1.2 Reflections on the first 2 years of a doctoral program in  (Page 6/7)

Curriculum and Instruction

Faculty new to teaching in a doctoral program must often undergo a major change in teaching style from that of basic mastery of concepts to one that is more constructive, exploratory, inquiry-based, open-ended and reflective (Alford, Gill, Marshall, Crocker,&Spall, 1999). The balance between teaching curriculum theory and embedding these principles in assignments that relate to practice is often a challenge for faculty.

Another aspect of curriculum is that the original designations of the cognates were multiculturalism/diversity and effective schools. Initially, there was an expectation that“teacher types”in the program would select multiculturalism/diversity and that administrator-types would select Effective Schools. Instead almost all of the students have selected multiculturalism/diversity topics as a way to achieve an effective school. Thus electives offered in the multiculturalism/diversity have grown, while those courses in the cognate Effective School have largely been untaught.

Need for Collaboration

In the first year of the program, faculty created syllabi independent of one another. Because all of the students in our cohorts are busy practitioners, a major criticism that students made is that too often major papers became due on the same dates. Additionally, there was little connection or collaboration in course requirements as professors often worked in isolation. Core faculty members have responded to this concern by meeting regularly to discuss syllabi and, when possible, interrelating activities and assignments across courses.

Preparation for Dissertation

Most of the students in our programs do not come with a graduate background that has been steeped in extensive writing. Therefore, it is important that students have the experience of American Psychological Association (APA) formatted writing in their classes and of building a body of literature research in their specific area of interest (Irby&Lunenburg, 2006). Finding a way to relate formal writing assignments to the work of practitioners is important. For this reason, doctoral core faculty have increased our efforts for students to have academic, scholarly writing experiences that bridge their work experience as a component of each course they take. For example, in my Cultural Influence course, which students take in the second semester, Cohort I members were asked to research an area of interest and write a literature review on that topic. Now, when I teach that class, I ask students to think of an area of inquiry that relates both to their practice and to a special area of interest that might become a dissertation interest. Then, in other classes, we ask them to explore different aspects of this issue, thus building a body of literature that investigates their inquiry from a variety of different perspectives.

Changed Understandings of Leadership

At the end of the first and second years, faculty conducted evaluations of the program. Among the issues we explored were questions that focused on how student understandings of leadership were changing. Consistently, the students shared examples of how their understandings had changed. One student commented that, because of the cultural influences class, he had a new appreciation of what students experienced outside of school. This caused him to create programs in his school which involved training for parents. Another student wrote about how the process of conducting an equity audit in one of the classes was valuable in understanding data available to school districts. He shared this study with his school board and it resulted in a grant that emphasized culturally proficient teaching. Another student commented that she was amazed that she had come this far in her education program and not heard of Brazilian educator, Paolo Freire, and liberationist philosophies of education. Yet another student noted that when she attended a recent seminar that featured national speakers, she felt that she knew as much, if not more, about the topic, than the speakers. Why?—because of the reading she had done in the doctoral program.