If you’re in an EdD program, there’s a good chance someone has described your Dissertation in Practice as “basically a dissertation, just more applied.” This description is technically accurate and practically misleading — and it causes real problems at the proposal stage.

Here’s what’s actually different, and why your committee cares.

The problem of practice is not a research question. A traditional dissertation begins with a research gap in the literature. A DiP begins with a problem of practice — something that is actually going wrong somewhere, for real people, right now. These look similar on the surface. They require very different starting moves. If your proposal reads like a PhD problem statement, your committee will send it back.

Improvement science is not just methodology. Many EdD programs have adopted improvement science — Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles, driver diagrams, root cause analysis — as the methodological home for the DiP. This isn’t just a methods section you fill in. It’s an epistemological commitment about how knowledge is created and applied. Reviewers who work in this tradition will evaluate your proposal accordingly.

“Practitioner” is not a limitation — it’s a credential. One of the most common mistakes EdD students make is apologizing for their practitioner perspective. Your position in the field — as a principal, a program director, a district leader — is not a bias to be managed away. It’s a source of knowledge your committee wants you to leverage, carefully and deliberately.

Your committee may be new to this too. Some faculty who supervise DiPs were trained in traditional PhD programs and are learning alongside their students. This creates genuine confusion about what “counts” as acceptable evidence, what the defense looks like, and what publication means for applied work. If your committee seems uncertain, that’s not a sign you’re doing something wrong.

The DiP is a legitimately different scholarly form — not harder or easier than a traditional dissertation, but genuinely distinct. Treating it as a slightly shorter PhD dissertation is the single most common reason proposals fail.

My book, Empowering Scholar-Practitioners, is a comprehensive guide to the DiP from proposal through defense and publication. Available on Routledge and Amazon.