adaptations

Abstract

Ed.D. programs are increasingly turning to improvement science (IS) (Bryk et al., 2015) as a signature pedagogy and research methodology for students’ dissertations (Perry et al., 2020). We follow Hinnant-Crawford (2020) in viewing IS as an overarching logic that involves identifying problems of practice, inquiring into the systems that contribute to that problem, developing a theory of improvement and corresponding system of measurement, and iteratively implementing, adjusting, and spreading change ideas.

There is a limited but growing number of first-hand accounts of efforts to incorporate IS into Ed.D programs (e.g., Leach et al., 2020; Militello et al., 2022; Mintrop & Zumpe, 2019; Spaulding et al., 2021) as well as comparative studies of efforts to re-imagine Ed.D. programs according center equity, continuous improvement, and practice-focused dissertations (Buss et al., 2015; Firestone et al., 2021; Paufler et al., 2020, Stone-Johnson & Hayes, 2020). However, there is no published research that focuses on the common challenges faculty and administrators across multiple institutions face when incorporating IS into Ed.D. programs and how they are overcoming these challenges. Such an overview will be helpful as more programs take on the innovative and complex work of re-imagining leadership preparation by incorporating IS as a signature pedagogy. This paper will seek to address this gap by investigating two research questions:

1) What are the pedagogical, organizational, and/or political challenges that administrators and faculty face when developing Ed.D. programs that use IS to prepare leaders to advance
equity and justice in their schools?
2) How are programs overcoming these challenges?

To explore these two questions, we conducted a qualitative, interview-based study of faculty in Ed.D. programs that have or in the process of integrating IS into their coursework and/or dissertation expectations. To identify programs that were incorporating IS, we engaged in a systematic review of websites and materials of CPED affiliated doctoral programs. We also identified faculty members who had written about teaching improvement science in journals or books. We interviewed a total of 12 faculty members across ten different doctoral programs. All faculty we spoke to played significant roles in teaching improvement science, and some were involved in the initial work of incorporating improvement science into their doctoral program. Six of these programs were housed in R1 institutions, the other four were part of regional or R2 institutions.

After reviewing publicly available artifacts about each program, we conducted 60-minute semi-structured interviews with each of the participants. We asked participants to share about the history of their doctoral programs, describe how IS had been incorporated into their programs, and reflect on both the most pressing challenges they encountered trying to integrate IS and how they were working to overcome those challenges.

We identified three overarching challenges that faculty across these institutions had to navigate: 1) redesigning the dissertation and coursework to incorporate IS, 2) collaborating with faculty who may have limited knowledge of IS, and 3) ensuring that students were using IS in a way that centered equity and justice.

Authors

• Maxwell Yurkofsky, Radford University
  Presenting Author

• Sarah Capello, Radford University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Edwin Nii Bonney, Clemson University
  Non-Presenting Author