Innovate. Experiment. Expand | Your Annual Quest
These days, it seems like everyone is on a mission — finding the newest city to travel to, the best new restaurant in town, the newest workout trend — the list goes on and on. At a macro-level, education isn’t insulated from this trend. Throughout the country, politicians, researchers, experts and the like are trying to find the hottest new thing that will revolutionize education and promote positive outcomes in schools like we’ve never seen before.
Unfortunately, in many of those instances, the questions being asked are not being asked by people in the field (i.e., educators)and in many cases, those people are the same ones answering their own questions. Learning is an ongoing and iterative process — the more we learn the more questions we have and who better to dig into and answer those questions than the people on the front lines. If we are serious about schools being places that foster learning and curiosity, then we need to promote and encourage practitioners to be the ones asking questions, proposing hypotheses, and exploring these questions with data to figure out what does and doesn’t work best for their communities. Now that you are getting to know your students this year, Learnmetrics is challenging you to go on a quest to ask (and answer) the questions that are tugging at you.
Innovate, experiment, and expand.
Below are some suggestions on ways you can get started.
- Join an organization that supports innovation — TeachPlus and ImpactLab are two such organizations, amongst many, that are encouraging and supporting teachers through this journey.
- Look at schools that are trying new methods and practices, and ask yourself, if I were there, what question(s) would I want to be exploring?
- Talk to your community — ask families and students what they think would make a meaningful difference in their classrooms and design a question around that.
- Engage with a network of educators online and explore what others are already trying (and have had success with!) — there are lots of these out there and many of them are free and easy to access.
Regardless of the direction you go, know that we and many others trust and support educators to do the work you are tasked to. Leveraging the right opportunity and the right data can put you in position to continue iterating and driving students success for the rest of the year. We’re excited to be your partner on this journey and we want to hear from you: What questions are you digging into this year?
Rickie Yudin
Chief Academic Officer
rickie@learnmetrics.com
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