EDUC 7660 – Learning Community of Practice VII
July 22, 2025
How to Build a Dissertation Proposal (MWB)
· STEP 1: It all starts with a problem statement (e.g., “School initiatives often wither because they do not have a strategy for providing professional development to people who join the school after critical p.d. has been delivered; e.g., new hires, temporary staff, volunteers”
o You start with a topic, problem, or interest
§ It is almost always too imprecise to be the basis for designing your dissertation project
o A process of sharpening the focus/articulation
§ It is typical that there are multiple iterations, not unlike the process that Ron Berger uses with multiple drafts and peer constructive criticism with his elementary school students…really (watch [<div class="video-card__frame">
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o Done in collaboration with one or more of the Ed.D. faculty
§ Ideally this will be your Dissertation Adviser (DA), but you may change your mind or topic eventually, so that may not be the case
o At the end of this process you will have a very specific clear and actionable statement of a problem on which you will try to “shed meaningful light” or add to the body of knowledge/work
§ CAUTION: You can go no further until you complete this. It is like trying to cook a recipe with incomplete or unclear directions.
§ CAUTION 2: You will start to think about your methods before you know precisely what you want to accomplish. That is like grabbing a tool (hammer, plumber’s wrench, voltage tester, etc.) before you know what problem you are being asked to fix (a leak, a loose board, an electrical short, etc.).
· STEP 2: Naming your buckets
o In the articulation of your problem statement will be a set of concepts
§ For example, for the problem statement above, you might identify the following buckets
· Professional development
· Training new staff
· Sustainability of initiatives
§ Many of the buckets will have sub-buckets; e.g., “training new staff” might include “new teacher orientation programs”
o There will be a logical sequence to when and how you introduce each bucket
§ Your literature review is:
· A narrative with a “plot line”
· Purposeful: it is building a justification for the question(s) you intend to address in your dissertation, so that when you get to the end of your literature review, it should be clear why the topic/problem you have selected and articulated is a good enough to use for a dissertation project
· STEP 3a: This leads to an annotated outline of the dissertation, which will grow organically as you collect relevant knowledge and have “aha” moments
o Literally constructed in outline format
§ Try to avoid the temptation of just starting by writing prose at this point
§ A complete skeleton of the dissertation, which slowly adds flesh, etc.
o The outline of the literature review can be thought of the set of “buckets” of knowledge to be filled with the reviewed literature in conceptual chunks
o Think “Frankenstein’s monster”
§ At first you just have a bunch of body parts (the buckets)
§ Then you start to lay out how they are arranged relative to each other (the initial outline)
§ Then you start collecting organs and muscles, etc. (the knowledge about each bucket) and placing them in the appropriate places
· In essence, you are putting quotes, references, urls, short thoughts, etc. in the outline where you think they are relevant
· Some parts of the “monster” will get completed more quickly than others, so you will have a very lopsided asymmetrical monster
· More helpfully, think of each bucket as a receptable where you are just storing stuff of relevance until you are ready to complete that part of the literature review
· Step 3b: The literature review presents what is already known
o The books we recommended as guides on the structure and process of writing a dissertation (e.g., Bell, Foster and Cone, 2020; see below for reference) have chapters on how to do a literature review.
o Here are some tips:
§ Identify key words (including synonyms) for your buckets; think broadly because you can narrow later
§ Use professional data bases that are relevant to your topic(s); e.g., google scholar. Librarians can be very helpful here.
§ Start with the title of the item and see if it might remotely be of relevance.
§ Then narrow further by reading abstracts if they are available.
§ Prioritizing: Here are some criteria for prioritizing sources
· More recent
· Peer reviewed professional journal articles
· Chapters in handbooks
· Reviews of the literature
· Expertise of the author(s)
· Getting more than one of these in a single source is better; e.g. a review article in a peer reviewed journal by an expert in the field that was recently published is…gold
§ Cyclical iteration
· When you find an apparently relevant and useful source, as you read it look for:
o Terms and concepts
o Cited authors and papers
o Names of measures, models, theories, etc.
o Then add those to your keywords and do a new search
o And read the cited papers of relevance and repeat the cycle with them
· Remember, papers can only reference things that already exist when the paper was written (exception is if you find any papers by Nostradamus), hence the need to start a new search to see if you can find more recent work by the author, with the new key word, etc.
o Periodically in this process do a new search with new key words and names
§ How much is enough?
· For general introductory buckets (e.g., what is character education?) you do NOT have to do an extensive literature review. Can just turn to a few experts sources and use them.
· As you get into more specific topics (e.g., what is known about character education with ESL students?), you will find less information and will need to be more exhaustive.
· When you get to your specific dissertation question (putting all of the pieces of the “Monster” together (e.g., what has been found to work best to nurture character with ESL students for whom Spanish is their first language?), you need to thoroughly review and integrate everything that is know about it.
· As for how to know when you have it all (or more likely close to all), when you seem to not be finding much new in your subsequent searches, you can stop collecting and finish writing
· STEP 4: Writing the literature review
o Usually it is a good idea to follow the sequence of logic of the buckets in your annotated outline, but that is not mandatory
o Pick a bucket that seems as full as it is going to get (or needs to get) and write that section.
§ Plug it in the outline in place of the pieces that are there.
o Then move to another bucket and do likewise.
o And continue until you have filled all the buckets with prose.
· STEP 5: This leads to the research or practice question(s) to be addressed
o While you probably already knew the question before you finished the literature review, you may have actually come to realize it needed tweaking
o Regardless, your literature review should have “made the case”; i.e., justified why your question makes enough sense for an entire dissertation to be devoted to shedding light on it
o NOTE: No study “proves” anything. Instead it
§ Sheds meaningful light on it
§ Supports or fails to support it
o NOTE 2: Only now are you ready to reach into the methodological toolkit and grab a tool (your method) that fits your problem
· Format
o There are two main formats for educational dissertations
§ 4 chapter APA style (various editions: Bell, Foster & Cone (2020, third edition): Dissertations and theses from start to finish.
§ 5 chapter style
§ Your dissertation adviser will work with you to determine the format you will use. All of Marvin’s advisees will use the APA 4 chapter format.
· UMSL Process
o Once your dissertation question, literature review, and method chapter are done, you have a dissertation proposal
o Once you complete your comprehensive examination and the UMSL forms are signed, you can submit the proposal for defense