Chapter 13: Journey to Becoming a Scholarly Practitioner

This chapter describes my educational journey to obtain an EdD from Lynn University, a member of the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED). It highlights my personal passage from being a K–12 educational leader to becoming a research practitioner who solves problems in practice. In particular, I highlight my experience with and characteristics of my nontraditional dissertation. First, I provide an overview of the Lynn EdD program.

Lynn University is an independent, nonprofit institution located in Boca Raton, Florida. Lynn joined CPED in 2007 and was part of the original membership that developed the CPED principles and design concepts (Carnegie Project for the Education Doctorate, 2015). They promptly set out to redesign the EdD degree to include this framework. The Lynn CPED-influenced EdD consists of a 3-year program of study, which aims to equip graduates with the skills needed to connect research with practice, lead high-performing organizations, and contribute to students’ learning (Lynn University, 2015a). The focus of the degree is Educational Leadership and includes four program themes: leadership, accountability, equality and diversity, and learning and instruction. Embedded in these themes is a focus on methods of problem-based inquiry (Lynn University, 2015).