Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Educational Studies

First Advisor

Kathleen Cunningham

Abstract

Career technical education (CTE) has traditionally been organized around distinct career pathways designed to develop deep technical expertise within a single occupational field. While this model has been effective in preparing students for entry- level employment, it increasingly limits students’ opportunities to develop transferable technical and professional skills that span multiple pathways—skills now essential in a dynamic, interdisciplinary workforce. This dissertation in practice examined how a career technical education system could redesign pathway-based programming to support cross-pathway skill development while preserving pathway-specific technical rigor.

Guided by improvement science, this improvement work was conducted at Grant Career Center (GCC), a rural joint vocational school district in Ohio. Using the Model for Improvement, the work was anchored by the improvement question: How can GCC redesign its career-pathway-based programs to support cross-pathway skill development while maintaining technical depth within individual programs? An improvement team composed of administrators and instructors employed iterative Plan–Do–Study–Act (PDSA) cycles to test a series of interconnected change ideas, including short-term minicourses, cross-curricular collaborative projects, and a fully integrated instructional framework referred to as the House Model. Data sources included student and instructor empathy interviews, instructor feedback forms, student reflection surveys, observational data, and implementation artifacts collected across multiple PDSA cycles. Rather than evaluating outcomes in a summative sense, this dissertation focused on understanding how the change ideas functioned within the existing system, what conditions supported or constrained implementation, and how learning informed subsequent refinements.

Findings indicate that cross-pathway integration is best understood as a system design challenge rather than a programmatic add-on. Effective implementation depended on instructional coherence, intentional collaboration structures, disciplined use of data for learning, and leadership practices that emphasized adaptation over compliance. The DiP also demonstrates the utility of improvement science as a practical methodology for leading system-level instructional change in career technical education.

This dissertation contributes to the field by offering a contextually grounded example of how improvement science can be used to redesign CTE systems in ways that honor local culture, center student experience, and support sustainable, iterative improvement.

Rights

© 2026, Michael J. Parry

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