In second year, Rider’s educational doctorate program continues to grow

From the time when Leonard Goduto arrived at Rider University as an instructor in the school’s educational leadership program, he saw the potential for the program to offer a Doctorate in Education, and in the process become the first program in the history of the University to confer a doctoral degree.

“It’s something I had always wanted to do and thought Rider would do a great job in putting this kind of a program together,” he says. “After I was here about four or five years, I started doing research on similar programs. When President Dell’Omo came on (in 2015) the idea really started to gain traction, and so I made a proposal and was given the go-ahead. I formed a committee with two faculty members, Trevor Buser and Judy Nappi, and we spent a good year plus researching and developing this program and then going through a very rigorous approval process.”

The program received official approval in 2017 and kicked off its first cohort of 15 students in July of that year. Now in its second year, and with the application process for cohort three underway, the program has seen an increased level of interest in each succeeding year.

Goduto, who is now the Ed.D. program director, explains that the doctoral program is for anyone who would like to take on a leadership role in an educational organization, including superintendents, principals, guidance counselors and college administrators. “Anybody who is interested in any form of education, whether it be K-12, higher education or private education, is welcome.”

He adds that one difference between the master’s and the Ed.D. program is that earning a doctorate provides an added level of expertise and prestige and can open additional doors for the program’s graduates. As an example, he cites the fact that many school districts now require applicants for superintendent positions to have a doctoral degree. Other opportunities the degree can provide include teaching at a college or university, as well as publishing in educational journals and presenting at national conferences.

The 51-credit program takes three years to complete. This includes two years of coursework and a year of dissertation research and analysis. The hybrid program consists of both online and on-campus studies, including a two-week summer residency in July and three on-campus Saturday sessions each fall and spring semester. The program also follows the cohort model, meaning each class of students takes the same courses as a group for the full three years. “One of the strong aspects of the cohort model is the lifelong relationships the students establish with the other members of the cohort,” says Goduto. “This helps them form a strong network for things like sharing job opportunities or discussing work-related issues.”

Goduto says the goal of the program is to transform students into “scholar-practitioners,” meaning they are taught to take a scholarly approach to practical problems in their current work setting. This is reflected in the background of the program’s faculty. “We have some practicing superintendents for the practitioner side, and we also have courses taught by professors who are currently working at the university,” says Goduto, “so there’s a nice blend of the practical and the academic.”

Kari McGann, the superintendent of schools for the Flemington-Raritan School District and a doctoral candidate in the first cohort, says the scholar-practitioner approach has already benefited her professionally.

“We had a great course about how to incorporate creativity and innovation into the mission of the school district,” she says. “It led me to thinking about how I can build opportunities for my teachers to do this in their classrooms. Something I’m pretty proud of is that we just created a new program in our earliest-learner classrooms, where our pre-school students are using Legos to build early coding skills. And that links back to the coursework about how do you have creativity in everyday life.”

Director of Curriculum, Instruction and Professional Development in the Northern Burlington County Regional School District Amy Stella is also a doctoral candidate in the first cohort. Having already completed her teacher preparation program, master’s degree and principal certification coursework at Rider, she says a factor in her applying for the Ed.D. program was her familiarity with the school’s reputation for preparing educational leaders. “I made a promise to myself many years ago that if Rider ever started an Ed.D. program, I’d be the first to enroll,” she says.

In addition to her previous positive experiences at Rider, one of the things she found very appealing about the new program was its “dissertation of practice” model, in which candidates’ dissertations are based around identifying and then solving a problem of practice that’s relevant to their work environment. “That model is unique in this region,” she says, adding that her dissertation will be designed to inform district professional development on student assessment.

Since launching the Ed.D. program, Rider has been accepted as a member of an organization called the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate, a group of more than 100 colleges and schools of education, “which have committed resources to work together to undertake a critical examination of the doctorate in education through dialog, experimentation, critical feedback and evaluation,” according to its website.

“We are fully committed to the beliefs of that organization,” Goduto says of Rider’s membership in the Carnegie Project. “We attend the convening sessions every year and we engage with the other institutions by sharing our ideas and our success with each other.”