MS. EISENHART: Thank you, Karen. First let me correct, I wish I had a Spencer grant to do this, but I don't. I am working in partnership with the Carnegie Foundation, however, on this work.

What I am going to be talking about today is the experience that I am having at the University of Colorado, in trying to implement common core curriculum for our doctoral students.

We started this process about a year and a half ago. So, we are definitely in the throes of it right now, and we will be implementing it in the fall of 2004.

I should start by saying what kind of program I have, since Andy DiSessa mentioned that there are quite a few differences across these programs.

Mine is a small school of education, 30 faculty members divided across four degree programs. Our entering doctoral students are about 15 to 20 each year. A third of them have not been teachers, two thirds of them have been teachers. So, that is the general character of the school.

I will say, also, that we did decide as a faculty that we agreed with this formulation of the problem, that current doctoral programs may not be preparing students to conduct high quality educational research. So, that was the impetus for the work that we have been doing.

Is this concern warranted? Although this evidence is circumstantial, I do think that the concern is warranted, and I will give you a couple of reasons why I think it is warranted.

The first reason, the ad hoc nature of most doctoral programs, and by this -- or at least my doctoral program, I should say -- by this I mean that the hiring decisions that are made for faculty are not based primarily on what would make a good doctoral program.

The hiring decisions for faculty are based on teacher education, regulations, history, tradition, various other kinds of things that are going on institutionally.

So, we find ourselves ad hoc-ing the doctoral program on top of these other responsibilities, or in addition to these other responsibilities that our faculty have.

We have not yet been able to make a hire because, or for the explicit reason of, improving or developing the doctoral program in educational research.

Another concern that we have is how few shared or required courses there are for students training to become educational researchers.

We did a cursory review of the 15 top schools on the U.S. News and World Report ranking from 2001, looking at the courses that were required across those schools.

What you find, as Felice mentioned, is that there is quite a range. There is at least one commonality, and that is that almost all programs have one course that is an introductory doctoral seminar of some kind, that is common to all students, one course that is in quantitative methodology, and one course in qualitative methodology.

The rest of the courses -- there are a few institutions that don't even have those three required courses -- but if you do have those three, then usually the other courses are all in the student's specialty area.

The other thing -- and Felice also made reference to this -- these data are from the NCES report of 2002, in which they compare the resources that are available for education doctoral students in comparison to -- one comparison is with humanities or social sciences doctoral students, and one comparison is with life and physical science doctoral students.

What you find is that 50 percent of ed doctoral students receive no financial support. This is in contrast to the other two areas, the physical/life sciences and the humanities/social sciences, where as a group only 21 percent receive no financial support.

The average amount of assistantship money and the percentage of money who receive assistantships is lower than for these other two areas.

Also, 75 percent of the students in education are enrolled part time, and that compares to only 37 percent in the other fields.

Another area that has concerned us, and also has been referred to already is the limited prior knowledge that the students bring about educational research.

I think the issue that really focuses our attention is, regardless of whether our students have been teachers or been researchers prior to coming to doctoral work, they come with very different, varied background experiences.

One of our jobs has to be to figure out a way to engage them in some kind of common conversation or common discussion and debate about what the issues are that we are going to talk about, at least in this school of ed while you are here getting your doctoral degree.

So, we are concerned about, given the diversity in the background of the students who come in, we are concerned about a lack of common language, a lack of understanding of shared issues or arguments, and a lack of shared research norms and standards, certainly to the point where, in some cases, as David mentioned earlier, students may come in without any background in research, or even without any appreciation of the value of educational research, and a deep skepticism about its value, in some cases.

So, these are some of the negative aspects of the situation that we feel like we need to address with a common core.

Some of the more positive aspects, I would say anyway, but also something that needs to be, in a sense, corralled by a common core, is the breadth of the field that we are dealing with.

There are many, many topics that could, of course, be, that are, of course, educational issues. There are multiple perspectives. Many people have written about this recently, and the importance of somehow incorporating attention to multiple perspectives in doctoral training.

There are multiple methods in research work. So, there is a lot of methodological material that needs to be covered.

Along with all of this general -- what you might call general information about the field in general, there is also presumably a need to develop the student's expertise in some area, some substantive area, and some method.

So, what we have decided to do -- and I would say that we started from basically a three course required experience for the first year doctoral students, which is similar to the one that I mentioned earlier that other people are doing, one doctoral seminar, kind of general seminar on issues, one in quantitative methods, and one in qualitative methods.

We have decided to actually double the requirement and to make it more dense. By that I mean, with the current situation that we have, students have one course that they have to take their first semester of their first year, and that is the doctoral research seminar, the general course.

The qualitative and quantitative courses can then be taken at any point in their career. They just have to be taken.

What we have decided now to do is to require a full year of course work in these areas that we think should be shared in common by our doctoral students.

In each of the first two semesters, there will be one course in what we are calling the big ideas, or foundation/current topics in educational research, one in qualitative methods and one n quantitative methods. Our goal here is to integrate across the three courses when we are teaching them.

For example, if one of the big ideas we are dealing with is school desegregation in the qualitative course, we will be talking about the qualitative data that has been gathered and exists and has been analyzed with regard to school desegregation.

When we are teaching the quantitative course, we will be doing the same with the quantitative data that bears on that.

Then the final course, which would be a not for credit course, is an informal seminar in the student's specialty area.

The reason we have this is that we did hear from our current students that we have been interviewing about these things that they did not want to go a full year without some attention to the specialty area that they came there to study in the first place. So, we couldn't, as far as they were concerned, give them a core and nothing else.

So, that is the first year, those six required courses of all students. They will all take them at the same time. They will go through as a cohort.

The second year will be focused on sustained course work in the specialty area, and this will be both content focus and method focus, if it is literacy education, math education, science education, educational foundations, policy, whatever it is.

The third year -- not all of our students take three full years, but many do take two-and-a-half years of course work. We see that half year or sometimes that full year being devoted to course work in other disciplines outside the school of ed, other course work that students need to develop their area of expertise or conduct their dissertation. Also, in that year, the preparation of the dissertation proposal itself.

So, the hard issues that we have been dealing with in trying to get this organized, one of the hardest, of course, is balancing breadth in the field and depth in the specialty area.

This is, of course, a tension between trying to develop a common language and some commonalities, some common topics and ways of looking at issues in educational research that we can share and discuss in constructive ways, and the need to develop a pretty solid base of expertise, because there are not, at least at the present time, very many post-doctoral fellowships and other kinds of things that will be available to our students, once they leave our graduate program.

Another issue was how we could provide a forum for learning about general issues, such that they served both as a foundation and a springboard for specialty area work.

So, we cannot concentrate solely on the big issues that the foundation faculty or the ed policy faculty think need to be discussed.

We have to consider what the specialty areas are that our students will be going into after they finish that first year, and we need a way to provide them with the foundations that they need for all of those areas, so that the specialty area faculty do not have to go over things that should be foundational, and they can move on to more advanced course work, when the students come to them the second year.

Another thing that we have struggled with is how to accommodate, in the first year core, foundations of background information, contextual information, the whole array of material that is covered by psychological, social and cultural foundations of education.

Link that in some way with the interests that the students already have, and this includes the transition problem that David mentioned earlier.

How, in our case, do we make the transition for students who are coming in primarily with teaching backgrounds, and turn them in some ways to educational research and its importance and value.

The other thing that we are trying to do is remain sensitive to cutting edge issues and time sensitive topics that are of professional interest.

Now, I know that it sounds like a very tall order. It is a tall order. We do actually have the syllabi now for these courses.

At my faculty meeting next wednesday, we are hoping to get faculty sign off on these courses, but we will see if that really happens or not.

Another thing that we are trying to do in this process is equalize the opportunities for students. These are particularly with regard to research experiences and teaching experiences under the supervision of a faculty member while the student is in our graduate program.

Right now, if you have had prior teaching experience, it is very easy for you to get more teaching experience in our doctoral program. It is not so easy for you to get research experience.

Similarly, if you have had previous research experience, it is easy for you to be hired on somebody's grant to get more research experience.

If you haven't had teaching experience, then it is hard for you to get teaching experience, and I think that we want to provide both of these experiences to our students.

Okay, now, big issue, faculty resistance. I should say that the faculty resistance is in the face of student enthusiasm, for the most part, for this change.

One source of faculty resistance is just the weight of tradition, the things that people have always done, the courses they have always taught, and so forth.

Another issue is the work load requirements for doing this. People have to gear up to teach new courses. They have to change their teaching schedules. They have to develop the syllabi.

They have to do a lot of work, extra work, additional work, in order to make something like this work, at least at the beginning. So, you have to have some kind of faculty buy in, if you are going to get this done.

Another issue, as I already mentioned, was hiring issues. I think that this is a serious problem, because we really cannot hire, have not been able to hire, specifically for, explicitly for, improved graduate doctoral programming. So, that leaves holes that we scramble to fill with people who don't necessarily want to teach that, or are not really experts in that, and so forth.

Then there are the power and control issues. One of the charges that has been leveled against this core curriculum is that the foundations and ed policy and methods people are trying to take over and indoctrinate the new students in the first year and socialize them to their way of looking at things.

The curriculum and instruction and bilingual instruction and other groups will lose out in the war to get the best graduate students affiliated with your group.

So, this is an issue that I am sure is not unfamiliar to you, and it is one that we are trying to work out with various compromises and arm twisting and what not.

Then there is just the logistical problem of setting this up, because it does require change in core scheduling.

It requires new syllabi to go through the university's curriculum committee. It requires that we set up our activities so that we can have a cohort.

It requires that we change our subsequent -- the students who have been grandfathered in, because they started under the old system, that we have to provide a way to meet their requirements as well. Since we are a small faculty -- and of course, the faculty is stretched thin -- it is difficult to do.

Finally, let me end with the leverage points that I see with regard to this. One of the things that I think has been helpful to us is that our committee, our planning committee for this, consists of 10 faculty. That is 10 faculty out of 31. So, it is a large number, and it is designed to be representative of the different factions in our group.

Another thing that I think has been important has been to provide regular updates to the faculty about the progress of the planning committee, and what kinds of things we are talking about, what kinds of decisions we are making and, at the decision points, take the material to the faculty and ask them to comment on the decisions and to ratify the decisions. So, there are interim opportunities for faculty input.

Now, the last thing there, I think, cannot be dismissed. You have to have some tactics for dealing with the faculty, the recalcitrant faculty, that you have.

In our case, we do have the strong arm of the dean. She has been wonderful in trying to make sure this happens.

We also have the backing of the Carnegie initiative on the doctorate, which has also been very helpful to us symbolically as a way of saying, this is something that we ought to be doing, and other people also think that we ought to be doing.

So, that has been our experience, and I look forward later to hearing your questions about it, and your reactions to it.

[Applause.]