Educational Leadership - K-12 concentration
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
The K-12 concentration within the Ph.D. in Educational Leadership is designed for persons who wish to develop leadership skills and serve as a superintendent or other central office administrator within a school district serving elementary and secondary students. Students completing this concentration may also receive one or more “endorsements” indicating that they would have met the state requirements for various K-12 administrative certificates (e.g., superintendent; central office).
Program Benefits:
The K-12 concentration is focused on the non-traditional student, offering courses on weekends. In addition, the program allows students to tie their career project experiences into their coursework. Finally, the program contains a very unique Professional Inquiry, Research, and Dissertation Core for all students which “flips the dissertation process on its head,” by having students focus on possible dissertation topics during the first year of their program (both through the initial doctoral studies seminar and their first professional field experience course). This will allow students, during their second and third years, to be working on their research ideas while taking core research and higher education courses.
This approach is very unique in that most doctoral programs require students to initially take a number of different content and research courses; pass their comprehensive exams; and only then begin to focus on their dissertation research. This places the burden of “guidance” for the dissertation primarily on the student’s advisor and committee members since all other courses have been completed. It also helps contribute to a large number of ABDs (students leaving a program with All But Dissertation complete). Faculty within WMU’s Department of Teaching, Learning, and Leadership are committed to significantly decreasing the number of doctoral students not completing their programs due to concerns with the dissertation.