Program Description
The Doctorate in Education Systems Improvement Science is designed to provide certified PK-12 practitioners, regardless of current job titles, positions, or content areas, with the opportunity to pursue an applied professional doctoral degree. Improvement science is an emerging field in education that has previously been used in business and in the medical fields. It is a specific method of inquiry that teaches practitioners to collect real-time data on programs and interventions to enhance replicability and improve results for students. The EdD focuses on the practice and improvement of education, through systemic whole school reform, with an emphasis on addressing educational priorities, as well as seeking specific strategic improvements in educational settings and student learning outcomes. Admission requires the completion of an Education Specialist (EdS) degree.
The program is designed to focus on problems of practice in schools through improvement science and systemic whole school reform, with the goal of obtaining a deep understanding of the problems, the system that produces the problems, and a shared theory of practice to drive improvement. The focus of leadership in school systems has changed to include an examination by faculty and others of the empirical evidence of best practices that support student achievement. Graduates need an awareness of the systemic context of challenges facing schools in South Carolina, such as poverty and rurality. Effective schools are characterized by a shared purpose, decisions are made collaboratively, responsibilities are distributed among teacher leaders, and capacity exists to create and sustain change. Increasingly, educational leaders must be the stewards of a vision of success for all students as they work to achieve consensus on the purpose of education and to implement the necessary structures to change the process of teaching and learning to assist all children to succeed.
The contextual framework for the research of the EdD centers around three themes: inquiry as practice, laboratories of practice, and problems of practice and leads to dissertations that seek to solve complex issues facing South Carolina to identify opportunity, innovation, and improvement. The program, by using field embedded research that moves theory into practice, is a key approach to addressing state needs based on state findings. Graduate students should plan their dissertations around problems they face in South Carolina schools, and propose and test solutions to those everyday problems.
Return to: