For me, this was roughly the spring of 2009. At that point I felt like I was in a very long, very dark tunnel. I was right around the halfway point in my studies with two kids, a wife, and a full-time job. Who does this to themselves? I don’t need a PhD. I can do almost anything I want to do in my career without one! I mean, what do I want to do? Publish papers in journals no one will even read?

Had I been not so far along, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have quit. I felt like I was too far in to turn back but too far from the end to see the “light.” I reasoned that if I quit, I’d hate myself forever. So the only way out was through. I focused on my love of learning and the reason that I, personally, had decided to embark on this journey: The prospect of contributing to changing an aging system and being paid to learn and write. In truth, a job in higher ed is probably a long way off for me since I truly love what I do in my school, but I like knowing that when I’m ready I’ll have the option.

If and when you begin a PhD program, you can be almost certain that you’ll question yourself at some point (or points) along the way. Try to keep in mind that you’re in a marathon, not a sprint. It requires moderate, sustained effort over a long period of time. Heck, if it was easy everyone would have a PhD.

Here’s the thing: You can always find a reason not to get your doctorate. A corollary of this is that there is never a good time to begin. There will be kids, bills, mortgages, and a myriad of other things going on. But the time will pass, whether you’re in grad school or not.

When the doctoral doldrums hit, consider taking a semester off to rejuvenate. Change up your schedule. Take an online class or something outside of your college.

Most important: Stay focused on why you started on the journey. You had your reasons.

This year we have allocated larger blocks of time to 4 longer blocks; each is about 90 minutes long. In the past, the school operated on a 6-period day with significantly shorter class periods. In order to accomplish this, we took a look at our data, “faced the brutal facts,”¹ and committed to focus — at least in the short-term — on math and literacy. Each of our students receives 90 minutes of math and literacy every single day. Science and social studies are taught for 90 minutes every other day or for a semester².

I believe that the closest thing we in education will find to a “silver bullet” are time and instruction. Purposeful adjustments to those two levers can pay dividends that exceed any canned academic program. I shared the graphic below with the staff and challenged them to dream up ways to see less of the orange circle. Now that we have adjusted to our new schedule, the remainder of this year and beyond will see our focus shift to maximizing every student’s academic learning time during that 90 minutes.

Our priority will be on a common academic language that communicates a culture of high expectations and academic excellence. We will also identify and adopt school-wide systems that are aligned from classroom to classroom. I made the comparison to Starbucks. You can go into any Starbucks and, while they all look a little different and have their own personality, there is never any doubt that you’re in a Starbucks. They don’t change the latté recipe. A Venti is still a Venti. The menu looks the same. The customer knows what to expect and doesn’t have to re-learn the menu every time they’re jonesing for a caramel macchiato.

At the end of my presentation, I asked the staff to reflect on a simple question: What do we want to give to our kids? I’m truly motivated and ready for the work that we have ahead. It’s good work and it’s important work.

1. I don’t care for that phrase. Sometimes the facts are not pleasant, but the word “brutal” is just so… well… Brutal…
2. During our pilot year, some teams teach science and social studies on an A/B rotation and some flip classes at the semester.

I’m [obviously] interested in technology leadership. One of the “rite of passage” classes I was required to take focused on educational policy. Dry and dull, right? How are they connected? Well, I ended up writing my final paper in the class on DOPA, COPA, CIPA, and COPPA and how the relationship between these pieces of legislation and E-Rate funding are commonly misunderstood or misapplied. The benefit of doing this is that when it came time to really identify a research focus, I had assembled a solid body of literature on which I could draw for my Lit Review².

Once you’ve been accepted, it is also a good time to seek out the person who will be your adviser. In some programs, you may not have a choice. In others, you may have to choose within a certain window of time. The best advice is to get to know as many faculty as you can in your first two or three semesters.

Bonus Tip: Of all the books I read and was forced to read over the program, the best one — and the one I wish I’d owned when I first started — is “Complete Your Dissertation or Thesis in Two Semesters or Less.” I think this is an unfortunate title because it’s not something a first year PhD student would naturally pick up, but there is some very practical advice in the book for students at all stages of the program and even for those who may be pondering whether a PhD is for them.

1. This doesn’t mean you’re making a life commitment, but if you have a broad area in which you’re interested it’ll help. A lot.
2. The Lit Review you will have to write for your dissertation will usually be Chapter 2 of the final product. As much of this as you can get out of the way ahead of time, the better.

Let me give you the quick and dirty on what my program (and I believe many others in the US) looked like.

The degree is 90 semester hours. That sounds intimidating until you learn that 30 hours usually come from your masters program and 15 hours are dissertation credits. That leaves you with about 45 semester hours of coursework to tackle. No small feat, granted. But if you’re going to do this you need to know what lies ahead.

Your 45 hours of coursework will be made up of a few different kinds of classes. Some of them will be research methods classes. These classes essentially teach you how to do valid research. In my program, I was required to take courses in both quantitative and qualitative methods. Some are very general and provide an overview of the methodological approach. In my opinion, these are good classes to take while you’re relatively new to the program because they will help you get your head around the kind of research you may want to do.

Other methods classes are more specific and deal specifically with a particular flavor of one of the methodological approaches. For instance, I took a class that specifically focused on narrative inquiry¹ Still others focus on quantitative strategies, including one course at CSU in which you can spend an entire semester learning the ins and outs of the ANOVA procedure.

Bonus Tip: Methods classes, especially quantitative methods classes, tend to involve less writing. The ones I took rarely involved a substantial paper at the end of the term. If you’re going to take two classes in a semester, I suggest balancing a content-focused class with a methods class.

Another subset of the classes you’ll be expected to take will focus on your major². In my program, these included courses with names like “Leadership,” “Teaching, Learning, and Professional Growth,” and “Educational Policy.” These are often very heavy on the reading and writing and you should think twice before taking two of them at a time while trying to work and actually spend time with your family.

As you approach the end of your coursework, you will eventually transition from being a “grad student” or “doctoral student” to being a “doctoral candidate.” I liked this. It made me feel like I was actually getting somewhere. I was frequently reminded in my program that about 50% of PhD students never receive their degree³. Some portion of those “drop outs” end up ABD⁴ because they make it as far as the candidate stage but can’t close the deal.

In order to become a candidate, you need to have completed most of your coursework and take what is commonly called a “preliminary exam.” These are different from school to school. I’ve also heard them called “comps.” Essentially, it is an opportunity to show your committee that you are ready to take on your own research. In my program, I had four weeks to write a research article from start to finish and then defend⁵ it. This basically meant that I had to field questions about what I did, why I did it, and how I could have done it better. For me, this was scarier than the dissertation phase because you have zero guidance and come into the meeting cold. At least with the dissertation, your committee will have seen drafts along the way and you can reasonably predict what they’re going to ask or tell you.

Once you’re a “candidate,” all that stands between you and your PhD is that pesky little paper called a “dissertation” or “thesis.” Here’s the rub: You are paying for the privilege of writing your paper at this point. You are no longer attending classes regularly, yet you are enrolled in those 15 credit hours I told you about at the beginning of this article. I have a hunch that this is where many ABDs lose their momentum since they are no longer accountable on weekly basis and are essentially on their own timeline.

Although there are always exceptions, the general rule of thumb is that your dissertation will have five chapters: Intro, Lit Review, Methods, Analysis, Conclusion. Before you will be allowed to actually do the dissertation, however, you have to “propose” your dissertation. My proposal consisted of the first three chapters of my dissertation basically outlining the problem, presenting a review of the literature, and describing how I plan to conduct my research. Once my proposal has been successfully defended⁶, I can go about collecting my data and writing chapters four and five.

Once all of that is finished, it’s time for the “Dissertation Defense.” This is a lengthier, two-hour-ish meeting in which you present your study to your committee (and, at CSU, anyone else who happens to want to come as they are open to the public). Once you’ve done your bit, the committee can ask you questions. After that, they send you out of the room and talk about you behind your back. At that point, the next thing you want to hear is your adviser coming to get you and calling you, “Dr. Such-and-Such.”

So that’s a pretty thorough description of roughly what to expect if you decide to take the plunge and start a PhD program. More to follow!

1. This is a flavor of qualitative research that, at its most basic, focuses on gathering research that tells a story.
2. for lack of a better word
3. http://guidetogradschoolsurvival.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/phd-completion-rates/
4. “All but dissertation”
5. There’s that word again. Remember, “defend” really means “meet with your committee and discuss.”
6. Again with the defending?

The bulk of my (non-work) time since I presented my prelim to my committee² in August has been spent working on what grad school folks refer to as the dissertation proposal.³ I completed this last month and am set to defend⁴ it in a few weeks. In the meantime, since I can’t actually start working on my research until my proposal is approved AND I receive approval from the IRB⁵, I figured I’d try to squeeze out a few blog posts. Since this PhD thing is what’s been consuming a significant amount of my time, that seems like the most relevant thing to post about at the moment.

In the interest of keeping me on track for a while with my blogging, I figured I’d put together a simple series of short posts with some advice and experiences that may prove useful if you are an educational leader considering embarking on a PhD program. I have no idea how many installments I’ll come up with, but feel free to ask any questions that you have as well.

Every school is different, but since I have been contacted by a few fellow educational leaders on the Twitter asking about the PhD program, I figured I’d hit the highlights. I can speak only from my own experience as someone who is nearing the end of his program so YMMV.

Expect the first installment tomorrow. I promise.

1. This is higher-edu-speak for “someone who has taken all of the classes that he or she can possibly take and passed his or her preliminary exam and now has no excuse not to sit down and write that darn dissertation he or she has been pretending doesn’t exist.”
2. Yes, you get your very own committee. At CSU, you are mostly free to choose your own committee. There have to be at least four members. More on that later.
3. Essentially, you write a plan of what you will do for your dissertation. More on that later.
4. The word “defense” sounds a bit intimidating, right? Again, it’s higher-edu-speak for what basically amounts to a meeting with your committee in which you lay out your plan for your study.
5. The “IRB” is the Institutional Review Board. Their job is to make sure that any research conducted using human subjects is done ethically and with minimal risk to the participants.

The Why

I have a personal goal to support teachers in talking to each other about their practice. As Elmore points out, “one of the greatest barriers to school improvement is the lack of an agreed-upon definition of what high-quality instruction looks like” (p. 3). The rounds process is intended to bring conversations about instructional practice into the school improvement process. The rounds process is adapted from the medical rounds model and includes “observing, analyzing, discussing, and understanding instruction” (p. 3).

My hope is that I can expand this school-wide next year, but I wanted to start small. I worked with my instructional coach to solicit seven teacher volunteers to be part of this pilot. I have a cross-section of disciplines, grade levels, and experience and we meet biweekly for a total of seven sessions. Each teacher will open their classroom to the group one time and have the opportunity to observe the other six over the course of the pilot.

In Elmore’s parlance, I have a theory of action that looks something like this:

If we develop and nurture a school culture that supports collaborative inquiry and the sharing of best teaching practices, then classroom instruction will be strengthened and students will learn in deeper, more authentic ways.

The How

The participants voluntarily come in to pre-brief at 6:45am on lab days. They have no incentive other than coffee and conversation along with their commitment to improve their practice through sharing in the lab experience. Though all participants are observing the same class at the same time, each bring a different inquiry question to the lab experience. These questions run the gamut and are highly dependent on the teachers’ interests and perceived areas for growth.

Some examples of inquiry questions from this group:

• How can a teacher foster global citizenship in his or her students?
• What strategies do teachers use to get students talking about text?
• How can social studies teachers more effectively include historical fiction in their units of instruction?
• How can I move students from external accountability to intrinsic responsibility for their learning?
• How can I ensure that my lessons are authentic and connect students with the larger social context?

The teacher being observed may also pose a specific question related to their class being observed. These questions are posted on our neopolitan-colored “Board of Inquiry.”

At our pre-brief, we also assign people to track specific data that the host teacher requests. For instance, this morning we tracked:

• Use of vocabulary by teacher and students that indicates “global literacy”
• Connections from historical fiction text to self
• Wait time between posing a questions and selecting a student to respond

The most challenging part is arranging class coverage for the observing teachers so that we can all be together to observe and de-brief the process. I am very passionate about the success of this pilot and have committed to using a chunk of the sub dollars allocated to me for professional development. On lab days, we use in-house coverage only when absolutely necessary, instead bringing in four or five half-day subs to cover for lab participants.

Following the one-hour classroom observation, we take a short break, top off our coffees, and re-convene for a de-brief.

Once everyone is back together, we sit silently for a few minutes to reflect on our initial observations. We go quickly around the table, sharing an objective, non-value-laden observation about what we’ve seen. Our instructional coach then leads the group through a discussion connecting one or two of the principles from the Elmore book to the lesson we observed.

It is at this point in the process that the requested data is shared and processed, along with other relevant information. For instance, this morning one of the participants noted that the host teacher had asked 70 questions in a 60-minute observation.

The hour-long debrief process usually flies by, and ultimately ends with each participant sharing something that they believe they have learned about the host teachers core principles. Examples include:

• Ms. X seems to value every student’s contribution to her class.
• It seems very important to Ms. X that her students access their personal experience to build background knowledge before tackling new text.
• Based on the discussion, it seems like Ms. X has high expectations that students are able to connect course content to real-world contexts.

Final Thoughts (For Now)

We are two lab cycles in to our pilot project and we continue to re-visit the norms we established at the outset. It is incredibly courageous of the teacher participants to open up their classrooms to their colleagues, and all have expressed their nervousness to do so.

All in all, I think the two teachers who have hosted to this point have come away feeling positive about the experience. My hope is to generate enough energy and momentum to roll this out school-wide next year. The logistics of pulling this off with 44 full-time faculty will be a bit of a challenge, but I believe passionately that this is the work we should be doing so I am committed to figuring out how to make it happen even if it means I’ll be covering classes.

As with the introduction of anything completely new, I explained to them the trade-off I was willing to make. My school was functioning under an intense “culture of meetings” that, in my opinion, was a little excessive. I committed to them to cut down on meeting times, but the trade-off was that all “FYI” items — without exception — would be posted on a private staff blog and that they were responsible for checking it every day.

Knowing that there would still be some for whom this was uncomfortable, I enabled a “subscribe by email” button at the top of the page. This meant that it was up to each individual to subscribe if they wanted to continue to receive school news via email. For me, this meant that I still only had to post in one place.

As a last bit of insurance, I worked with our school technologist to ensure that our staff blog was the browser start-up page on teacher computers. This means that it’s staring them in the face every time they open their browsers.

The benefits of the staff blog as I have seen them unfold this year are:

• Information is archived. How many emails do you get from staff who absent-mindedly deleted that email with the attachment they needed? I’ve been guilty of this myself! On the blog, everything is categorized and archived by month so the assembly schedule we used in October is still there when we need it again in January.

• Information is searchable. Technically, email is searchable, too, but if you’ve ever used FirstClass as your email client you’ll know that this is less than ideal. Plus, with the small mailbox sizes we are allocated, and the wonky way FC duplicates emails when you reply or forward, people tend to delete stuff.

• Comments are way more efficient than emailing. This one was a bit unexpected, but it’s probably the biggest benefit. Say you post about an upcoming event and you omit an important piece of information. If you had emailed it, you’d get 10 or 15 emails asking for clarification and you’d have to either reply to each one or send one of those, “Oops! I’m sorry I forgot to tell you that Friday’s dance has an 80s theme…” emails. On the blog, one person asks the question in the comments and I can answer it once,

Overall, I think this has been a successful experiment. I think one of the primary reasons is that I articulated the purpose clearly as a reduction in wasted meeting time. Also, the cold-turkey approach was the only way to go. I don’t think this would have worked as effectively had I continued to send emails and post on the blog.

It didn’t take long for the hold-outs to come around when there was something they didn’t know about. I overheard more than one conversation along the lines of, “How did you know about [whatever]?”

“It was posted on the blog yesterday. Don’t you check it?”

Also, as with the team blogs, support is critical. This was new for people so hand-holding was critical for some while some were off and running right away. Some people stress out very easily because they “just aren’t good with technology” so it’s critical to support them in the early stages.

At this point in the year, there are four of us who have rights to post on the staff blog. I want to expand this next year to make it even more collaborative and to reinforce it as the “one-stop shop” for all things school related.

When it comes right down to it, though, these are rituals that are deeply ingrained in the culture of our school. Most schools have a similar situation.

Long, low-energy meetings tend to distract and mute the day. – Martin Fowler

The trouble with throwing out meetings completely is that they do have some value. According to a few papers summarized here, meetings can help achieve the following:

• Shared commitment
• Communicate daily status, progress, and plans to the team and any observers
• Identify obstacles so that the team can take steps to remove them
• Set direction and focus
• Build a team

Being a new leader and getting to know my staff, I’m not willing to cut out all meetings. But what I am committed to doing is making sure that every minute we spend in some kind of meeting serves to move forward the school’s mission and agenda.

Zero-Based Meeting Budgeting We’re going to get back to basics. At the first regular, monthly meeting of our leadership team, we will remove every meeting from our calendars and begin adding back in those meetings that make sense and will move us toward our goals. We will no longer meet four times per month if we can accomplish the same objective in two highly-productive, focused meetings.

Less meeting time focused on dissemination of information Since my first day on the job, I’ve made some changes that I hope will whittle down the sheer volume of meeting time. Depending on the sensitivity, items that are “information only” in nature go into an email to team leaders or onto our school blog or wiki. Weening people off email has gone well so far, in no small part thanks to my very flexible group of teacher leaders who have been willing to jump into some new ways of doing business.

Two things I’ve learned in trying to bring this level of change to the day-to-day business of an organization are (1) stop trying to use the “inducement” approach to improving processes and systems (see letter B of Scott’s post on RSS for PD), and (2) stop asking questions like “Do you use Google Docs?” in favor of questions like, “To which email address should I send the invite for this document we’re working on?” It’s all about positive presuppositions. Of course we’re using Google Docs! I mean, who isn’t?

I’ll let you know how it goes, but it’s a start! Look for an upcoming post with more detail on the process of paper-reduction in a 40-year-old middle school.

Interesting reads I plan to share with the team:

• The 22-Minute Meeting
• It’s Not Just Standing Up: Patterns of Daily Stand-Up Meetings

Don’t be afraid to show your flaws. Imperfections are real and people respond to real. It’s why we like real flowers that wilt, not perfect plastic ones that never change. Don’t worry about how you’re supposed to sound and how you’re supposed to act. Show the world what you’re really like, warts and all. So talk like you really talk. Reveal things that others are unwilling to discuss. Be upfront about your shortcomings. Show the latest version of what you’re working on, even if you’re not done yet. It’s OK if it’s not perfect. You might not seem as professional, but you will seem a lot more genuine.

Like some other schools with diverse student populations, our students need a variety of supports – both academic and personal – to achieve “proficiency” on state tests. While I’m not a fan of this kind of assessment of our kids or our schools, as a new principal I believe that arguing about the merits of said tests is best left to the policy wonks. It’s the hand we’re dealt for now, and as a new principal I’m focusing first on those things within my control.

So my main objective in the near-term is to support my teachers in wrapping their heads around the idea that student success as measured on our state standardized tests and student success as measured by their ability to communicate, collaborate, and produce content in an interconnected, global community are not mutually exclusive.

When I first landed in the Big Chair, I ramped up my scouring of the blogs of other school leaders. What I found was an abundance of ideas, lists of tools and apps, advice on being a good Tweeter, and the like. I’m certainly guilty of posts like this…

What I’ve become increasingly focused on is moving from ideas and feel-good blog posts to action. One of my goals is to renew my use of this space and to spend time writing and reflecting about my actions in this first year as principal. I want to look at things that I actually do as a new principal that might improve systems, culture, and learning in my school with the goal of cultivating an environment that empowers students to learn and develop their identities as global citizens and world-class learners.

I’ll probably fall on my face. I might do that more than once. But at least I’ll try to maintain a good record of my thoughts and actions and how they play out in this organization. Maybe they’ll even help someone else who is entrusted with the exciting but very real responsibility of being a principal.

Some topics I will be addressing in upcoming posts:

• Re-imagining a culture of meetings
• Developing a manageable system of academic interventions that address students’ individual needs
• Moving a 40-year-old school into the 21st century
• Paring back “initiative bloat”
• Doing my best not to reinforce the status quo
• Quite frankly, anything else that comes to mind…

So stick around. This could get interesting.