Document4 New articles in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 United States License. This journal is published by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. 1 This journal is supported by the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate: A Knowledge Forum on the EdD (CPED) cpedinitiative.org impactinged.pitt.edu ISSN 2472-5889 (online) Vol. 3 (2018) DOI 10.5195/ie.2018.79 Adapted from the October 2017 Convening Opening Address: CPED Beyond 10 years Jill Alexa Perry, PhD School of Education University of Pittsburgh jperry@pitt.edu The Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) theme for the October 2017 Convening, hosted by California State University East Bay and San Jose State University, was Creating New Futures: Thinking Differently to Build a Better World. This theme presented the consortium with the opportunity to consider better ways to: • relate to each other, • emphasize our connective work, • collaborate in meaningful ways, • celebrate our creative differences, and • serve as role models for our EdD students. This opportunity, to me, the Executive Director of CPED, is a vision for moving our unique organization forward into its next 10 years. I stress unique because CPED is unlike any of our other professional organizations. We have been built on a foundation of collaboration and shared vision. More than just an intellectual exercise, CPED has become the first action-oriented effort aimed at producing definitions and frameworks for changing the meaning and design of the Education Doctorate (EdD). Our faculty members have led the ambitious CPED agenda at a grassroots level, allowing the design process to evolve at the local level and shared learning to take place at the national level. At the national level, we convene twice a year to engage in discussions and sharing of ideas about our program designs and the purpose and appearance of professional practitioner preparation in education. These discussions are shaped by the basic questions— What are the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that professionals working in education should demonstrably have? And how do we prepare them to have these? At the local level, ideas generated at convenings are brought back to each institution and implemented as change/improvement efforts. Over time, members bring back to the consortium what they have learned from testing CPED innovations. It is from this process of experimentation and sharing that the consortium developed and continues to evaluate the CPED Framework (see Table 1) across more than 100 members. This process has led to many accomplishments at our growing number of member institutions over the past 10 years. As CPED moves into its next decade, the organization must consider the two inspirational talks from our June 2017 celebration. One from Dr. Lee Shulman, the President Emeritus of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who is affectionately known as the grandfather of CPED. The other from Dr. Ash Vashudeva (see Vol 2, No 1 issue of Impacting Education), Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. First, Dr. Shulman told us how CPED came to be—how our original 25-member institutions and their faculty contemplated their differences as they considered professional preparation that aligned with other professions and demonstrated the tenets of a profession. He called us a community of innovators and challenged us to treat our own work of redesigning our Education Doctorate programs as “an active site for investigation.” He stressed the need to gather all types of evidence—numbers, narratives, etc.—of the work we are doing. He urged us to make it public via our journal or others, to invite critique from colleagues within and outside of CPED and to act on that critique so that we, as faculty, will continue to improve our programs and our own practice as educators. In short, he pointed out that CPED is a Networked Improvement Community. Next, Dr. Ash Vashudeva asked the attending member of the convening if “CPED’s existing strategies, approaches and structures are sufficient to achieve the goals we have for the organization and for our individual campuses over the next decade? Is what GOT you here today enough to GET you where we want to go tomorrow?” (Vashudeva, 2017, p. 2) To help answer that question, he reminded us of two issued raised by Judge (1982): 1. Our tendency as schools of education to emulate traditional forms of academic research and scholarship; and 2. Our tendency to less-than adequately address the pressing needs of practitioners in schools and school systems – particularly those related to equitable opportunities and outcomes. In doing so, he cautioned us to consider the impact of our work in redesigning EdD programs. We cannot emulate what we know and dress it up in new packaging. Instead, we must become faculty leaders (Perry, 2014) who change the way practice in doctoral education is performed. He noted, CPED is a community of academic practitioners learning to improve our own practice of designing impactful EdD programs and offered Improvement Science as a means to document our improvement efforts. CPED Beyond 10 Years Impacting Education: Journal on Transforming Professional Practice impactinged.pitt.edu Vol. 3 (2018) DOI 10.5195/ie.2018.79 2 What I took away from these two talks is the imperative to document the work of CPED. We must learn from our program designs and the impact they have on graduates and their practice. We must share and teach others about best practices. And we must continue to be innovative and to improve the EdD. What got us here was a combination of courageous faculty who wanted to change the way things had been done and institutional support from deans. Our early members came together and deliberated during a time when the EdD was so poorly regarded and in many respects on the chopping block, threatening the opportunity to give practitioners the skills they need to improve our nation’s education system. These faculty asked their institutional colleagues to consider changing the way things were being done. Now, going forward, we must look to these pioneers and consider new ways of changing, new ways of improving, and new ways of demonstrating the accomplishments we have made. How do we consider the next steps for CPED and for our EdD programs? Our best tools to overcome these challenges are those that we have been taught, and those that have strengthened in our EdD programs—scholarship and inquiry. Why? As an organization, CPED not only works to improve the Education Doctorate but it also ultimately changes both the culture in graduate schools of education and the skills and abilities of the educational practitioners we prepare. The only way CPED and its members can provide evidence that our work has been impactful inside and outside of the academy is to share what we have learned. That is, we must share our knowledge about how to redesign and improve the EdD as a professional degree. We must share how the new EdD changes the processes and policies of schools of education. We must share our learning about the impact our graduates have on their own practice. In doing so, we must also invite critique and reflect on whether we are doing our best, if our practice is having the impact we want. Celebrating the 10th anniversary of CPED in 2017, offered the opportunity to look back together and acknowledge the tremendous accomplishments of the organization—from membership growth to the creating of a journal, from increased numbers of graduates that span PK-20 and beyond to several books and many more articles written by our membership. We have much to be proud of in terms of growing, learning and sharing. Still, we need to do more. As I settle back from the June convening, still glowing from all that CPED members have achieved, I received an external review for a book proposal submitted to Harvard Education Publishing Group. With this review, I was painfully reminded of all we still need to do to change the perception of both schools of education and the Education Doctorate. I share an excerpt of this review here as it pertains not just to CPED headquarters, but also to our members— those who have worked so hard over 10 years to change the perception of the EdD and to change their own institutions, and those Table 1. CPED Framework: Members of CPED developed a Framework for EdD program design/redesign that supports creating quality, rigorous practitioner preparation while honoring the local context of each member institution. Perry Impacting Education: Journal on Transforming Professional Practice impactinged.pitt.edu Vol. 3 (2018) DOI 10.5195/ie.2018.79 3 who are new to this organization seeking to continue the work. The anonymous reviewer said, Whether this book makes a significant contribution to the “field” depends heavily on whether schools of education are interested in its emphasis upon doctoral education in improving educational practice. So far that is a very weak subject. While many graduate schools of education profess to prepare practitioners at the doctoral level in ways that will improve educational practice, so far few are able to do so effectively, regularly and widely. Most are still caught in explaining the problem, not in fixing it. Hence, programs that claim to make doctoral graduates able to remedy the educational flaws found in the U.S. and thus improve educational practice lack broad public support for their enterprise. If such programs were ever able to provide compelling evidence for their claims, undoubtedly, they would be in great demand since without question such skills would be extremely valuable. If the authors had evidence that doctoral preparation in education was truly changing as a result of their efforts, then this book would be very useful. From headquarters, we can refute these claims with evidence of: • growing numbers of CPED-influenced programs, • early Spencer funded work on graduate outcomes (see Imig, Syed & Perry, 2009), • a U.S. Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE) funded work that demonstrated how schools of education had changed as a result of CPED membership (see Perry, Zambo & Wunder, 2015), and • a William T. Grant funded study on research evidence use by CPED graduates (underway). Additionally, at headquarters, we have launched a massive data gathering effort to learn about our member’s programs, outcomes and implementation of the CPED Framework. However, our evidence is only as strong as the documented and demonstrated work of our members. As an organization, we need to listen to Shulman and Vashudeva—we need to network our learning and be stronger in voice and in evidence. CPED is unique. In the beginning we were novel, but over the years I have come to appreciate and value the many faculty who strongly believe in and have dedicated much of their professional time to the idea that the EdD is a professional degree that must be tailored to the needs of practitioners versus the needs of the academy. I have come to know many more students who have thanked us for giving them a degree that serves them and helps them become stronger change agents and leaders. I know our work is the right work, and I will continue to argue this claim with evidence that supports it. Just as David Imig and I (2016) did in the inaugural issue of Impacting Education: Journal on Transforming Professional Practice, I invite our growing membership to join me in strengthening our community of practice. By pushing our own boundaries to innovate, learn, critique and share our knowledge and to produce the necessary evidence of change our next ten years will be strengthened and offer the opportunity for the naysayers to walk along side of us and see for themselves how this unique community has changed history and will continue to do so. REFERENCES Imig, D., Syed, S., & Perry, J.A. (2009). Final report: Creating rubrics for the assessment of EdD candidates. Spencer Foundation: Chicago, IL Judge H. (1982). American graduate schools of education: A view from abroad. New York, NY: Ford Foundation. Perry, J. A. & Imig, D. (2016). What do we mean by impact? Impacting Education: Journal on Transforming Professional Practice. 1(1), 1-3. doi: https://doi.org/10.5195/ie.2016.26 Perry, J. A. (2014). Changing schools of education through grassroots faculty- led change. Innovation in Higher Education, 39(2), 155-168. doi: 10.1007/s10755-013-9267-y Perry, J. A., Zambo, D. & Wunder, S. (2015). Understanding how schools of education have redesigned the doctorate of education. Journal of School Public Relations, 36 (Winter), 58-84. Shulman, L. S. (2005). Signature pedagogies in the professions. Daedalus, 134(3), 52-59. Vashudeva, A. (2016) Reflections and new directions on CPED’s 10th anniversary. Impacting Education: Journal on Transforming Professional Practice, 2(1), 1-5.