How to Choose a Dissertation Topic in Education

Vicki Davis: Today, we’re talking with Maggie Broderick about social-emotional learning at the college level. Now, this is important because we do want our students to be prepared for the next level, and you could argue that some of these things we need to be teaching at the high school or even junior high level. Happy Thought Leader Thursday!

Announcer: This is the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis: I’m so excited today to be talking to Dr. Maggie Broderick. She’s associate professor at National University and editor of the Journal of Online Graduate Education. Maggie, I know that you’ve written about everything from social-emotional learning to research-based guidance for teachers of less commonly taught content areas. But there’s this kind of overarching passion you have about servant scholarship. What is that?

Maggie Broderick: Thanks so much, Vicki. It’s great to be here. I love your podcast. I was thinking about how you do so much with PK through 12 and also thinking about higher ed, how those go together. And servant scholarship, I guess you would say, is sort of my heart of a teacher. I think a lot about that. Why is somebody a teacher? Also about my role in higher education. Why does somebody publish and present if they do some kind of scholarly work? Basically, what’s their why? What’s their motivation and their whole reason for doing it? Because it’s a lot of work. If you want to write a chapter or a book, publish a journal with peer review or present at a conference, you’re signing yourself up for a lot. It’s not a quick thing. And you really have to pour your heart and soul in. So I think, OK, people kind of need a little guidance on that journey. There’s so much out there these days. So the idea is that if we have that kind of lens where we’re thinking, what good can we do for everything once we’re not there anymore, sort of planting trees won’t see someday, that can be our muse and really give us a guidance for how we choose to publish and present. Because there’s just so much out there and so many avenues, people get stuck. It’s just a good way to think about sort of a servant leadership mindset towards your scholarship.

Vicki Davis: I sort of think that when you wrote the book, Navigating the School as a Smaller Fish, is there a servant scholarship story behind that book?

Maggie Broderick: I was really grateful. With that chapter, it was in a book a colleague of mine did, well, two colleagues, and they were looking for basically guidance for new teachers because we have such attrition rates, right? Hasn’t everybody heard that statistic that an enormous number of teachers leave within the first five years? I thought to myself, well, I taught music and German, which is a little different, right? And I teach ESL teachers and I was like, well, I don’t know the research on that just yet. I’d like to bet their role is even harder in terms of that attrition. There’s a lot. And I thought, gosh, we need to support those teachers. So I reached out to some colleagues and colleagues of colleagues and friends of friends and just said, can you share some anecdotes of what it’s like to be that small fish, right? What is it like when you are the only, let’s say, Russian teacher in a program within this enormous high school and you have this role for all this time and maybe you don’t have colleagues who quite get your groove. You’re doing something different. And we find that often those are sort of safe spaces and really extra wonderful places for our students. When teachers have that emotion labor within themselves, they give that to their students and that beautiful gift of helping the students. We need to support those teachers, too, when they’re doing those beautiful things. Let’s say it’s in an art class over in that wing of the high school, or maybe it’s the marching band or something like this. Less commonly taught, so maybe they need a different kind of support.

Vicki Davis: Some of the greatest schools that I’ve seen, I’m thinking of the American School of Bombay with my friend Shabbi Luthra, who’s actually director of research. Some K-12 schools, larger, well-funded schools, have research directors because they understand to truly look at their unique situation and unique environment and the unique time and history in which we are. We have to do research to understand that attitude of constantly doing research, is a powerful one. So how can we empower more of our Ph.D. students? It’s not about just picking something out of the blue that’s easy. It’s about having a servant’s heart with what you select that can actually help people, right?

Maggie Broderick: Absolutely. It’s so interesting, Vicki, because I’ve been sharing dissertations since, I think, gosh, 2016 as a chair and maybe 2012 or 2013 as a committee member, over a decade being on dissertation committees. So you end up with like this portfolio of many dissertations you’ve looked at over the years, and they’re lengthy, right. And you do see a pattern like anyone who does this and wants to do a doctoral degree can learn the basics. How can I do research? What is qualitative? What is quantitative? What’s an appropriate methodology? What are the steps in making a lit review? Right. But like you said, to make it something actually from your heart and not just learning sort of the ropes and the ways to be a researcher, I think that makes that connection between research and practice. Right. So we’re not just learning sort of, oh, how do I do a correlational analysis? We learn how will that impact maybe, I don’t know, the English language learners at my school or maybe parental engagement, all kinds of things. I have a student right now who’s about to defend and I talk about her work a lot. Mary Alvarez is her name. And Mary is doing her dissertation on people who left the profession after COVID. They just said, hey, I’m retiring. I could stick around. I’m still pretty young. Teachers, maybe they retire after 30 years, but they’re like, I’m out of here. And she really wants to understand what their stories were. I think that’s helpful because something could happen again. We don’t know what’s going to ever happen. What are things that can go on and suddenly we have a bunch of teachers leaving? What can we do to support the teachers? It’s a really heartfelt message there of servant leadership. We need to understand, okay, why did they leave? What was the decision there? What would we do perhaps differently if we had a chance, you know?

Vicki Davis: And this profession is a noble profession, and we need to partner. Researchers and practitioners in the classroom and our best, most noblest, we are friends and partners and collaborators, not two separate things. Because there are some teachers who feel like, well, Ivory Tower, they don’t get the classroom. But you’re talking about people who actually get the classroom and do the research.

Maggie Broderick: Right. It’s so important to make that connection. It’s almost one of those mantras that you hear, oh, let’s connect research and practice. Yay. But it’s so much deeper than just like sort of reading one article and saying, I’m going to try that new tip or trick, which is good. If you see something in an article and go, I’m going to try that today. Like I think of Tomlinson’s differentiated instruction and how widespread that is now and how it took some time, you know, actually for us to change our mindset. And that’s connecting research and practice. But even at a deeper level, sometimes it’s a very specific population. I’ve had doctoral students in American Samoa, for example, who are Native American who work in a school where it’s a tribal school or something like this. Their problems are specific sometimes to their context. So it might not just be a widespread sort of connection with differentiated instruction, which is super important, but maybe it’s something very specific to that group or that context. Maybe it’s rural, urban, suburban, whatever the case may be. We have a very diverse country here with lots of different pockets of people who have different needs, you know?

Vicki Davis: One of the things I think frustrates some teachers is that a lot of the research these days is being funded by the tool companies. I’ve never seen a tool that improves learning. It’s always how the teacher uses the tool, supports the tool, is the pedagogy around the tool. So I know that researchers need funding. And yes, PhD, that’s at a little different stage, but you work with researchers of all types. How can researchers maintain a servant heart, still get funding without, quote, selling out?

Maggie Broderick: Well, that’s a great question. It’s so much in the world today, especially in our country, I think, where money is the language, right? We all know money speaks volumes sometimes. No, I’m thinking about sort of the first part of what you asked, because that teacher being so much more important than, say, some packaged item, it’s a dispositional thing, right? So I think about dispositions for teachers, and I’ve done research on that connecting with SEL. I think that’s true for researchers, too. I think the disposition of a researcher matters. And do they care more about fame and money or sort of having a resume that’s like really, really long and extensive? Or do they care more about making that impact? And it might end up being somewhere in the middle. Most people who publish and present aren’t going to make money on it. It’s pretty rare, but I think we need to give a bit of encouragement, put their name out there and say, there’s a balancing act, right? We don’t want it to be totally pro bono per se, but we also want it to be unbiased, appropriate. So that’s a really great question. I think it kind of depends on who you’re asking. If you’re asking the people I work with more as sort of just a small, I do a very simple book chapter as opposed to sort of these huge grants and things like that, right? So I think there’s two different sets maybe.

Vicki Davis: Well, for me, I’m a classroom teacher, but also need to fund the podcast and the newsletter. And that’s thousands of dollars. I’ll probably turn away 95% of the people who want to sponsor. But you know what, there’s that 5% of organizations and tools I would recommend anyway. To me, my litmus test is, if I would recommend this anyway, and does their culture respect the artistry of the teacher? So we can’t always judge as teachers and say, oh, I’m going to do that. A tool company sponsored this, so we just have to throw it out. There is research out there that can be very helpful for us, even if funded by a big company. I do think it’s the heart of the researcher, which sometimes can be hard to get at unless you look at their body of work, because doesn’t body of work matter?

Maggie Broderick: 100%. And we have to collaborate. When you’re looking at that, is the person doing everything sort of just on their own? Or are they sort of like, I’m going to come over here and work with you and with you, and then we all come together. It’s that spirit of collaboration. And that’s one of our four C’s, right? We’ve been hearing about for 24 years now, the 21st century skills. But I think it’s still super relevant that collaboration and research, just like collaboration and teaching, just makes everything richer.

Vicki Davis: Well, and I do want to point out that servant scholarship can filter down to every grade level because I’ve seen students do research about this. The school had some money and they’re trying to figure out where we’re going to put the basketball court or they’re trying to figure out how to improve their recycling program or what type of things need to be added on campus. And the students do research. They do servant scholarship. I mean, this is far-reaching of how can we do research that serves our communities? That’s so powerful.

Maggie Broderick: I love that. I mean, I always think about adding in that policy piece, right? Like research, practice, policy. It’s not just your practice, like we said, with differentiated instruction, which is super important, but also your policies. What are you going to do for equity of distribution of resources like the basketball court or whatever the case may be and all of that? And really having kids understand the research process and the why behind it could be really powerful to make that lasting in them instead of sort of, just like we said with doctoral students, oh, you’ve learned the ropes. That’s great. If the more to it is what’s really motivating and engaging.

Vicki Davis: If we look at the characteristics of this younger generation coming up into scholarship, into teaching, Purpose is a big part of why they want to work, isn’t it?

Maggie Broderick: I have three kids. One is 22, one’s 18, and one’s 13. And I see that a lot. Two of them are old enough to vote, and we have discussions, and the 13-year-old still wants to have those discussions. The purpose, like, what are we doing? Why are we doing it? Instead of just going with the flow and learning sort of the more shallow level understanding of things, they want to go pretty deep. I love that.

Vicki Davis: So, Dr. Maggie Broderick, why don’t we finish up with just a quick pep talk encouragement for all of our listeners who are looking at earning their PhD. It is something you have to earn. You have to work for it. It’s not given to you anywhere I know of. So could you give them a little pep talk about selecting their topics for their dissertation in this servant scholarship approach?

Maggie Broderick: I think it’s helpful. A lot of people don’t realize that there are various types of doctoral degrees. You might think you can only get the PhD, but there’s the PhD and the EDD within education and other ones that are tangential to education. There’s really, I don’t want to say something for everyone because it’s a special niche to want to go that far, but people might be surprised that they have options. And then within that, just really have that growth mindset, which we want to see in our students. Keep thinking, I’m just on a journey. And then eventually you do work with your committee in a PhD or an EDD program and just understand you’re going to get different perspectives and your role is to look at all of that and make sense of it and try to grow through it. It’s much more of a process than a product. So we really want to think about our growth and our growth mindset and understanding that that’s a journey that may take a lot of time, but just like lots of things that take time, it’s really worth it to have that beautiful, transformational kind of growth within yourself.

Vicki Davis: Dr. Maggie Broderick, thank you for your time today. And thank you for this terminology of servant scholarship. I absolutely love this and I’ll be using this one. Thank you.

Maggie Broderick: Thanks, Vicki. It’s great to be here today.

Vicki Davis: Thanks for tuning in to the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast. Watch the video version of this podcast and catch my new radio and TV show, Cool Cat Teacher Talk, on YouTube and a radio or TV station near you. Join my Cool Cat Teacher Classroom Matters newsletter at coolcatteacher.com forward slash newsletter. Leave a review if you found this helpful. See you later, educator.