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) 

Productive struggle and the exponential growth of human knowledge

According to Toffler (2002), it took approximately fifty thousand years to accumulate the knowledge of mankind that existed in the year 1 AD. It then took 1500 years to double that knowledge. But by the early 70's, we (mankind) were doubling our knowledge every 6 years. Scientists have determined that in our current day, human knowledge doubles EVERY YEAR. (Collier and Thomas, 2014)

Teachers no longer have the luxury of being the only one doing the teaching. When the knowledge-growth rate was slower, the traditional model of students seated in rows and a teacher delivering the exact same level of knowledge the exact same way to all students was adequate. Today, teachers must become facilitators of student directed classrooms, "preparing students to become information processors, analysts, and self-motivated learners." (Collier and Thomas, 2014).

Do you want to know what my most favorite parent complaint is? "He is so frustrated in class! He says his teacher won't just tell him the answer!" 

"Perfect!" says I. 

"A great teacher doesn't teach as much as possible. A great teacher teachers as LITTLE as possible, while modeling the behaviors of how to figure something out." (Maats & O'brien, 2015).

As parents, this is a huge shift for some of us and the way we learned. And we figured that because we learned that way, and we turned out fine and we understand it and are comfortable with it, our children should learn the same way.

But our instruction and learning environment needs to evolve and adapt to the amount and needs of human knowledge. This means we need to focus less on specific content (all of our favorite dinosaur or circus-themes lessons) and more on teaching students how to learn, how to reflect, how to productively struggle.