Completing my Doctoral Dissertation, GRRRRRRR

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I've been working on this stupid thing for years, literally. It's been two years since I've completed all of the required coursework and passed my comprehensive exams for my doctorate in educational leadership. The only thing between me and wearing the goofy looking robe is my dissertation. There are 5 chapters for a dissertation. Chapter 1 is an introduction, 2 is a literature review, 3 is my research methodology, 4 is the results section and Chapter 5 is where I discuss the findings.

Once I was able to get approval from my dissertation chair, I submitted chapters 1-3 and was approved to move forward. I then received approval from the Institutional Review Board my first submission, and could start my research. The research itself consisted of a series of interviews with principals and teachers and only took me about 2-3 weeks to complete. I really liked that part. I really enjoyed sifting through all the data. That was May of 2015. Since then I've been writing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting chapters 4 and 5. Once my chair and I get to a place where we think it's right, we submit to my two dissertation reviewers. Their jobs are to provide me with feedback. They're apparently experts at that.

I am SO sick of feedback!! We're not even talking about grammar and such yet. I'm still not to that fine of a level. We're still talking about about organization and flow and presenting qualitative data in a way that doesn't look or sound quantitative, which I thought did in revision #4, but then it sounded TOO qualitative and there wasn't enough narrative or synsthesis.....

I know, I'm boring you. But I do have a point.

I know the content of this topic and research inside and out now. The purpose of doing the doctoral research is to become the foremost expert on a topic or leadership problem that is relevant, unique and useful. All of the editing and revising and yelling at my computer that I've been doing over the last year has given me a level of understanding that will last forever.

Yes, I'm sure my dissertation chair could fix this for me. Yes, I've been to that point where I would have paid someone else to write it just to be done. But her perseverance and gentle pressure, applied relentlessly has forced me to productively struggle, or as James Nottingham calls it, "cognitively wobble." (click his name to watch a great video!) And it's because of this productive struggle that I'm earning and owning knowledge.

And that's my point. 

Knowledge must be earned for it to be lasting, to become synthesized and embedded. 

Do you want to know what my dissertation chair asked me to do tonight? Write a flippin' outline for chapter 4.  Can you believe that?!?! My dissertation is currently over 140 pages, all my own work and research and she wants me to stop and write an outline?!?!

But I did it. And in doing something as simple as an outline, I could clearly see how disjointed the chapter was, the portions that were redundant, and the portions that altogether didn't belong.

It is such a pain in the butt having a teacher who sees your full potential 

and knows that the learning is the true reward, and makes you struggle. (written in sarcasm font) 

Laser-like focus or a broad-strokes approach?

As we've been working with Dr. Ray Smith from Visible Learning he has said some things that have really resonated with me.

Today he said, "80% of your impact comes from 20% of your practice. You need to be sharply focused not well-rounded." He followed this comment up with, "Sharply focused means you must be very selfish as to where and how you use your time. Practices have disproportionate impact!"

This last week or so, we've been looking at our mid-year reading data for our students. We haven't made the growth that we had hoped for and began doing research into why not. There are many things we do well but the research provided some ways we can be doing better:

1. If we want to see measurable gains in reading, our master schedule needs to reflect reading as a priority. It didn't. But it will next week. We have revamped it to identify 90-minute reading blocks for 1st and 2nd and 90-minute literacy blocks for K. This will provide teachers with more time to intervene with their lowest students. We can coordinate better with our reading support program to make better use of their time pushing into these classes. 
2. Our afternoon intervention time will be focused on our most struggling readers. Yes, we'll still provide enrichment opportunities for those students who are already at or above grade level, but our job is not finished until we get all students above that line. 
3. The most effective reading intervention is good teaching. If we want our students to become better readers, we must become better at teaching reading. Starting this month we will have a full-time reading support coach. This position will not be to work directly with the students, per se, but more focused on helping teachers who want to become better. We have several new teachers this year and this will be a resource for them on how to allocate time, how to group students for small groups, and how to teach more effectively in small groups. The same also applies to our veteran teachers. Research is clear on how to most effectively deliver reading instruction and our reading coach is hands-down the most up-to-date person in our building, probably even the district, on reading research.

Change is uncomfortable. Change in the middle of the year is even tougher. But change, based on best practice, centered around improving student reading is a no brainer. :)