“Let us help you unleash your creative intellect!”

Our Services

Our profile of services is intimately tied to three key components:  Our philosophy as process consultants and educators, at what phase of the project you’re at (e.g., planning, data collection, data analysis or interpretationg, writing-up the results, or post-graduation), and the nature of the types of capstone experiences graduate students encounter in their master’s and doctoral programs.

As process consultants, our work is founded on core principles of problem solving / opportunity finding, and teaching and learning with the intent to provide consultation, coaching, and focused training that provides solutions and builds your knowledge and skills.  Our consultants are educators, first and foremost, who possess a deep understanding of and appreciation for the developmental nature of learning around a full array of core competencies that professionals, researchers, and scholar-practitioners need to be successful in managing the complexities of the 21^st Century, and that graduate students need in order to successfully complete their program’s capstone project.

We are also keenly aware that the type of support you’re seeking and focus is intimately tied to which phase of the capstone project you’re currently in, from the various stages of planning, implementation / data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, and report writing, as well as activities based on your project post-graduation.  We are equipped to support you in any phase of your project, and to meet you where you’re at, developmentally, in each competency domain and with respect to your professional goals.

Let us help you make sense of the many design decisions you face, and move forward in completing your project!

In addition, we recognize the evolving nature of many graduate program’s capstone projects—various types of master’s theses and doctoral dissertations—from the more traditional (e.g., Plan A / Plan B master’s theses, 5-Chapter dissertations), to alternative types of capstone projects (e.g., action-oriented projects, intervention-based projects, needs assessment / systems analysis, curriculum design & development, systems design, etc.). Given our broad and eclectic training and experience, we can provide support to those undertaking a wide variety of projects.

Consultation services tend to focus on either short-term support for a specific and often narrow focus of needs and problem-solving (e.g., topic selection, sample size determination / power analysis, data analysis, editing services), or longer-term consultation focused on such things as critically reviewing the literature, research design and proposal development, instrument design and development, or strengthening one’s writing skills.

Coaching services frequently accompany longer-term consultation, and moves beyond a focus on the technical dimensions of scholarship into the higher-order dimensions of critical thinking, reflective practice, and the socio-emotional dimensions associated with an emerging self-concept as a master’s or doctoral-level professional, scholar-practitioner, and/or researcher. Coaching is typically a required component when addressing the development of your writing skills—both expository and scholarly writing competencies—as writing and critical thinking go hand-in-hand. The coaching relationship is that which comes closest to mentoring, where the potential exists to guide your development as a future member of the community of scholars, researchers, and scholar-practitioners to which you hope to gain entry, and where we will facilitate your exploration of both the science and art of research and scholarship!

Focused and targeted training may be a part of short-term consultations, and is most often a part of longer-term consultation and coaching, and typically involves presentation of information through the use of synchronous virtual workshops, PowerPoint presentations, handouts / Briefing Sheets, and structured exercises or experiential activities intended build knowledge and skills in targeted competency domains.

All three types of services involve phone conferences which may take place through use of virtual meeting technology that allows for both audio and video conferencing, and virtual white boards.

Scalable consultation, coaching, and training that is driven by your needs, interests, and goals!

E-mail is used to the extent that it supports certain types of written communication, and especially as a medium through which you submit documents for review and feedback (e.g., outlines, prospectus, draft proposals, completed training exercises, etc.).

While we provide essentially a full-slate of services covering all phases of most types of dissertation and thesis projects, our experience in serving as reviewers of dissertation proposals both for scientific merit and research ethics (i.e., as a member of an Institutional Review Board (IRB)), has led us to develop specialized expertise in many of the areas where graduate students most often seem to struggle.  Central to this is in distinguishing between research design as both a noun (i.e., the various types of research design) and research design as a verb (i.e., the activity and process of making design decisions).  While a number of graduate students face some developmental challenges / limitations in foundational competencies (i.e., information literacy, expository writing basics, basic understanding of research methods or statistics), many more struggle with the more complex, sophisticated, and esoteric elements of having to make literally dozens of design decisions in navigating the landscape of design options.  We pride ourselves on helping you make sense of complex concepts, and to be able to map-out and manage the various design decisions needed to successfully complete your project.

Who We Serve

We provide support to graduate students primarily in the social and behavioral—and organizational / management—sciences, who most often are enrolled in degree programs in Schools of Business, Education, Psychology, Political Science, or Human Services, seeking Masters of Science, Arts, or Social Work, and both those seeking more practitioner-oriented doctorates (e.g., EdD, DBA, PsyD) and particularly those seeking the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) (i.e., often seen as the “researcher’s”) degree.

We also provide training and professional development activities—coaching and consultation—for faculty to support them in their varied roles as dissertation or thesis chairs, as researchers, and as instructors.

In addition, based in part on an understanding of and appreciation for research done in the positivist, social constructivist / interpretivist, critical- / transformative-theorist, and pragmatist traditions, we are equipped to provide support to students—and faculty / researchers–who choose to adopt a wide array of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods designs, as well as a variety of more applied types of research, including action research, program evaluation, policy analysis, and disciplined inquiry based on appreciative inquiry.

Finally, we recognize the evolving nature of graduate programs and the various types of “capstone” experiences that both masters and doctoral students may have available to them, from the more traditional types of literature or data-based kinds of projects, to those that may involve designing and developing curriculum, intervention-based projects, conducting needs assessment or systems analysis, organizational assessments, and various types of advocacy-based projects. We are also equipped to support those doing true experimental, quasi-experimental, and single-subject research in both field and laboratory settings.

One of the benefits of working within a scholar-practitioner framework, is that we can support a wide variety projects based on the diverse interests of today’s graduate student or researcher and emerging types of professional programs.

During our initial intake, we will work with you to determine the specific areas where you are seeking support, and the type of service—consulting, coaching, training, or problem-solving—that best meets your needs and goals.