Presenter: Erin Pollard, Institute for Education Sciences

This presentation will demonstrate the a new feature on the What Works Clearinghouse website—tags on studies that meet the evidence standards in the Department of Education’s non-regulatory guidance on the evidence requirements for the Every Student Succeeds Act. This will demo how to find evidence and how the tags are applied. We will then talk discuss future enhancements and how they can be used to support educators in finding research evidence.

Presenter: Jonathan Sharples, Education Endowment Foundation

For the last 8 years, the Education Endowment Foundation, the UK’s What Works Centre for education, has adopted an integrated approach to mobilising evidence, by attending concurrently to evidence production, mediation and use. This work has generated insights on the degree to which evidence-use systems naturally form and self-organise. This session will briefly present this work and open up a discussion on the coordination of evidence-use systems.

Presenter: Medha Tare, Digital Promise

Learning sciences research provides insights into how best to support and engage learners with diverse skills, experiences, and needs. The Learner Variability Project (LVP) team at Digital Promise translates this ever-growing research into easily accessible K-12 Learner Models, composed of factors and strategies for math and literacy development, that can inform both product design and classroom practice. These interactive models, available at the Learner Variability Navigator, are free, open-source, and based on a whole-child framework that addresses learners' content area knowledge, cognitive abilities, social-emotional learning, and personal background. To encourage meaningful use of this resource, we have built several tools that allow educators to find, select, and share learner factors and research-based strategies that are relevant for their students. We also conduct outreach with educators and districts to support their integration of research-based practices. Attendees of this presentation will learn more about our process in building and sharing our resources as well as lessons we have learned from these dissemination efforts.

Presenters: Emily Lockwood and Megan McCarthy, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Ambika Subramanyam, Anne Lewis Strategies

For high-quality, evidence-based practices to reach the right stakeholders and inform their decision making, they need to be delivered in a way that is highly optimized for their needs – attending to timing, format, messenger, and channel. But how do you know what those needs are? And how do you translate those needs into an asset? The Gates Foundation created a Resource Optimization Toolkit to help answer these key questions. This toolkit, based on deep user insights collected over several years, outlines a process for optimizing high-quality resources to meet the needs of practitioners at the school and district level. By applying this process, organizations seeking to support decision-makers in schools and districts can take dense or academic-leaning resources and transform them into high-impact materials by:

• • repackaging them into new formats (webpages or digital documents) that speak to the intended audiences, and

  • disseminating them through the right channels and with the right wraparound supports to reach the intended audience.

Please join us to learn more about the specific tools within this toolkit and to provide your feedback. We are continuously working to improve this resource, we welcome your thoughts.

Presenters: Rosemary Hughes, Laura Mikowychok, and Noreen O'Neill, Pennsylvania Department of Education

The Pennsylvania Department of Education has been a leader in creating ESSA resources and furthering evidence use in schools. Launched in early 2020, PA’s Evidence Resource Center (ERC) combines a high-quality clearinghouse with tools that engage leaders in meaningful evidence exploration. Recently, the ERC's collection of over 150 strategies with ESSA-tiered evidence has been expanded: a new COVID Collection highlights strategies with special relevance and usefulness in response to pandemic challenges, while the Experiences tool helps school leaders become not just evidence consumers, but contributors, reflecting on their strategy use, adaptation, and results. Positioned side-by-side with formal evidence, the Experiences tool elevates the insights that school leaders have to share, inspires decision-makers to look at evidence holistically, and highlights needs that future studies can meet. See these resources in action and provide feedback as we work to create an indispensable venue for evidence sharing in 2021.

Presenter: Kim Marshall, The Marshall Memo

Subscribers have made the Marshall Memo the third largest US-based education publication. Kim Marshall, educators' "designated reader," will describe how he views his role and responsibilities as a knowledge mobilizer as well as explain the factors considered when weekly writing the content for The Marshall Memo.

Presenter: Penny Reinart, ASCD

ASCD is committed to empowering educators to achieve excellence in learning, teaching, and leading so that every child is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. With this mission in mind, we have used our organizational connections to researchers in the various education fields as well as published research to launch a new internal content framework to guide all development. The research is then used as a foundation of each content product: our Educational Leadership magazine, our publications which include books, newsletters, QRGs, and more, as well as all of our synchronous and asynchronous professional learning.