The Four Chapters of the Ed. D. in Educational Leadership Dissertation and Their Purposes
The four chapters of the Ed.D. in Educational Leadership dissertation are designed to highlight the program’s commitment to learning through leading improvement efforts focused by the social justice imperative to improve education of all children and youth through equity and excellence.
Chapter 1: Moving from a Problem to a Problem of Practice
The purpose of chapter one is twofold. First, the chapter narrows the dissertation’s focus from a larger problem to illuminate the specific problem of practice that the candidate seeks to improve through evidence-based improvement leadership.
Problems of practice reside in complex contexts with multiple, uncertain causes and various interpretations determined by the beliefs and assumptions of a variety of stakeholders.
The second purpose is to persuade others that a problem exists within the candidate’s sphere of influence. In mounting this persuasive argument, the candidate must describe the current gap between the existing state and the preferred or goal state within the candidate’s organizational context.
The chapter should answer the overall question: What is the specific problem of practice, why does it need to be addressed, and what is the candidate’s position on the problem?
Chapter 2: Review of Knowledge for Action
This chapter builds a conceptual framework to deeply understand what is happening by presenting supporting arguments for the research questions.
Importantly, the review of knowledge that can support the actions for improvement that will part of this study allows you to position yourself as a scholar practitioner of educational leadership by synthesizing and critiquing the theory, empirical research, stakeholder perspectives, and extant documents to build a model that connects your improvement efforts to important outcomes for children and youth. It is by building a persuasive argument across these four sources that you establish the significance of your work.
In writing this section, you must make tough strategic choices. You should not report all tangentially related literature (theoretical and empirical), all stakeholder narratives, or all the extant documents from your setting. Your purpose is to situate your study within a broader understanding of theory, reports of research studies, effective practices, and current actual practices within your context. By carefully selecting the knowledge from these sources that will guide your leadership actions, you demonstrate that a scholar of practice supports strategic improvement through a balanced use of multiple sources of actionable knowledge to support the claim about current conditions and the need for change and advance the argument for a particular set of improvement practices.
The chapter should answer the overall question: What has been done to address the situation relative to the problem of practice?
Chapter 3: Methods and Design for Action
This chapter describes multiple lines of inquiry used during the improvement process. It employs information from the candidate’s logic model and the Design Alignment Tool (Kanyongo, 2017) below to justify an applied inquiry plan to carry out the improvement initiative, inform the research questions and document impacts of the improvement initiative. It makes a strong case for how the methods and designs of the study address the research question(s) by describing the people involved, the methods used, the practices monitored and evaluated, and the criteria used to define improvement.
Design Alignment Tool (Kanyongo, 2017)
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Study Problem and Purpose Provide one sentence for each.
They must align with all RQ rows.
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Research Questions
List each research question (RQ) in a separate row below. Add or delete rows as
needed.
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Data Collection Tools
List which instrument(s) are used to collect data that will address each RQ.
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Data Points Yielded
List which specific questions/ variables/ scales of the instrument will address each RQ.
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Data Source List which persons/ artifacts/ records will provide data.
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Data Analysis Briefly describe the specific statistical or qualitative analyses that will address each RQ.
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RQ 1:
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RQ 2:
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RQ 3:
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This chapter answers the overall question: How do the research questions, theoretical framework, research studies, stakeholder data, existing documents reviewed in Chapter Two lead to a design for rigorous lines of inquiry and action?
Chapter 4: Description of Findings and Recommended Actions
Purpose of Chapter 4
The purpose of this chapter is to present findings, results and recommended actions to demonstrate if they fit your improvement model. You may want to begin Chapter 4 with a brief reminder or restatement of your research question(s) and hypotheses.
The discussion also draws conclusions from the findings and results to determine recommendations and leadership lessons that emerged from the initiative.
In the case of findings resulting from quantitative lines of inquiry organize and present the data according to variables embedded in the research questions. Findings are reported succinctly in the text and/or presented in the form of a clearly labeled table or tables that are understandable at a glance to an informed reader.
In the case of findings resulting from qualitative lines of inquiry, organize the data thematically according to how they respond (or do not respond) to the variables embedded in the research questions. Present the findings using thick, rich descriptions of the context and multiple, relevant quotes from participants that support (or do not support) the variables in your research questions.
This chapter answers the following two questions:
1. What information was gathered that supports or fails to support the improvement effort and provides contexts for your leadership decisions?
2. What was learned from the improvement effort and how do these understandings inform current and future efforts related to the problem of practice?