4   Fostering Scholarly Thinking Online

Much has been written about how professionals should think and behave. The term habits of mind is frequently used to label professionals’ dispositions and has been defined as “characteristics of what intelligent people do when they are confronted with problems, the resolutions to which are not immediately apparent” (Costa, 2008, p. 15). Commonly cited habits include persistence, flexibility, intentionality, metacognition, critical-mindedness, creativity, clarity of expression, and continual learning (Costa & Kallick, 2008), as well as measuring one’s baseline performance, seeking feedback, and engaging in ongoing reflection (Chick, Haynie, & Gurung, 2012).

Individuals in numerous disciplines have attempted to identify habits of mind important for their professions. For example, habits of mind appearing in the medical literature include being attentive, curious, self-aware, and willing to recognize and correct errors (Epstein & Hundert, 2002), and in the nursing literature, habits of mind include being open to changing one’s mindset and challenging preconceptions, beliefs, or assumptions and exhibiting critical thinking (Kotcherlakota, Zimmerman, & Berger, 2013). Habits of mind frequently appearing in the leadership literature include leaders being learners, participating in their worlds, valuing innovation, and having high standards (Reilly, 2007), and habits of mind proposed for librarians include thinking flexibly, aiming for accuracy, imagining, innovating, and questioning (Jacobs & Berg, 2013).

We were unable to locate existing frameworks for habits of mind related to researching professionals such as those we prepare in our online professional doctorate. As we considered the habits of mind most pertinent to researching professionals, we chose to focus on one we believe connects together theory, research, and practice: researching professionals are individuals with the ability to address challenges and problems within their practice through theory and research. They can look beyond their contexts and often across disciplinary boundaries to explore theory and research that will enable them to make decisions grounded in more than gut feelings, prior experiences, and contextual factors. We refer to this ability—or habit—as scholarly thinking, and we believe that this is what separates researching professionals from other professionals. In this chapter, we provide a framework for the conceptualization of scholarly thinking in professional doctorates and then offer examples of how online professional doctorates can intentionally scaffold students to develop and exhibit scholarly thinking and to own it as the stance they take as researching professionals.

SCHOLARLY THINKING FOR RESEARCHING PROFESSIONALS

We conceptualize scholarly thinking for researching professionals as a reiterative process. It involves the ability of professionals to identify problems of practice, recognize theory and research related to these problems, select theory and research most applicable to helping them address problems, apply theory and research in their professional contexts to develop solutions to address the problems, evaluate how successful the solutions were to addressing the problems, and plan future steps to improve their practice based on what they learned.

Although researching professionals are usually experts in their field before they enter a professional doctoral program, their expertise can make it challenging for them to employ scholarly thinking in their practice because of their deeply embedded knowledge of the contexts and the success they may have experienced in practice. This challenge makes the intentional fostering of scholarly thinking even more important; thus, curriculum in an online professional doctorate should carefully scaffold the development of researching professionals as scholarly thinkers and simultaneously provide them with multiple opportunities to connect such thinking to their practice.

Before we discuss how to scaffold the development of scholarly thinking, it is important to identify its processes. Based on our experiences working with over a hundred professional doctoral students and with literature related to doctoral preparation and competence, we chose to focus explicitly on the scaffolding of four processes of scholarly thinking: reading, information literacy, writing, and enculturation.

Although these four processes may be informally scaffolded during on-campus degrees through, for example, hallway conversations, brown-bag lunches, writing groups, meeting with librarians, or a lecture series, curriculum and activities in an online doctorate must purposefully foster these processes. Typically, students demonstrate their prowess in scholarly thinking by completing a dissertation that represents independent researching, thinking, and writing. To set students up for success during the dissertation stage, however, scholarly thinking must be scaffolded throughout the entire program of an online professional doctorate.

SCAFFOLDS TO DEVELOP SCHOLARLY THINKING

We present each of the four processes below and provide examples from the UF EdD EdTech to illustrate how to design an online doctorate to scaffold these processes until they become habits of mind for researching professionals. In practice, of course, these processes are rarely mutually exclusive, and students usually engage simultaneously in more than one process, which is often ideal while developing complex abilities such as scholarly thinking (Walker et al., 2008).

Reading

Reading is a fundamental activity and skill at every level of formal education. Ideally, students enter a professional doctoral program as readers. While this is one of the criteria for admission into our doctoral program, our students typically enter the program reading trade publications that support their views rather than theoretical or empirical work considered important in the academy. The disconnect between the “professional literature genres” that academics and practitioners “count as legitimate academic sources” (San Miguel & Nelson, 2007, p. 82) is one reason to scaffold reading intentionally in an online professional doctorate.

We designed our program so that students immediately begin identifying problems in their practice and reading about the theoretical underpinnings of the educational technology discipline. However, we have found that students initially struggle to integrate theory and empirical research with their problems of practice, and this experience is supported by the literature (San Miguel & Nelson, 2007). Students are often so engrained in their practice and confident in their understandings of the problems within it that they have difficulty viewing the problems through lenses other than those of gut feelings, prior experiences, and contextual factors. Professionals need multiple opportunities and considerable time to understand that “learning the literature requires far more than simply reading widely, regurgitating key phrases and findings, and genuflecting to seminal researchers” (Golde, 2007, p. 344).

Thus, we emphasize the importance of reading during our on-campus orientation and provide suggestions for how students can begin to develop the reading habits of a researching professional. We emphasize the importance of planning time to read just as one schedules meetings or vacations and identifying places to read that are free of distractions. We also discuss how the digital world has changed reading: for example, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) aggregators enable users to receive immediate updates when articles from certain journals or with certain keywords are published, and mobile devices provide different reading modes and options, including audio reading and the ability to modify font size and line spacing according to personal preference.

We also help students recognize that through processes such as reading, they are developing new identities as researching professionals and that these identities will probably carry over into all aspects of their lives. Barnacle and Mewburn (2010) refer to this as “deterritorialised” learning practice because it involves a loosening up of traditionally conceived spaces for or of learning and raises a student’s awareness of learning that takes place in professional practice, in online communities of peers, and in a host of other venues. In addition to emphasizing the importance of carving out dedicated times for reading, we encourage students to identify areas in their lives into which they can integrate reading. We use the example of preparing to write this book. Although we each scheduled time for reading (often early in the morning or late at night), we also worked reading into our busy lives: one of us read in airports, on flights to Germany and India, and in cafés and waiting rooms, while the other read in the baseball stands between youth games, in carpool pick-up lines, in waiting rooms at doctor’s offices, and while supervising teenagers at a water park. Providing examples of what a scholarly reader looks like is important for students developing their identities as researching professionals (San Miguel & Nelson, 2007). During orientation, we also discuss the importance of developing strategies for active reading, such as note taking, using graphic organizers and mind maps, and highlighting. We have found, much to our surprise, that such strategies for active reading are not a natural part of our students’ reading processes, despite having reached the doctoral level. Students have not typically engaged with complex texts as professionals in practice, and many of them either did not learn the skills of scholarly reading in their past academic degrees or lost those skills through the intervening years.

The first formal assignment for students in our program is to identify one problem within their practice and then locate, read, and produce annotated bibliographies for five refereed and empirically based articles related to that problem. This activity is preceded by information-literacy instruction (described in detail below) about search strategies and databases where students can locate such articles. Students then locate five articles related to a chosen problem of practice and produce an annotated bibliography, with each entry comprising a summary of the article, its theoretical perspective, an analysis of how it relates to the problem of practice, and key ideas in the article that they can apply to their problem.

Creating an annotated bibliography helps students understand that they are not alone in facing their problem of practice; they generally find that the problem is present and has been researched across a variety of disciplines and contexts. However, students often choose articles that correspond to their beliefs about the problem, which is why a discussion about article choice and the importance of considering multiple perspectives follows the activity. Furthermore, during this assignment, students often struggle to adopt a critical stance to reading: their tendency is to take what they read at face value instead of integrating it with what they know and have experienced and comparing it with what other literature says (San Miguel & Nelson, 2007).

To help students learn to evaluate literature critically, we have them read a popular article within the field of educational technology and analyze it in terms of the claims and evidence it presents. As they conduct additional research on the article, they may find critical commentary suggesting that the article is neither grounded in empirical data nor supported by other research. They may also find that some of the citations are not appropriately or accurately used and that, in fact, the author is an entrepreneur with no background in the discipline and no research expertise. This is when our students begin to realize that published writing cannot be taken at face value and, in some cases, may not be reliable. Throughout the program, students continue to hone their ability to analyze and assess articles through numerous reading assignments.

Our efforts to facilitate the development of the habit and skills of scholarly reading help support students in understanding “what has been done before, the strengths and weaknesses of existing studies, and what they might mean” (Boote & Beile, 2005, p. 3) for the professional contexts in which they work as developing researching professionals. As students undertake the process of becoming scholarly readers, they face serious challenges that surprise them—and that initially surprised us. Most of our students arrive in our program with woefully inadequate information-literacy skills, a lack of understanding about how to curate and cite information, and an inability to synthesize research from academic databases. Such skills are essential for students to develop scholarly thinking abilities.

Information-Literacy Instruction

Students entering an online professional doctorate often have limited familiarity with the electronic resources available in academic institutions because many return to complete a degree after a hiatus from formal education. As a result, their ability to access, find, evaluate, cite, and synthesize research from academic databases varies greatly, although these skills are crucial to their development as scholars and the completion of their dissertations. Information literacy—the ability to locate, evaluate, and effectively use needed information—is a known challenge in traditional doctoral education (Green, 2010), and this challenge is even more pronounced in online professional doctoral education. In a survey conducted with forty-nine incoming online professional students enrolled in two programs in our college, a small proportion of students rated themselves as very experienced in using library resources (17.6%) or different databases (18.2%), and almost half (47%) rated their anxiety in searching for literature as high or moderate (Kumar, Ochoa, and Edwards, 2012). Low self-efficacy and anxiety related to information literacy can affect students’ knowledge of scholarship in their fields and the quality of their assignments, research proposals, and dissertations (Collins & Veal, 2004; Onwuegbuzie, 1997); therefore, it is important to integrate information-literacy instruction in the online professional doctoral curriculum.

University libraries typically offer excellent services for on-campus students seeking immediate help. While libraries also provide multiple resources on their websites, few online students know that such resources exist or explore these resources unless explicitly instructed to do so. Faculty members, too, are often unaware of the available resources, and they assume that professionals will be able to access and evaluate appropriate literature for their research. It is critical to integrate proper instruction and support about library resources into the orientation and curriculum to help online professional students successfully complete program activities. Information-literacy instruction is typically offered in the form of one-time workshops, online tutorials, and step-by-step guides available as downloadable documents. These resources are most valuable when directly integrated into courses so that students can immediately apply library instruction to assignments (Beile, 2003; Hall, 2008). In the UF EdD EdTech, we have found that a program-integrated approach to information-literacy instruction is effective in increasing information-literacy skills (Kumar & Edwards, 2013; Kumar et al., 2012; Kumar, Heathcock, & Ochoa, 2014). This approach involves the four elements described in detail below, which ensure a planned and tailored approach to information-literacy instruction that is integral to the curriculum as opposed to a just-in-case approach in which information literacy is perceived as an add-on to the curriculum.

Analysis of skills and needs of incoming students. Incoming online students’ information-literacy skills and needs can vary depending on their prior academic experiences, familiarity with digital resources, and comfort in the online environment. Since online instruction needs planning and development, information about students’ prior experiences with library instruction and the use of library resources and their perceived ability and confidence with such resources can greatly contribute to the design of curriculum specific to a particular cohort. Students admitted to the UF EdD EdTech receive a survey to assess their incoming knowledge in these areas and their use of discipline-specific databases so that instruction can be designed accordingly (Kumar et al., 2012; Kumar & Ochoa, 2012).

Designing instruction specific to a cohort. Tutorials and resources on information-literacy skills essential for all online graduate students (e.g., accessing resources from a distance, using the library catalogue) are often available on library websites. In addition to these resources, doctoral students become familiar with discipline-specific databases that they may not have used in prior academic experiences and with citation styles for specific disciplines. Moreover, bibliographic software, often available within university libraries, can be extremely helpful in managing students’ reading and producing the citations for a dissertation. It is essential to create online guides or resources that provide instruction in these areas and to ensure that students know how to access them.

In designing additional instruction for a particular cohort entering our online doctoral program, we consider the results of the incoming-needs survey mentioned above. For example, for one UF EdD EdTech cohort, the surveys showed that knowledge of the educational databases widely used in our field was low; therefore, we designed instruction to focus on these databases, and we shared an existing video about searching databases. Identifying essential skills—and adapting curriculum to the needs and incoming knowledge of each cohort of students—can ensure that all professionals in an online doctorate can access and evaluate the research needed for their progress.

The use of documents, videos, Libguides, and similar online resources that students can access at any time from off campus is essential for professionals in an online doctorate. Additionally, synchronous sessions that focus on a specific topic or question-and-answer sessions with a librarian can address the needs of a cohort, and an email help desk or telephone contact can provide support for individual student concerns (Ferguson & Ferguson, 2005; Kontos & Henkel, 2008). In addition to incoming skills surveys, feedback from students on common problems during each semester in the first year of the UF EdD EdTech has been invaluable. For example, at the end of the first semester, several students in a particular cohort said that they knew the difference between peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed articles, but when they actually found or read an article, they could not determine whether it was peer reviewed. One of our librarians led a synchronous session on specific databases that helped students resolve this challenge.

Integrating an embedded librarian. An embedded librarian in an online course is an effective way to support students and increase information-literacy skills. Using pre- and post-surveys, we found a significant increase in doctoral students’ ability to find and evaluate resources from education databases when a librarian was embedded in our online professional doctorate (Kumar & Edwards, 2013; Kumar et al., 2012, 2014). While acknowledging the value of a discipline-specific liaison librarian who acts as a primary contact for online doctoral students (Tunon & Ramirez, 2010), we found that an embedded discipline-specific librarian who provides instruction, designs just-in-time instruction in response to needs that arise, provides support to individual students, and focuses on critical thinking and cognitive processes in information literacy for lifelong learning is essential to the development of scholarly thinking in professionals. Embedded librarians in the UF EdD EdTech collaborate with the program coordinator to understand assignments and challenges that students face in the first year and design information-literacy experiences to help students become independent scholars.

Timing information-literacy instruction in the curriculum. The content of information-literacy instruction will be most useful to students if its delivery is timed appropriately. In the UF EdD EdTech, the embedded librarian introduces existing online resources to incoming students during the orientation. Links to online resources are placed in online modules within courses, and synchronous sessions on relevant topics are timed according to activities in the curriculum. For example, the first time that students are instructed to find peer-reviewed resources, they review online videos; attend a required synchronous session about how to find and evaluate the resources; and, finally, review materials about appropriate documentation of sources. Following the initial assignment, which requires students to identify and critique twenty-five articles, they receive an introduction to bibliographic software that will help them curate and cite these articles. The embedded librarian is available in an online help forum to support students with this assignment. We have found that online professional students are far more likely to use an online library help forum than the library help desk.

The previously mentioned four elements of program-integrated information-literacy instruction presume a collaborative relationship between librarians and program leaders in an online professional doctorate. Program leaders must communicate to the librarians the needs of professionals in the specific discipline, the expectations and activities in the curriculum, and the challenges faced by online students. Program leaders must also recognize librarians as information-literacy experts who can contribute in instructional roles within the curriculum. Finally, it is important to regularly assess the information-literacy instruction to determine its effectiveness and identify student needs and challenges.

Writing

Like reading, writing is a key component of doctoral education, but it is one of the most challenging processes for doctoral students across disciplines (Golde, 2007). This challenge is often magnified for those enrolled in professional doctoral programs because many such students have been away from academic writing for many years. In addition, they have difficulty situating their writing at the intersection of theory, research, and practice (Lee et al., 2000), which is more complex than writing in traditional PhD programs, where the intersection typically involves only theory and research. Specific writing challenges for researching professionals include framing their problem of practice as an important research issue; integrating what they know and have experienced with literature; navigating their need to write for both academic and practical purposes and for different audiences; determining how to refer to oneself themselves in their writing, given their embeddedness in the settings (i.e., first or third person); and writing about their contexts and the people within them in ways that are accurate and respectful and that support continued collegial relationships (Chan, Heaton, Swidler, & Wunder, 2013; San Miguel & Nelson, 2007). Although some students are more natural at navigating the complexities of academic writing (Kamler & Thompson, 2006), these complexities, which are magnified by the fact the students are learning to write as researching professionals online while embedded in a professional context where academic writing is likely not emphasized, necessitate that students receive multiple and varied opportunities to practice writing throughout the program (Maxwell, 2006; Golde, 2007).

Academic writing is a distinct writing genre, and in our program, we try to unveil its mysteries by dissecting scholarly articles collaboratively with the doctoral students. We also provide writing tips, facilitate writing groups, conduct writing workshops during our on-campus sessions, and provide opportunities to practice academic writing throughout the courses.

Early in the UF EdD EdTech, we have students write in ways that related directly to their beliefs and practice but that also integrate theory and research. For example, we task students with sharing their philosophical and psychological beliefs about the field of educational technology and analyzing how these beliefs play out in their practice. This is the first time many students have examined their beliefs and practice through the lens of theory and research, and the process can create cognitive dissonance when they realize that their beliefs and practice do not align or that they have been practicing their profession without a clear set of beliefs. This process helps prepare students to contextualize their research, which is an important part of research conducted in practice (San Miguel & Nelson, 2007).

To further contextualize their research, during the first year of the UF EdD EdTech, students are required to write about the problem of practice they identified in their annotated bibliography in a way that merges their contexts and problems with theory and empirical research. That is, they explain their problems of practice within their contexts and detail how the problem might play out in different contexts, what it looks like when viewed through different theoretical lenses, and how research has already addressed the problem. They then identify the theories and research that they find most applicable to their contexts and provide reasons to support their choices. Through this assignment, they begin to learn how to frame a problem of practice within the literature, a process that is markedly different from traditional PhD research, in which problems are typically framed based on gaps in the literature (Bourner et al., 2001). Students also begin to learn how “to go about adopting or adapting textual conventions so that one’s own, and one’s colleagues’, professional expertise can be reconfigured as legitimate academic knowledge” (San Miguel & Nelson, 2007, p. 71) alongside published literature.

This assignment also helps the students begin the process of learning to write for different audiences. Many professionals write in concise formats such as executive summaries, which serve them well in practice. However, to position themselves as researching professionals within an academic community, they must learn to adopt writing styles appropriate to their disciplines, styles that include more robust explanations and descriptions and explicit connections among theory, research, and practice (Golde, 2007; San Miguel & Nelson, 2007). The annotated bibliography discussed above provides the opportunity to read scholarly articles and is followed by a discussion on disciplinary writing. Students are then tasked with locating and sharing a research article that they would like to emulate and to explain why. We have found that students, as professionals, usually choose articles that explicitly connect theory, research, and practice. Such opportunities help make visible how writing can vary depending on its intended audience.

Later in our doctoral program, students move to more complex writing tasks, such as conducting a literature review focused on a problem of practice (often, but not always, the same problem identified for the annotated bibliography assignment) and developing a conceptual framework by extracting the pieces of theoretical and empirical evidence that are most pertinent to the chosen problem of practice (Kumar & Antonenko, 2014). This conceptual framework is critical for researching professionals because problems of practice rarely fit neatly with one philosophical or psychological perspective, and one context is rarely a replica of another. Thus, researching professionals must critically review theories, prior research, and methodological approaches related to their problem of practice; select from the large body of related scholarship what is most applicable to their problems and contexts; and synthesize this information into a framework that can guide research in their practice.

The complexity of this process cannot be overstated. When the problem is drawn from the student’s own professional practice,

matters such as the problem under investigation, the workplace context, and the positioning of the researcher/practitioner vis-à-vis the research site and participants, may need to be introduced early in the literature review so that the impetus for the research is clearly articulated and the theoretical knowledge is clearly linked to the practice problem that it is meant to illuminate. (San Miguel & Nelson, 2007, pp. 76–77)

The writing activities discussed above are carefully scaffolded to involve multiple drafts focused on various components of the writing process. They also involve opportunities for peer and instructor feedback and for self-reflection in both synchronous and asynchronous formats. While such scaffolds support doctoral students in the academic writing process (Golde, 2007; San Miguel & Nelson, 2007; Wisker, 2015), there is a point at which students must demonstrate their ability “to position themselves as scholars by adopting disciplinarily appropriate ways of establishing and defending knowledge claims” (Barnacle & Mewburn, 2010, p. 434). This opportunity comes during the written component of the qualifying exam process. Sometimes referred to as a rite of passage (Estrem & Lucas, 2003; Hadjioannou, Shelton, Fu, & Dhanarattigannon, 2007), qualifying exams vary greatly across programs but typically involve written and oral components. Our qualifying exams are designed to allow researching professionals to demonstrate their independent scholarly thinking ability in written and oral form, and the previously described writing assignments intentionally scaffold students for success. In our online program, about 90 percent of the students pass on their first attempt and can then advance to the dissertation stage of the program. We believe that this high rate of success is a direct result of the intentionality with which we construct the processes of scholarly thinking throughout the program.

Enculturation

While developing scholarly thinking abilities through reading, information literacy, and writing, our students become enculturated within the larger disciplinary community of educational technology as researching professionals. Enculturation involves legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and we ensure that students are introduced to the professional organizations, conferences, journals, and other features of the larger community, such as popular listservs and related special interest groups (SIGs). The students spend time exploring these facets of the discipline and are encouraged to participate within the community in simple, low-risk ways, such as attending a conference, submitting a proposal for a conference presentation, joining a SIG, or subscribing to a journal. As they come to understand the community, many students begin to participate in more robust ways, including serving as a reviewer for conference proposals, organizing the program for a SIG, or serving on an editorial review board. In fact, two graduates of our program are serving on a committee responsible for rewriting the standards for a major professional organization in our field.

In addition to enculturating into the disciplinary community, professional doctoral students must begin to transform their identity from a practitioner to a researching professional grounded in both their disciplines and their professional contexts. As Barnacle and Mewburn (2010) state, “doing a doctorate changes you,” and the change does not “just involve becoming an expert in a topic area, but comprises a transformation of identity” (p. 433). This transformation may challenge professional doctoral students, many of whom have formed strong identities as successful practitioners and leaders within their contexts.

The previously discussed processes associated with scholarly thinking (reading, information literacy, and writing) serve as avenues for helping students transform their identity to that of a researching professional who addresses challenges and problems within the practice through theory and research. The online communities of practice developed by cohorts in our program serve as essential vehicles for this transformation, much of which occurs through noncourse interactions such as online synchronous sessions, on-campus cohort visits, and discussion groups in which students provide and receive peer feedback. Engaging in critical conversations with peers about theory and research related to problems of practice, coupled with providing and receiving feedback related to writing, further develops scholarly thinking, helps students to identify as researching professionals, and enculturates them into the disciplinary norms related to dialogue and discussion.

As Golde (2007) notes, “Careful study of professional education shows the value of pedagogies that require students to perform publicly” (p. 349), and providing and receiving feedback within a safe online community is one example of scholarly thinking becoming public in low-risk ways. Another way in which scholarly thinking, identity formation, and enculturation can be supported through public performance within an online community is through dialogue about articles in the discipline. As noted earlier, students can be asked to discuss claims versus evidence in particular articles, but disciplinary writing can also be used to talk about important issues like writer identity and other challenges that professional doctoral students experience. These low-risk public performances within cohort-based online communities of practice are initially led by faculty members, who model disciplinary norms, but gradually, students take over ownership by, for example, structuring their writing groups, hosting synchronous discussion groups, and even driving a couple of hours to meet personally with other cohort members.

KEY CONSIDERATIONS

Scholarly thinking is a habit of mind essential for researching professionals. Helping students develop this habit during an online professional doctorate requires careful planning, in part because those studying in such programs have already developed habits of mind that drive how they address problems in their contexts. For example, we have noticed that students new to our program tend to address problems of practice by talking to people and seeking out resources that support their views and beliefs. Scholarly thinking, in contrast, requires that they seek out information from multiple perspectives and from resources that they have probably not consulted in the past, such as peer-reviewed articles. Since students often have to unlearn habits that are incompatible with scholarly thinking, curriculum must be designed intentionally to foster scholarly thinking, as shown in the following key considerations.

Defining habits of mind. As students enter an online professional doctoral program, faculty members must explicitly define for them the habits of mind they wish students to develop. We believe that scholarly thinking and the associated processes we identified above (reading, developing information literacy, writing, and enculturation) will resonate in many disciplines, but discipline-specific cultures and program goals may warrant different habits of mind.

When we first started our program, we made the mistake of thinking that our students would naturally demonstrate the habits of mind that we expected of researching professionals. When our first cohort went through the qualifying exams, we recognized major differences in how the students performed. Some were natural readers and writers, easily figured out how to leverage online resources, and enculturated into the academic community of our discipline with little effort. Others, however, did little more than what was required in coursework and within the online community and were ill-prepared for the qualifying exam process. They struggled to see things through multiple perspectives and were often unable to connect theory, research, and practice in meaningful ways. Our frustration with the range of performances made us realize that it was our fault for not explicitly defining scholarly thinking and emphasizing the need to develop this habit of mind. Only then did we operationalize scholarly thinking in our program. We encourage others to approach this issue with much more forethought during program development and before their first program offering.

Communicating scholarly expectations to students. In addition to encouraging us to define scholarly thinking, the above experience highlighted the importance of explicitly communicating our expectations for scholarly thinking at various points in our curriculum. Students must understand the purpose and ultimate goals of assignments designed to develop scholarly thinking. Otherwise, as adult learning theory and our personal experiences tell us, they may lack the motivation to exert their best efforts, because the work is both time-consuming and mentally challenging. This communication should occur in multiple ways and within every semester of the program, whether formally through coursework, informally through interactions in the online community, or, ideally, both. Students need to be continually reminded of the ultimate goal of developing scholarly thinking and how what they are doing at that moment contributes to that goal.

Scaffolding for scholarly thinking. Moving from simple to more complex opportunities for practice helps build scholarly thinking gradually. These opportunities should be available in multiple courses across the program, since scholarly thinking is not something that can be taught in one course. Furthermore, faculty members must engage and collaborate in the process of scaffolding for scholarly thinking. Faculty in our program find that planning for scaffolding works best when we dedicate time to meeting about the program as a group to plan how scholarly thinking can be integrated across the curriculum and when we are able to make explicit connections among courses for students. For example, during the first semester of our program, students take a final exam that includes writing prompts similar to but not as complex as those they will see on their qualifying exams. These prompts ask students to synthesize content from both of the classes they enrolled in during the semester. The final prompt asks them to identify two research questions related to their current areas of interest and to explain why these questions are appropriate given what they have learned about theories and perspectives in our discipline. The prompt serves as a bridge from the foundational knowledge they develop during the first semester of the program and the research design course they will take during the second semester. The instructor for the research design course reads students’ responses to these final prompts and begins the course with a discussion of the questions posed by the students and how questions drive research design decisions.

Recognizing the influence of embeddedness on scholarly thinking. It is important to recognize that some students will struggle with scholarly thinking even if program faculty explicitly define it and scaffold for it. We have come to believe that this is often due to the students’ embeddedness in their contexts. In most cases, we have found that this embeddedness has the most influence on their ability to develop thoughtful research plans. For example, we have had students work on problems with many possible solutions, both from our perspective and from those of related literature. Yet some students only use literature that supports their viewpoints and solutions—in some cases, manipulating the literature in ways that support their solutions and refute other potential options before those options are carefully tested or even seriously considered. Similarly, we have had students who face tremendous pressure to show positive results related to an intervention in their practice, which sometimes prevents them from being able to think critically about the intervention or about how to best evaluate effectiveness. We do not have a fool-proof plan for addressing these issues when they arise, but we always spend considerable time as colleagues brainstorming possible approaches and we hold multiple conversations with the students about these situations, sometimes including in our conversations the data they have collected in their practice. This can be helpful in developing scholarly thinking, especially when we are able to see these data from different perspectives and discuss data that they may have discounted because they did not fit within their personal viewpoints. We find that it is sometimes difficult to determine whether scholarly thinking is adequately demonstrated and how hard and how often to push students on these issues.

Leveraging institutional resources. Scholarly thinking is better supported during an online professional doctorate when institutional resources are leveraged. For example, some institutions have developed writing centres to support online doctoral students, while others have created online modules and resources related to discipline-specific reading opportunities or information-literacy skills. In many cases, employees on campus may already be equipped, or interested in becoming equipped, to support online professional doctoral students. In our own context, our librarians have been very keen to learn about our online professional doctorate and how they can support our students. We have found that engaging with librarians to help them understand the needs of researching professionals and the nuances of learning online can be invaluable, especially when it comes to intentional planning for students to develop scholarly thinking as a habit of mind.

CONCLUSION

Scholarly thinking is a habit or a way of being that permeates how researching professionals navigate the intersection of theory, research, and practice. It involves using the processes of reading, information literacy, writing, and enculturation to study and address problems of practice. Developing scholarly thinking among researching professionals requires intentionality and careful scaffolding in the design of online professional doctoral programs, because students are typically not immersed in professional contexts where such habits are widely practiced. Specifically, it involves coordination among assignments and activities to support a progression from simple to more complex ways of engaging in scholarly thinking. In this chapter, we discussed how students in the UF EdD EdTech move through the carefully sequenced process of identifying a problem of practice, creating an annotated bibliography, participating in a discussion about quality scholarship, conducting a literature review, and crafting a conceptual framework. In addition, developing scholarly thinking requires both collaboration with library staff to meet the information-literacy needs of online professional doctoral students and institutional infrastructure for access to online resources that support scholarly thinking. Scholarly thinking as a habit of mind should be emphasized in the design and implementation of online professional doctorates, since it separates researching professionals from other professionals by enabling them to view challenges through various lenses, seeing beyond their own experiences and gut instincts.