As my doctoral program rolls right along, I am currently in the throes of the literature review section of my dissertation.  After some going back and forth between potential topics, I have decided to focus my dissertation on the theory of distributed leadership.

I’m still in the very early stages of the whole process; I have yet to develop a specific research question or methodologies by which to conduct research, but what I am doing presently is attempting to read everything about distributed leadership I can get my hands on.  With this in mind, I am turning to the folks in my online professional network (i.e., any educator with whom I connect via blogging and/or social networking) for some direction.

I know many of you either work in environments where leadership tasks are distributed across staff, or may even be in formal leadership positions in which you distribute these tasks.  In other words, you may have some personal and professional connection to or investment in this theory.  If you have favorite resources or authors on the topic toward whom you can point me, I would be very appreciative if you could leave a note in the comments or shoot an email to damian at apaceofchange dot com.  Of course, I am fully capable of using EBSCOhost and Google Scholar, but I’d like to see what articles, sources, books, or authors are favorites among my online colleagues, including critiques of the theory.

I thank you in advance for any suggestions you can send my way, and best wishes to all for a happy, healthy, productive, and educational 2012!

The first course in my doctoral program, Experiential Learning, focused primarily on helping students to codify their beliefs about leadership and establish learning goals for the coming year.  In one of my papers, I established the following goal:

Goal #2: Reflect on my learning in a transparent manner.   I have long felt that honest reflection is one of the most vital components of learning, and I required my students to do it frequently, both verbally and in writing.  As a blogger of over four years, I have found great value in writing about my professional practice and considering feedback from my audience [...] I hope to gain similar benefits from writing online about my experiences in the doctoral program as I have from writing online about teaching and school psychology.

So what are my reflections upon finishing my first course?  They’re much less to do with leadership and more to do with biting off more than I can chew.  I figured it would be difficult, but doable, but I seriously underestimated how much all this newness in my life would take out of me.  I don’t feel that either my studies or my work suffered as a result of my decision, but my sleep patterns, stress levels, and general well-being certainly did.  I had the opportunity to defer starting my studies for a year, and in retrospect that wouldn’t have been the worst idea, but what’s done is done.  Moving forward, I need to be much more sensible about balancing my responsibilities.  Perhaps that’s not such a bad lesson for a future leader to learn now rather than later.

Samuel Sennott is a doctoral student at Penn State and the co-creator of the Proloquo2Go app for iOS.  I have seen firsthand how nonverbal students can use this software to communicate, and I can’t overstate how phenomenal an impact it has made on their confidence and independence, let alone their communication skills.

Although Sennott is no longer with Proloquo2Go, he is continuing his work in the field of AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) with a research study focusing on the writing experience for middle school students who use AAC.

Further details (including how students and teachers can participate in the study) can be found on Sennott’s blog.

After making my statement…

After sharing my views…

After all this and an application process that started over a year ago, today I received my acceptance letter into the 2011 Cohort for Wilmington University’s Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership program.

I start in September; “excited” doesn’t begin to cover it.

Educators, and teachers in particular, are often relied upon to be experts in many areas: content area knowledge, behavior management, child psychology, and public relations are just a few of the fields teachers must be able to navigate proficiently, if not expertly, throughout the course of their careers.  Most often, when teachers need support in these areas, they can turn to colleagues, mentors, or even external sources such as consultants.  Curriculum development, however, is one field in which the “experts”, at times, reach out to the people most directly impacted by the choices made throughout the process: their students.  This is not a universally accepted practice, as many educators feel that as experts, we should dictate curriculum.  While few people would suggest swinging to the opposite end of the spectrum and asking students to devise their own curriculum in its entirety, there is certainly merit to the idea of students and educators working collaboratively to develop meaningful, relevant curriculum.

Recognizing students as stakeholders in their own education speaks volumes to the tone and atmosphere of a school community.  When students are asked their opinion, whether on a controversial topic discussed in class or a plan for a new school program, it sends a clear message that these young people are respected and valued as members of the community, as opposed to simply recipients of our collective wisdom.  Many school communities give lip service to the concept of respect, but fail to act in ways that support the platitudes.  At one of my previous schools, students were included in nearly every committee-based decision making process, including hiring teachers and professional development planning.  The difference in how those students related to their school versus how students at other schools at which I have worked related is utterly palpable.  While it may not be logistically possible to have face-to-face meetings with every individual student, especially in larger schools, it is possible to either meet with small groups or designated student representatives in the curriculum development process.  This act of inclusion not only actively demonstrates how the school values its students, it also gives the students a more acute sense of belonging to the school community and of having a vested interest in their own education.

When students feel they play a proactive, rather than reactive, role in their own learning, they tend to be more engaged with the subject matter.  Educators are constantly looking for ways to increase student engagement due to the suggested correlative relationship between engagement and learning outcomes – i.e., the more engaged students are with the material, the better they learn.  What better way for educators to learn what engages a student than to ask one?  As desirable as a wholly individualized learning program for each student may be, most schools do not seem to be up to the task yet.  It is possible, however, to collect feedback from students about their individual strengths and interests, as well as potential career goals for older students.  From these data, educators can then work to incorporate their desired skills and standards to be taught into a framework that best engages their students.  Anecdotally speaking, I have observed this phenomenon many times as both a teacher and a school psychologist, especially among students who struggled in traditional classroom settings.  Given the opportunity to practice skills such as research, writing, and problem-solving in a context in which they had some say, they tended to do much better there than when contexts were imposed upon them.  Again, one hundred percent agreement is beyond the scope of most schools at present, but soliciting students for this kind of feedback at least raises the opportunity for increasing engagement, and thereby learning.

Of the myriad of skills and standards teachers are expected to instill in their students, very few are more important than the love of learning.  By tapping students for their interests, strengths, and opinions in the curriculum development process, not only do we allow them to perform better on our local assessments, we also allow them to develop all these skills in such a way that they can and will continue to use them long after their formal education has ended.  When a student has learned to conduct research on a preferred topic, the skills involved in the research process will be transferable to other aspects of his life, both in and out of the school setting.  My former students may not remember every detail of every novel and play we read in our classes, but I would like to think that, because I gave them some flexibility and choice in their assignments, they have retained those skills because they learned them in a preferred, familiar environment, as opposed to being dragged kicking and screaming through the process learning about a topic with absolutely no connection to their lives.  Skills must be taught within some kind of authentic, meaningful context; otherwise, I fear they will be forgotten as quickly as they are taught and assessed.

There are varying degrees to which educators can involve students in developing curriculum.  Certainly, there is no “one size fits all” approach, and each individual district or building must approach the prospect as best fits their unique situation.  There are also logistical and philosophical challenges that each school will face as they attempt to meet the diverse needs of diverse communities; however, these challenges will not deter the school districts that feel strongly enough about the inclusion of all students in their own educational process.  The sense of ownership, community, and engagement that such a program can bring to a school should be reason enough to give each student some degree of say in his or her own education.

All of the career decisions I have made in my ten years in public education have been guided by my desire to affect positive change in the lives of young people.  In my roles as both a teacher and a school psychologist, I have been able to create or influence these changes primarily on a classroom level (e.g., teaching techniques, uses of assistive technology, incorporating principles of Universal Design for Learning).  It is my hope that in matriculating to _____ University’s Ed.D. in Educational Leadership program, I will be able to build upon my existing leadership skills and knowledge of educational practice to affect change at a much larger systemic level, either through the training of undergraduate pre-service teachers, researching and contributing to education policy reform, or acting in an administrative capacity.

Fingers crossed, chin up, etc.  Here begins a new chapter of my career in education.

• quit my job and go to school full-time for 5-7 years
• forget about getting the doctorate

If I was single, I’d actually consider the first option, but the fact is I’ve got a wife, two kids, a mortgage, day care tuition, and a host of other financial responsibilities for which I have yet to receive my bailout check from the federal government.

Because I live over an hour away from the nearest university that could accommodate my professional schedule, I started looking into online psychology doctoral programs, such as those offered through Walden, Capella, and Argosy.  From what I could glean from the institution websites (as well as some discussion boards on this topic), the trade-off for convenience is huge: often higher tuition rates with little or no financial aid/tuition forgiveness, not to mention the seemingly widely-held attitudes that online graduate programs such as these are inferior to “brick & mortar” universities in terms of academic rigor and career preparation.

Of course, incidents like this, in which it was discovered that two teachers and three high-ranking administrators in the Freehold (NJ) Regional High School District purchased their doctoral degrees from diploma mills, do nothing to advance the cause of distance learning in the eyes of the public or other educators.

Let me make two things abundantly clear: #1: I don’t want to buy a doctoral degree, and #2: I recognize the benefits of face-to-face interaction. I don’t want to get my degree from a diploma mill; I want the opportunity to work hard to earn one.  I would just like to do that while still being able to pay my bills and see my kids.  Is it really necessary for me to drive an hour and a half each way twice a week to be lectured (with bulleted PowerPoints, as was a good part of my grad experience)?  Given the technology that is available to us today, can we not do that online, with maybe a monthly or bi-monthly f2f cohort meeting?

So I’m at a temporary impasse here, folks.  After 5 1/2 years of part-time grad study, I promised my long-suffering wife that I would wait on the doc degree until our oldest was in school full-time, so I’ve got another year or two before I can make a move, but some questions remain:

• Administrators: Would you dismiss a resume out of hand that featured a degree earned from an online, yet accredited, program?
• Higher Ed folks: Why must doctoral study and earning a living wage/supporting a family be mutually exclusive?  That’s the implied message I’ve gotten from 99% of the universities I’ve researched in my area.
• All Concerned Educators: What can/must be done in order to raise distance learning to the same level of perceived credibility as traditional routes of study?  Is that even a possibility?  Or is it already there and I’m just listening to the wrong echo chamber?

Update! As if guided by Providence, this post from Open Education just came through my RSS reader.  While it certainly only addresses one small part of a larger issue, these two takeaways make my heart smile:

Critics have long held onto the fact that being there and hearing the lecture in person, face-to-face, trumps any taped offering. The work of McKinney, et al, certainly undercuts that assertion.

…

So we have not been able to discern what McKinney postulates as rationale for the students listening to a podcast to perform better than those students hearing the lecture in person.

But the abstract alone confirms that as education gives careful consideration as to how best to implement technology, things change when the focus is on steps to make education more affordable. Because, if lectures and the accompanying power point slides available on iTunes produce even similar academic outcomes as traditional face-to-face lecture formats, then the enormous potential cost savings from taped online versions would in fact render the current educational model obsolete.