Improvement Science as a Frame for the Dissertation in Practice: The Johns Hopkins Experience

Abstract

The Johns Hopkins University Doctor of Education program was developed with the expressed program outcome of developing leaders who possess the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to rigorously examine educational problems of practice with stakeholders within their context of professional practice using a social justice lens. The purpose of this article is to describe how improvement science principles depicted by Bryk et al. (2015) served as a frame for our Applied Dissertation to support scholar-practitioners to partner with their colleagues in educational institutions and to independently take on the challenges and opportunities they will encounter in their future work. We outline the dissertation through a discussion of these principles and provide four examples of the resulting dissertations and their impact on the scholar-practitioner’s context of professional practice and on them as educational leaders.