Chapter 9: Moving a Whole School Towards a Leadership-Oriented Doctorate: The Contributions and Limits of Vision and Participation

Two recurring prescriptions for successful educational change are that leaders must have a clear vision for what the change should accomplish and that broad participation is the key to building support for the reform. Yet, there remain many questions about how one should enact these prescriptions and why they might work.

This chapter describes the process of developing Rutgers’ Doctor of Education (EdD) program that focuses on preparing leaders and change agents. More specifically, it examines the significant ways in which the design of that program was shaped by both vision and participation. The process began with a dean who had a clear, but somewhat abstract vision for the program—informed by Shulman’s work on the professional doctorate—that challenged the local status quo. The process for designing the new program was quite participatory, with faculty invited to take part in design and feedback loops throughout the change effort. After 3 years, we suggest that Rutgers has developed a program with substantial procedural differences from its predecessor. Yet, these procedural differences have not been accompanied by equally substantial pedagogical differences or other changes in educational processes. We suggest that the limited pedagogical change is because such developments require sensemaking akin to a paradigm shift on the part of the faculty, and the shift required in this case was quite significant for this faculty (Kezar & Eckel, 2002b; Simsek & Louis, 1994). The quality of participation and time involved, while extensive, did not allow for sufficient sensemaking.