Ten years and counting: salient doctoral program design and delivery  (Page 5/10)

Representative goals for the program include:

• To produce field-based research that links university inquiry with the public schools.

• To promote school-community-university collaborative relationships, developing linkages between the public schools and the university, thereby strengthening the quality of education.
• To address challenges and concerns of regional importance with a major emphasis on research that focuses on increasing academic success of students.
• To retain highly qualified educational leaders within the region, by selective admissions' process to the program that will assist in continuous renewal of administrators of excellence.

Basic tenets of the doctoral program as defined by the doctoral faculty are:

The educational leader must be highly well read, reflecting the highest standards of scholarship.

The educational leader must exhibit judgment in the application of concepts and theories.

The educational leader must engage in the identification of problems and the analysis of solutions.

The educational leader must be a reflective practitioner who is adept in the leadership of change efforts for continuous improvement.

The educational leader must demonstrate ethical standards in the application of concepts, theories, and specific action plans to make a difference.

The ongoing collaborative work of the doctoral faculty has resulted in a refinement of departmental program beliefs from the general statements that were first generated to more specific belief statements:

We believe leaders must

• Model, encourage, and instill the ethic of lifelong learning.
• Maintain a dialectic relationship with teaching and learning.
• Engage in and encourage self-critical examination.
• Assume moral, ethical, and social responsibility
• Encourage construction of self-identity as it relates to practice.
• Recognize that a professional learning community and self-renewing organization develops the capacity of individual leaders.
• Recognize that change is constant and accept responsibility to shape the direction of change.
• Recognize and honor diversity as an essential element for improving the human condition.
• Facilitate building and sustaining inclusive and democratic communities.
• Recognize that leadership involves reciprocal processes of dialogue requiring a deep understanding of language, thought, and conversation within organizational and social contexts.

In addition to three electives in the program, core courses in the doctoral program include: Connecting Leadership Theory and Practice, Exploring Contemporary and Emerging Paradigms of Educational Research, Examining the Dynamics of Organizational and Human Interaction within Educational Systems, Bringing Critical Voice to the Design, Analysis, and Implementation of Educational Policy, Operationalizing the Dynamics of Change in Educational Systems, Examining Human Inquiry Systems, Inquiring into the Foundations of Ethics and Philosophy of School Leaders, Designing Research within Educational Settings, Conceptualizing Scholar-Practitioner Models of Leadership, Investigating Cultural and Societal Patterns, Synthesis Seminar I and II, and Developing the Dissertation Research Proposal.