Do you know what the difference is between us and all the other people without a PhD?
We are DOING IT! :)
Dr. Jonas, in his "tell-a-story way", asked us why there are more male engineers than women engineers? It has to do with the way men and women learn in math and science. Men typically perform better in science and math in school...except in same sex schools. That is because in same sex schools, instructors are more willing to teach using the preferred learning methodologies of the students. Interesting. Just another way to convince us that we need to be good researchers.
We spent today going over the program again and making more connections about the program. Special emphasis was on the title of our degree...a doctoral in Leadership for the Advancement of Learning and Service. It takes leadership (figuring out what to do and when to do it) in order to advance the learning and service of ourselves and others. It makes sense.
While all that was great, and something I know I'll elaborate on later, the most valuable pieces that were connected for me today was when we reviewed our dissertation (research) process. Funny, Dr. Jonas asked us to write questions we had about research and stats on a piece of paper. After dinner we came back and he answered mine. I think he has figured out my handwriting already. If there are any year 1 CSU doc students reading this...take this information for what it is worth right now AND TRUST THE PROCESS! (Hope you like that Peter!)
Dr. Jonas gave us a perspective of our lit review that was much needed for me. So this is the skinny...the lit review is 40 pages long (mine will be 30), you need 2 references per page, which means you should have 60-80 references total for the lit review. You have one main researcher that sets the theoretical framework of your study. The lit review contains 5 sections, which means each are 6-8 pages. It is that simple.
Your theoretical framework is the wall that has already been built that helps your research. Dr. Jonas used Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" as the analogy. Have you looked at the lyrics to that song Dr. J? Do you really know what the song is about?
"We don't need to education, we don't need no thought control, no dark sarcasm in the classroom, teachers leave them kids alone, hey teachers, leave them kids alone, all in all its just another brick in the wall."
Maybe he knew at the time there was more to learning that he was getting in his education! Hmmmm.....
In learning organizations, we need to remember that not all people are ready for learning at the same time. An example that we talked about was TV's going digital this month. Even though we talked about this over and over, why were some people still not ready for it? Why did 400,000 people call because their TV's were working? Well, sometime people don't know what they don't know. A great example was given in this youtube video. They have disabled embedding, so you have to go to you tube and search "analog to digital funny" and it will be the first video on the list. Enjoy!
The challenge for us as leaders will be to challenge all of our employees to continue learning. However, this will require us to know a great deal about learning, how the brain works, and how to recognize when others are ready to learn. It also takes trying to capitalize on others strengths and to find their interests to capture their attention in order to want to learn.
