Overview of CCL program at NLU

Overview

Program Mission
The Mission of the Community College Leadership (CCL) doctoral program is to prepare students to meet the challenges and opportunities surrounding community colleges in a rapidly changing society and enable them to provide enlightened and competent leadership for the 21st century.

Program Design
The program design recognizes that all doctoral students enter the program with a wealth of skills, abilities, and prior experiences. The intent of the program is to assist students as they build on those capacities while developing new skills and perspectives that underlie leadership. The program design recognizes that knowledge is continually being created more rapidly than any individual can ever master. The program balances knowledge acquisition, the development of perspectives, and the enhancement of skills fundamental to effective leadership. It is through discourse, and dialogue and collaborative students centered interactions among that students and faculty and peers, facilitate the expansion and diversification of knowledge.

The CCL program provides students with perspectives on current knowledge in postsecondary education and on methods of inquiry aimed at improving the quality and ensuring the continued growth of community colleges. Through courses and other planned learning experiences, students critically examine current understandings of administration, leadership, organizational functioning, diversity, policy, technology, and student development. Students also conduct research culminating in a dissertation constituting in a significant contribution to knowledge revelant of community college leadership.

The CCL doctoral program is intended to engender a broad understanding of community college education by encouraging focused scholarly inquiry grounded in the reality of leadership and administrative practices. The program is directed towards developing scholar-practitioners who understand the power of ideas and who place those ideas in service to improve educational practice.

Moreover, the administration of complex postsecondary education enterprises, including community colleges, requires leaders who possess a well-developed educational philosophy, a depth of knowledge of education as a social institution, a broad range of professional experiences in a number of operational programs and activities, a sound understanding of human and organizational development theory, and well-developed educational leadership and analytic skills.

CCL Doctoral Program Terminal Objectives
Upon graduation, individuals will be able to:

Utilize theories and skills form a variety of disciplines pertinent and essential to community college leadership, administration, and management.
Demonstrate mastery of research skills through professional presentations, scholarly writing and successful completion of a quality dissertation.
Understand the complex interrelationships among the diverse stakeholders residing in the community college milieu.
Demonstrate an understanding of the convergence of globalization and diversity relevant to the community college field.
Employ contemporary educational thought on themes relevant to the community college institution as a whole.
Demonstrate knowledge of federal, state, and local laws, politics and higher education policies as they affect the complexity of decision making in the community college.
Analyze the financial and resource management for community colleges, utilize the latest techniques in budget development, and evaluate the parity funding of education in the community college system.

Scholar-Practitioner: Conceptual Framework
The CCL program prepares leaders who will possess the practical and scholarly grounded knowledge, skills, values, and vision to change and transform community colleges. The scholar-practitioner model espouses this concept whereby leadership and administrative practices are informed by scholarly inquiry. Scholar-practitioner leadership is grounded in a view of leadership, which seeks to blur the boundaries between knowledge and practice. The scholar-practitioner concept of leadership represents a complex set of relationships among inquiry, knowledge, practice, and theory. At the convergence of knowledge-practice and inquiry-practice, an emerging framework for an epistemology for community college leadership exists. Engaged in this new epistemology, students learn to lead and articulate knowledge and practice through inquiry as praxis.

Embedded in the scholar-practitioner model is the belief that professional identity is not a static phenomenon that ends once a terminal degree is achieved but instead consists of life-long learning that evolves as the field does. The goal is to develop research, critical thinking, conceptualization, problem-solving, and other scholarly skills that are particularly pertinent to leadership and administrative practices in community colleges. There are a variety of activities viewed as vital in implementing this philosophy, including integration of professional literature, engaging in research in a variety of ways, and using a scholarly approach to facilitate critical thinking.

The scholar-practitioner model encourages faculty to enrich each of their courses with exercises, case studies, and projects that reflect the actual demands placed on today's leaders and administrators in community colleges. Likewise, the scholar-practitioner model propels the student into immediate and continuous interaction with the complex and dynamic issues facing community college leaders throughout the curriculum. This exposure to the problems, issues, or concerns facing community colleges seeks to achieve better understanding of the relevance of the concepts, theories, and skills required of them in their doctoral studies. At the same time, students are better able to participate in the classroom through questioning, discussion, and providing examples of applications of the material in certain situations that they have experienced or are experiencing in their community colleges.

With respect to instruction, the scholar-practitioner philosophy demands the selection of full time faculty holding terminal degrees in appropriate disciplinary areas who also possess substantial career experience in community college leadership and administrative positions. The scholar-practitioner concept further encourages the appointment of adjunct faculty who are currently engaged or have recently retired from community colleges and/or those who offer the students a range of academic, real-world professional experiences relevant to community colleges

Coursework
The program is three years in length including an integrated dissertation process. The coursework is a set sequence of courses, where all cohort members begin and end the sequence together. Throughout the program, the courses build on the knowledge gained from the previous course. Student participation entails attendance of face-to-face classes with guided study over the internet supporting the coursework. Development of a dissertation plan begins at the end of the first year. Dissertation research is embedded within the curriculum during the second and third year. The CCL faculty is dedicated to helping students complete the coursework and dissertation within the three years.

Cohort Model
The CCL program is built around the cohort model. This means that each entering class comprises a cohort and matriculates through the program as a cohesive unit. Students typically are working community college professionals who study in a group of 12 – 15 of their peers. Each student cohort is carefully selected to assure a diverse representation of participants. With its emphasis on collaborative learning, project-based learning, and individual learning, the cohort format draws on like-minded professionals who share common work experiences and interests. The cohort model promotes collegiality, interdependence, and networking among students for a lifetime.

The cohort model was chosen for two reasons. First, individuals in community colleges are increasingly asked to work as team members, instead of as professionals in isolation from one another. The cohort approach emphasizes this collaborative approach. Second, the cohort model provides a strong social support system for students as they move through this rigorous doctoral program.

The cohort model is designed for adult learners who are working professionals striving towards professional and personal growth. However, while a member of the cohort, students still take personal responsibility for their education.