Candidates for an Ed.D. in Education Leadership now have three new pathways to the doctorate: Teacher Leadership, Building Level Leadership, and District Level Leadership.

The new program is modeled after an approach derived from the work of the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate, whose principles sprang from a shared-knowledge network involving 100 graduate schools of education in the United States, Canada and New Zealand whose members collaborated to enhance professional preparation in education at the highest level.

The team that developed the new program at Wilmington University’s College of Education was headed by Dr. Joseph Crossen, program chair for the EDD in Education Leadership, with assistance from Dr. Kathi Brown, director of Advanced Programs, and Dr. Kae Keister, chair for Advanced Programs.

These new pathways, along with WilmU’s existing EDD degrees in higher education and organization leadership, now provide students with five different doctoral degree programs from which to choose. The new degree replaces most aspects of traditional end-of-program dissertations and replaces them with a Dissertation in Practice (DIP), a project that begins in the candidate’s very first year in the program and is to be completed by the end of a candidate’s third and final year.

Applications for admission to the program are on the upswing, with a new cohort of 10 candidates from Sussex County was formed this fall.