Education-Leadership, Foundations, and Policy

Through research based practices and theoretical framing, students learn to build schools' professional capacity through recruitment, interviewing, induction, professional development, evaluation, and compensation. The process is considered in school and policy contexts with attention to ethical and diversity considerations. Students develop actionable plans for employing, supporting, and retaining professional capacity as a leader.

This course covers the basic principles of engaging families and the community in the life of a school, a fundamental responsibility of school leaders. Topics include communication with the school community and families, community partnerships, crisis communications, and research-based engagement practices. This course will provide tools and resources for building positive relationships with staff, parents, and the community at large.

This course explores the principal¿s pivotal role in organizational operations and change, focusing on how school leaders shape climate, foster internal professional accountability, and respond to the demands of external accountability. Students examine schools as complex organizations, analyze leadership routines and tools, and apply improvement science to address a real-world problem of practice.

This course explores school finance principles and challenges, emphasizing budgeting activities like planning, data collection, development, communication, implementation, and monitoring. Topics include resource allocation, accounting, business management, organizational behavior, and data management. Students apply concepts and engage in discussions.

This course explores laws and policies that shape U.S. public school teaching and learning environments, covering Supreme Court cases and federal legislation. The course introduces legal principles and guidelines for fulfilling leadership duties and protecting the respective rights of student and teacher. Students will be prepared to make fair and ethical decisions, enhancing educational opportunities for all students.

This course gives students conceptual and philosophical frameworks for leading good instruction and creating conditions for teaching and learning in schools and districts. Students reflect on their own instructional filters and deepen understanding of what we know about effective teaching and learning. Considering various instructional issues, students learn to supervise and evaluate instruction, connecting supervision with professional growth.

This course equips educators with tools to lead continuous improvement aimed at advancing the academic success, engagement, and belonging of all children. Grounded in improvement science, the course introduces tools for systemic change and includes field-based application in P-12 teaching and leadership.

Examines how, as a team, school leaders analyze the relationship of the integration of technologies to teachers' beliefs & practices & to local school culture, structures, & policies. Students will evaluate factors critical for successful implementation of EdTech; identify & deconstruct the distributed leadership of EdTech in a school setting; & plan comprehensively for a system of practice to lead EdTech.

Leadership for Equity of Diverse Populations seeks to support special populations in schools. It proposes that effective leadership for all special student populations involves particular knowledge and requires a strong equity orientation.

Under close guidance of an individual faculty member, students work on areas of particular interest that cannot be met in regularly scheduled courses. Enrollment in this course is limited to three credits in a master's degree program.

This course introduces early-stage PhD students to education research and to academic and non-academic professional development through a speaker series, EHD faculty and alumni career panels, and guided discussions. Students engage with scholars within and beyond EHD, read and analyze research, attend talks, and explore a range of career pathways. The course emphasizes critical inquiry, peer learning, and preparation for future scholarly and professional work.

The primary goal of this course is to provide a structure to support you in planning and designing your Research-Practitioner Partnership Experience project. We will discuss how to find and contact a potential partner, how to begin a conversation about research with a partner, how to listen to the partner's needs, how to guide a discussion that focuses your project on a specific research question, and how to write the RPE proposal.

This course will cover a single emerging research issue on a rotating basis. Examples of topics include data visualization, program innovation, tools for open science, communication of findings to broad audiences, and grant-writing. The explicit focus is to cover topics that are not currently covered or emphasized by existing coursework for VEST fellows but are indispensable to cutting-edge research in the education sciences.

Focus is on the generalized linear model (GLM) for cases when variables have specific non-normal conditional distributions, with emphasis on common data analytic challenges that arise in real world settings. Topics include nonlinear relationships, nominal and ordinal outcomes, discrepant data, and bootstrapping methods. Course materials are grounded in applied examples from the social and health sciences.

A rich body of literature has emerged about the design, implementation, and analysis of experiments in field settings. This course introduces students to advances in the design and analysis of field experiments; provides opportunities for students to read and discuss well-known field experiments that have had important implications for policy; and discusses methodological issues related to both experiments and non-experiments.

Graduate seminar on quantitative reasoning for education and youth: what can we responsibly claim from evidence, and what should we not? Students learn causal and quasi-experimental designs (RCTs, RD, DiD/event studies, CITS) and build reproducible R workflows for data management, visualization, and interpretation. Emphasis on claim discipline, validity threats, and decision-facing communication in dashboards, edtech, and AI-enabled analytics.

Education policy research increasingly leverages econometric methods applied to large-scale datasets. This course bridges the gap between prior training in econometrics or causal inference and the application of these techniques (regression adjustment, fixed effects, difference-in-differences, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, matching) through discussion of empirical articles and replication or simulation exercises.

This course is designed to familiarize students with the basics of multilevel modeling. Topics include random effects ANOVA models, means-as-outcomes models, random coefficients models, intercepts- and slopes-as-outcomes models, contextual models, random effects ANCOVA models, linear growth models, nonlinear growth models and cross-classified models. Prerequisite: EDLF 7420 or equivalent.

The major topics include exploratory/confirmatory factor analysis models, a variety of structural equation models, growth curve models, and multi-sample modeling analysis. The major focus of the course is both on the conceptual understanding of latent variable modeling and on practical application of these models in research and measurement. Students will work with data sets and computer programs to gain practical research experience.

This course is intended for graduate students who have used or plan to use case study methods in their own research. The course will examine the foundations, logic, design, and ethics of case study research in education and the social sciences. The class will explore single-, multiple-, and mixed-methods case study designs and methods of data collection, interpretation, and analysis.

Problems of practice through systematic inquiry are the focus of this course. We explore the intersection of theory and practice with emphasis on the design of thoughtful, ethical inquiry about educational problems of practice. There is a co-requisite (EDLF 5301: Academic Writing for Practitioners that is focused exclusively on academic writing to address problems of practice).

We focus on problems of practice (POP) through systematic qualitative inquiry, specifically focusing on qualitative processes, questions, and strategies to conduce meaningful inquiry in educational systems. Specifically, the focus is on identifying a qualitative question to address POP and the creation of a qualitative design to address the POP. Co-requisite of EDLF 8384 Lab of practice.

This Lab of Practice complements qualitative fieldwork methods in educational settings focusing specifically on observations, interviews, artifacts, and beginning data reduction and analysis that are the focus of EDLF 8383: Qualitative Inquiry. The Lab is an opportunity to engage in fieldwork on a very small scale allowing for practicing the major qualitative methods for generating qualitative data.

Focus is given to Problems of Practice (POPs) through systematic quantitative inquiry, specifically focusing on survey processes, questions and strategies used to conduct meaningful inquiry in educational settings. The course begins with the process for survey development followed by basic statistical processes and procedures for organizing and analyzing data from surveys. A co-requisite for the class is EDLF 8386: Survey Lab of Practice.

This Lab of Practice complements EDLF 8385: Survey Inquiry. The Lab provides a structured opportunity to engage in survey work on a very small scale allowing for practicing the main ideas focused on in EDLF 8385: Survey Inquiry.