Becoming a Member of the School of Advanced Studies (SAS)

Doctoral Community
DOC/700 Version 2 / 1

University of Phoenix Material

Becoming a Member of the School of Advanced Studies (SAS)

Doctoral Community

Trajectory of Introductory Courses

As a doctoral student, you are joining the School of Advanced Studies’ vibrant, intellectual community that will help you develop as a scholar, leader, and practitioner. You will be encouraged and challenged to develop, refine, and advance your critical thinking and research skills, which can help you make a difference in the community through research, theory, and practical experience.

With all the societal and technological changes taking place in the world, professional leaders are required to think and operate in different ways to keep pace with these rapid changes. The SAS doctoral program will help you to grow as an individual and professional by providing you the opportunity to develop the skills, competence, and confidence you need to make meaningful and original contributions to society through teaching, leading, consulting, and/or conducting and publishing research.

The sequence of introductory courses consists of DOC/700, LDR/711A, DOC/705R, and RES/709. This sequence is designed to prepare you to be a successful member of the doctoral community. Along with a number of other resources, your faculty will help you make sense of the program and its expectations. You will be encouraged and supported in becoming more informed through the literature and active engagement with other classmatesto create and co-create new ideas and research designs as you progress in the doctoral program.

In each course, you will be asked to develop and further your scholarly writing and critical thinking skills. You will be challenged to expand your thinking beyond deductive and inductive reasoning to generate new ideas and conclusions through the use of abductive reasoning. According to Peirce (1958), “Deduction proves something must be; induction shows that something actually is operative; abduction merely suggests that something may be” (p. 171).

Types of Reasoning / Visual Depiction / Description / Application
Deductive Reasoning / General premise

Specific conclusion / Taking existing theory to explain an observed event, action, or phenomenon. Deductive thinking is often called the top-down approach because it works from the more general to the specific. / Scientists apply deductive reasoning by setting up experiments to test hypotheses based on specific premises.
Deductive reasoning is often used by people to affirm or replicate reasoning.
Inductive Reasoning / Develop theory or explanation

Observe specific events or actions / Using observed events, actions, or phenomena to build a new theory or explanation. Inductive thinking is often called a bottom-up approach because it builds on observations to develop a general conclusion or theory that may or may not be true. / Upon arrival at a crime scene, detectives look for clues to help them develop a plausible theory about what happened.
Medical doctors develop a diagnosis by reviewing a number of symptoms.
Abductive Reasoning / Move from a deductive and inductive basis to what is possible / Creative and improvisational propositions or conclusions are generated and evaluated to create new solutions, practices, models, and outcomes. / Designers learn about the problem by trying out plausible solutions.
Scientists test the validity of conclusions by examining premises and exploring alternative hypotheses.

Abductive reasoning can occur at any point in time and is often both creative and intuitive. Although all three types of reasoning are useful and can be helpful when reaching conclusions, inductive and abductive reasoning are helpful when making decisions because you must reach a conclusion based on information that is often incomplete.

For example, medical doctors must determine a medical diagnosis based on a set of symptoms or tests. As they explore the symptoms, doctors use abductive reasoning to generate possible diagnoses and conclusions. Similarly, jurors must reach a verdict based on the evidence and testimonies presented in the trial. Reaching a verdict requires generating potential scenarios illustrating the innocence or culpability of the defendant. Scientists follow a similar path of reasoning as they work to develop alternative hypotheses explaining or extending understanding of phenomena.

As you are entering the doctoral program, you may also be engaging in deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning through the types of questions you ask yourself. For example, if you ask yourself “How many hours do I have to dedicate to my studies?” you are engaged in deductive thinking. “What will I notice changing about myself as I enter the doctoral program?” is an inductive question. An abductive question would be “What will my life be like if I have a doctoral degree?”

Blended Learning Model

In today’s knowledge economy, we are increasingly asked to create new knowledge, new practices, and new designs in a multitude of ways. Indeed, the very concept of leadership in today’s knowledge-intensive organizations centers around the idea of stimulating and energizing the collective intelligence to design and improve the community.

In order to make such a contribution, it is becoming increasingly apparent that we need to engage in active inquiry. We must ask powerful questions and be open to seeing new potentials and possibilities. The student learning experience incorporates contemporary practices to support active inquiry in this sequence.

The learning model in this sequence blends discovery practices and validation. Discovery practices encourage us to create and co-create new models, new ways of thinking, new research designs, and new insights with peers and faculty members, supported through research and engagement in the doctoral community.

You will also have the advantage of having clear assessment standards that are recognized in the educational community to help you validate what you are learning from each course. You will receive feedback and guidance from the doctoral community to enable you to meet these standards.

Figure 1: The rising sun depicts the blended learning model. The center represents validation or the competenciesfor the course. The rays represent the various discovery practices students will be exposed to throughout the sequence.

Through this blended approach, the sequence is designed to successfully launch your entry into the doctoral community by providing you opportunities to engage in discovery practices with clear standards and supportive feedback.

One way that you will be able to measure your success in this doctoral journey is through the following crucial success factors: scholarly writing, critical thinking, critical inquiry, and research. The following tables will help you understand these factors and how the blended approach works.

These are the discovery practices that you can draw from as you progress through the doctoral program.

Crucial Success Factors
Scholarly Writing, Critical Thinking, and Critical Inquiry
Discovery Practices / You will ask insightful questions that will help you to challenge your assumptions to explore and connect your life experience within your writing process.
You will increasingly come to understand how attention to your writing process will improve your thinking.
You will employ metaphors to make sense of connections between your experience and the literature.
You will develop an informed opinion/voice to create and co-create models and visual forms to make your thinking visible.
You will use abductive thinking to generate creative and improvisational propositions or conclusions to create new solutions, practices, models, and outcomes.
You will expand upon initial input and literature by actively using intellectual flexibility to generate alternative insights and ideas through the use of multiple approaches.
You will create a narrative to articulate the critical thinking process you have engaged in to make sense of the plausible outcomes that you reached from the literature.
You will use thought experiments to explore alternative ideas and perspectives to propose new assumptions and insights and to explore potential consequences and principles in question.
Validation / Your scholarly writing abilities will be supported by a comprehensive, multi-level (self and faculty) feedback process against a consistent set of criteria across this sequence with one common assessment tool.
Your scholarly writing improvement process will be assessed longitudinally in the learning portfolio to provide you a trajectory of your improvement within this sequence.
You will connect various critical thinking models to doctoral study and inquiry.
You will read and process information critically and distinguish between facts, evidence, and opinions.
You will formulate informed opinions supported by reasoning and evidence.

Self-Assessment

In this sequence, you will be engaged in self-assessments. Self-assessments provide you the opportunity to reflect on your own learning and become aware of your own strengths and weaknesses.

Feedback is crucial to developing as a scholarly writer. Writing is a cumulative, iterative process and receiving feedback is part of the work.Recognizethat a new set of eyes can see fresh insights. Serious writers value the insights because they can apply those insights to strengthen the quality of their work.

Starting in DOC/700 you will be required to contribute to a learning portfolio that you will build upon with each subsequent class in the ACCESS sequence. This will help you track, monitor, and reflect on your progress and learning throughout your first four courses. The ACCESS portfolio is designed to prepare you for the Doctoral Assessment and Showcase Portfolio (DAS Portfolio) that will serve as an electronic based collection point for mastery evidence across your degree program.

The DAS Portfolio will also:

Provide a comprehensive representation of advanced doctoral academic work from the beginning of the program through the completion of the doctoral dissertation.
Provide a continual means of reflecting upon your progress over the course of the program and your personal doctoral journey.
Act as a tool for continually building and improving written and orally expressed ideas and concepts.
Become a showcase that will maintain documentation of key points of achievement that may be shared with employers and other external stakeholders.

Additional information will be provided to you later in your program to reinforce the DAS Portfolio expectations.

Self-Assessment
Questions we encourage you to ask of yourself. / You will continually answer questions such as the following to track and monitor your learning:
What have you done to develop your scholarly writing competence?
How are your scholarly writing skills improving? How is improving scholarly writing skills important to you and your communities of influence?
In what ways do you feel more competent engaging with doctoral colleagues and faculty by improving your scholarly writing skills?

Doctoral Community

By entering a SAS doctoral program, you are becoming a member of a scholarly and leadership-oriented community where you will be recognized and acknowledged as a contributing member. Belonging to such a community has the potential to support you and your growth as a scholar, leader, and practitioner. In SAS, you will be encouraged to claim your identity, become responsible and accountable for your learning outcomes, and strengthen your voice as a scholar and leader by contributing to and growing in the community.

Doctoral Community
How can you contribute to the doctoral community? / You will model effective writing skills in your reflections and assignments.
You will share successful writing practices from your portfolio with your peers

Reference

Peirce, C.S. (1958).The collected works of Charles Sanders Peirce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.