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Given the significant challenges PK-12 educational leaders currently face, the purpose of this essay is to orient EdD faculty with Noddings' (1984/2003) care ethics as a framework for conceptualizing their work and employing care acts to support EdD scholar-practitioners through the COVID-19 pandemic. Practical strategies for this work are suggested. The author argues that Noddings' (1984/2003) ethic of care provides a timely lens through which EdD faculty's actions can be guided. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, faculty have become tasked with supporting their students' socioemotional well-being in addition to their academic progress. EdD faculty must be responsive to these needs if they are to retain students and effectively train scholar-practitioners to identify and address problems of practice. Stemming from this argument, future research could empirically investigate how employing care ethics affects scholar-practitioners' well-being, program satisfaction, retention, and completion rates.

For decades, the field of education has been criticized for failing to distinguish between the PhD and EdD degrees. However, the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate has recently redefined the EdD as a professional practice doctorate and offered a framework for program (re)design that includes the generation and application of practitioner knowledge to identify, investigate, and solve problems of practice. This renewed focus on (re)designing EdD programs provides a timely segue into rethinking doctoral assessments in EdD programs. This document analysis demonstrates how one near-ubiquitous assessment, the comprehensive examination, can be reimagined to serve as a site for reinforcing practitioner-oriented program outcomes. This manuscript reports how an EdD program implemented alternative comprehensive examinations to support student growth toward a variety of practitioner-oriented program outcomes. The findings indicate that the alternative assessments fostered student growth in all program outcomes and allowed students to meet several purposes of traditional comprehensive exams while also demonstrating that other purposes of comprehensive exams are misaligned with revised visions for EdD education. The implications of this study are that EdD assessments should be aligned with program outcomes and that program administrators should abandon traditional comprehensive exams for assessments that support practitioner growth and development.

Purpose: This paper describes how an embedded dissertation program design feature supported two cohorts of EdD dissertators and helped them make consistent progress toward and eventually complete their dissertation milestones during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we detail the work, challenges, and results of EdD students' efforts toward their milestones and offer perspectives on the same topics for EdD faculty who are teaching dissertation writing courses or supporting dissertators during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conceptual Argument: This paper argues that an existing program design feature, the embedded dissertation, provided unexpected affordances for EdD dissertators during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, it acted as a scaffold for dissertators to make small but consistent steps forward on their dissertation milestones despite the significant challenges they faced both as practitioners and as students during the pandemic. Implications for Research: In sharing these experiences, we hope to: (a) offer a contribution to the literature on the intersection of program design and dissertation writing, (b) proffer a program design structure that was successful in moving dissertators forward during COVID-19, and (c) document the lived experiences of EdD dissertators and faculty in this unprecedented, historical moment.

Prior research shows that supervisors of teacher candidates are typically underprepared for their work and receive little oversight of it. However, there has been less research into these causes and the effects of minimal preparation on supervisors. This case study of a teacher education department uses survey, interviews, and document analysis to examine the tensions that occur when supervisors are underprepared for their roles. The results indicate three tensions that undermine supervisors' practice: unclear expectations, perfunctory evaluations, and the failure to develop teacher educator identities. In the absence of organizational supports for supervisor preparation and development, supervisors relied on peer networks and their PK-12 experience to inform their practice. Program administrators lamented the lack of training for supervisors but did not have the time or resources to support it. Intentional preparation could help supervisors navigate these tensions and should aim to align supervisors' training to the roles they embody.

In an effort to integrate university coursework with field-site experiences and bolster pre-service teacher learning, national teacher education organizations have charged teacher education programs with embedding teacher preparation within clinically-rich experiences. These reforms have resulted in expanded and increasingly complex conceptions of pre-service teacher supervision and the university supervisor, which have affected not only traditional supervisors but all university-based teacher educators. This paper presents a framework that maps the shifting roles of four university-based teacher educators: program administrators, research faculty, teaching faculty, and adjunct faculty due to changing notions of clinically-rich preservice teacher supervision. This framework demonstrates how faculty roles have become more inclusive of supervisory tasks, more integrated with school-site learning, and faculty are in closer communication with each other regarding pre-service teacher growth. Supporting new faculty roles within clinically-rich supervision requires adequate training for all faculty, appropriate institutional recognition for supervision, and rethinking departmental organization and culture.

Doctoral faculty have long advocated for writing support for doctoral candidates during the dissertation stage. However, schools of education are often challenged to provide organizational supports to assist struggling dissertators. EdD students in CPED institutions may need additional supports due to shorter time-to-degree programs and full-time work commitments. This paper reports how one PhD student in a CPED institution acted as a dissertation consultant for 35 EdD dissertators and successfully guided them through their dissertations. The author examines how her background in composition, experiences in educational research, and willingness to address socio-emotional needs contributed to this success and argues that PhD students in schools of education with similar backgrounds can take up dissertation consulting work as organizational supports for EdD dissertators. The mutual benefits of engaging in this work are discussed as is the potential for school-university partnerships stemming from PhD-EdD student collaboration during doctoral study.

For decades, university supervisors of preservice teachers (PSTs) have been undervalued and ignored. Following neoliberal reforms, post-secondary institutions have outsourced PST supervision to contingent faculty, failed to provide professional development for supervisors, offered poor employment conditions, and overlooked PST supervision in tenure and promotion decisions. These actions, combined with the service orientation of teacher education, have framed PST supervision as service work. This case study sought to understand how supervisors and administrators in one teacher education department positioned supervisors' work as service and the influence of the institution and department on that positioning. Using a survey, interviews, and document analysis, this study found that supervisors positioned their work as professional, financial, and emotional service. In turn, the institution and teacher education department positioned supervisors' work as service by providing minimal compensation and no institutional rewards and expecting supervisors to enact roles that were not officially required of them. The study's implications are that teacher educators and higher education administrators should strive to recruit and retain a professional corps of supervisors, provide ongoing professional development to supervisors to assist in the professionalization of the role, and resist notions of supervision as service.

This paper explores how two assistant professors who come from diverse paradigmatic, theoretical, and methodological perspectives collaborated for impact to co-teach in a literacy doctoral program. Initially, we grappled with naming and negotiating our differences individually and professionally across race, culture, theory, and methodology. Storytelling and positioning theory afforded us opportunities to humanize one another and bridge differences by sharing our stories and critically examining ourselves and our training in relation to literacy research.

In this paper, we (a) share perspectives from stakeholders who learn and teach in an EdD program located in the United States that utilizes telepresence for distance learning (TDL) in a synchronous, hybrid environment, (b) frame our learning as a community of practice, and (c) report affordances and challenges of this model. TDL students asserted that the telepresence option gave them choice in selecting their doctoral program and increased their social presence and ability to be perceived as real people, and all students recognized the importance of a cohesive community to offer support through technological challenges. Faculty were largely unfamiliar with utilizing telepresence in the classroom initially and acknowledged that revised pedagogies and instructional methods were essential to supporting all students in this model. TDL affords opportunities to increase equity and access in doctoral education; however, technological and logistical challenges must be remediated to ensure a successful learning environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, the field of education has been criticized for failing to distinguish between the PhD and EdD degrees. However, the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate has recently redefined the EdD as a professional practice doctorate and offered a framework for program (re)design that includes the generation and application of practitioner knowledge to identify, investigate, and solve problems of practice. This renewed focus on (re)designing EdD programs provides a timely segue into rethinking doctoral assessments in EdD programs. This document analysis demonstrates how one near-ubiquitous assessment, the comprehensive examination, can be reimagined to serve as a site for reinforcing practitioner-oriented program outcomes. This manuscript reports how an EdD program implemented alternative comprehensive examinations to support student growth toward a variety of practitioner-oriented program outcomes. The findings indicate that the alternative assessments fostered student growth in all program outcomes and allowed students to meet several purposes of traditional comprehensive exams while also demonstrating that other purposes of comprehensive exams are misaligned with revised visions for EdD education. The implications of this study are that EdD assessments should be aligned with program outcomes and that program administrators should abandon traditional comprehensive exams for assessments that support practitioner growth and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, university supervisors of preservice teachers (PSTs) have been undervalued and ignored. Following neoliberal reforms, post-secondary institutions have outsourced PST supervision to contingent faculty, failed to provide professional development for supervisors, offered poor employment conditions, and overlooked PST supervision in tenure and promotion decisions. These actions, combined with the service orientation of teacher education, have framed PST supervision as service work. This case study sought to understand how supervisors and administrators in one teacher education department positioned supervisors' work as service and the influence of the institution and department on that positioning. Using a survey, interviews, and document analysis, this study found that supervisors positioned their work as professional, financial, and emotional service. In turn, the institution and teacher education department positioned supervisors' work as service by providing minimal compensation and no institutional rewards and expecting supervisors to enact roles that were not officially required of them. The study's implications are that teacher educators and higher education administrators should strive to recruit and retain a professional corps of supervisors, provide ongoing professional development to supervisors to assist in the professionalization of the role, and resist notions of supervision as service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how two assistant professors who come from diverse paradigmatic, theoretical, and methodological perspectives collaborated for impact to co-teach in a literacy doctoral program. Initially, we grappled with naming and negotiating our differences individually and professionally across race, culture, theory, and methodology. Storytelling and positioning theory afforded us opportunities to humanize one another and bridge differences by sharing our stories and critically examining ourselves and our training in relation to literacy research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]