6Educational Perspectives v Volu me 49 v Number 1
Mentoring the Consultancy Project: Lessons in
Collaboration and Research
Daniel E. White
The consultancy project is the first of two key projects that
candidates in the EdD program are required to complete.
It provides students opportunities to apply research and
leadership skills to a real-world problem of practice in
a collaborative venture with schools and community
organizations. The goal of the consultancy is to provide
clients with a set of advisory recommendations based on
a doctoral level inquiry into an agreed upon problem of
practice.
The idea of professional practitioners and graduate
faculty collaborating to support student consultancy
groups emerged at an early point in the planning of the
EdD degree in Professional Educational Practices at the
University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa. The collaboration was
natural. The program founder, Professor Hunter McEwan
of the Department of Educational Foundations, put
together a planning committee that comprised professors,
independent school leaders, and Hawai‘i Department
of Education personnel. The unique combination of
established leaders (community mentors) and university
faculty supported a program design that embedded this
kind of collaboration.
The dissertation in practice, the second major project in
the program, also includes practitioner mentors who sit on
students’ dissertation committees. The experience of the
mentors for cohort I consultancies helped to ref ine the role
for cohort II mentors.
Students in cohort I included school principals and
academic division deans, teachers with some administrative
duties, university and college program directors, and
independent school heads. Cohort I students came from,
in roughly equal proportion, public and charter schools,
independent schools, universities and community colleges,
and the Kamehameha Schools. A few had consulting
experience already. The twenty-six cohort members were
drawn from an applicant pool of nearly eighty. The ability
to write well, demonstrated in several assignments in the
application process, was a major factor in admission. Those
doing the selection, then, were choosing people with
experience and a track record of success in communicating
with others.
The Origins of the Consultancy Requirement
The idea of requiring the consultancy as one of two major
projects of the degree program gained currency when the
University of Hawai‘i program director, Professor McEwan,
and his colleagues attended convenings (a CPED term) of
the Carnegie Project in the Education Doctorate (CPED),
a consortium of graduate programs across the nation of
which the UH program is a part. The UH EdD planning
committee learned about how other CPED members
used consultancy as a teaching method. The UH program
planning committee had also looked at other graduate
programs at UH Mānoa that focused on developing
practitioners, like medicine and business, and found
variations on the consultancy experience.
The planning committee expected that the consultancy
projects would provide students with many learning
opportunities: how to work with a team; how to help others;
how to frame the question the clients really meant to ask;
how to put together a meaningful review of the literature;
how to collect and analyze data specific to a situation to
provide clients with “value added;” and how to communicate
their findings effectively.
The planning committee recognized that the students,
in their professional careers, might well be in the position
of hiring consultants for projects. By having the experience
of engaging with a client to work on a significant problem
of practice, the students would come to understand what is
involved from the consultant perspective. That knowledge
could prove useful to emerging institutional leaders.
The corps of mentors for cohort I included school
heads and principals who had hired consultants and others
who had experience as professional consultants. With their
backgrounds in both public and private education, K–12
and collegiate settings, and instructional and administrative
