Mid-Career Doctoral Program

The Mid-Career Doctoral Program accommodates working professionals, including those at the most senior levels of districts and organizations, by modeling the successful format of leading executive-level business administration programs. Students attend coursework for one weekend each month in the fall and spring semesters and for one week during the summer. The program explicitly teaches collaboration and reflective practice, and models a collaborative learning community by forming cohorts of students and placing a high value on a student's ability to problem-solve through the creation and implementation of new ideas and educational approaches. Use of the Internet allows continuity between formal weekend program sessions so that students, faculty, and adjunct instructors can come together to discuss assignments, download readings, and reflect upon practice in a virtual learning community.

The Mid-Career Doctoral curriculum fosters a deep understanding of organizations, instruction, and learning, and their implications for schooling. A distinctive focus on inquiry-based leadership cuts across the program's core content areas:

• Instructional Leadership Educational
  Leaders cannot lead what they do not understand; therefore instructional leadership is at the core of the program. By instructional leadership we mean the ability to know and manage teaching, learning, and performance. Students in the program explore such fundamental questions as:
  • What does instructional leadership look like at the primary and secondary levels?
  • Which practices do successful leaders use to improve teaching and learning in a variety of contexts?
  • How should educational leaders, teachers and facilitators be observed and evaluated?
  • How should educational organizations and their staff be held accountable for their contributions to learning?
  • And most importantly, how can everyone involved in schools promote student engagement and learning?
• Organizational Leadership Professional
  Educators cannot be effective instructional leaders without understanding the complex systems in which teaching and learning take place. The program's approach to organizational leadership includes a focus on developing the emotional intelligence of leaders seeking to manage small groups and teams, intergroup and systems dynamics to promote learning communities. Students in the program learn about efficiently employing and creating resources to promote learning environments and managing change. The goal within this content area is to prepare students to create organizations that foster the continuous improvement of teaching and learning. Public Leadership Each organization, in turn, operates within a wider community and policy context. Sustainable instructional and organizational leadership depends on the capacity of educators to understand and engage the ongoing support of one’s various public constituencies. Educational leaders must perform as advocates, brokers, and catalysts in their communities in order to support educational success. They need to frame current educational challenges within wider philosophical, historical and sociological contexts, and then find ways to build stronger and more inclusive "publics" for their institutions. They need to model the public problem solving required to diagnose and engage the educational ecology affecting the educational development of those they serve.
• Evidence-Based Leadership
  Ultimately, every dimension of school leadership described above is enhanced by a leader's capacity to make evidenced-based decisions. They are constantly faced with a myriad of complex decisions that are best made by accumulating, synthesizing, and analyzing data from multiple sources and in a variety of forms. Those who are prepared to recognize and utilize the wealth of information around them will invariably produce more reasoned and better-informed decisions.

This area prepares education leaders to identify and employ data sources and analytic methods to inform decision-making. The curriculum incorporates the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) Standards for School Leaders. The program does not directly provide for administrative certification, as student and state requirements vary considerably. Students seeking administrative certification should consult with designated Penn staff in order to arrange appropriate coursework. A master's degree is required for admission, as is prior leadership experience. Students complete a minimum of 27 course units at Penn. Participants pay a single price for the program, a flat fee per term, which includes all tuition and fees, books, materials, and meals.