Forming a Unique Partnership Between a University's Educational Leadership Master's Degree Program and Its Surrounding School Districts Using the Five Whys Protocol.

In 2019, program leaders and professors in the university's educational leadership program noticed a significant decline in enrollment, and state leadership test scores for the program were below the state average. Using the Five Whys protocol and five stages of the design thinking process as identified by IDEO (Brown & Katz, 2019), they set to resolve the issues. The Five Whys protocol is an iterative and formative interrogative technique used to explore cause-and-effect relationships. As noted by Serrat (2017), the primary goal of the technique is to determine the root cause of a problem by repeating the question up to five times. Each response informed the foundation for the next iteration and allowed the group to settle on the root cause of the problem. Then, design thinking was used to provide a solution-based approach to resolving the problems noted. Program leaders began by forming a stakeholder workgroup that included school district leadership development professionals from each of the university's surrounding districts. Program leaders used district leader input to understand what skills school districts needed in graduates of the university program and considered possible program changes to address the problems noted. The result of the year-long process was a program transformation, with increased enrollment and improved state assessment scores, to a widely accepted and successful master's degree program that is supported by all districts served by the university.