The Doctor of Education (EdD) in Educational Leadership at East Carolina University incorporated advising into the admissions process through the first two semesters of the program. This study examined how, through the first year of implementation of this process, student knowledge of the role of the scholarly practitioner evolved from pre-admission advising through the second semester of this CPED-influenced EdD program. CPED is the Carnegie Project for the Educational Doctorate, a consortium of colleges of education which aims to prepare scholarly practitioners to solve problems of practice through the lens of equity, ethics, and social justice (CPED, 2009; Hoffman & Perry, 2016). The study describes how faculty utilized the Model of Improvement framework with three Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles to intentionally teach this concept. The results of this study indicated that there was a mindset change for students from practitioners to scholarly practitioners. Accordingly, the findings herein may be beneficial to educational leadership doctoral programs in replicating the program's successes with growing practitioners into scholarly practitioners through embedded activities from admission through early coursework.