One of the core needs identified across the convening - which elevated the value of the convening itself - was the need to create opportunities for individuals and organizations that serve in knowledge broker roles to work and learn together. These ideas spanned both the areas of policies and systems and learning and collaboration. Four actions were suggested to achieve these goals:

• Build networks or communities of practice. Suggestions included the opportunity to work in role-alike groups, including, for example, those that work in local or state education agencies, in professional associations, etc., as well as groups that span different levels of the system or are regional.  

• Identify opportunities to learn with/from other fields. Knowledge brokerage is more formalized in other sectors, such as health, and in other geographic contexts, such as the U.K. and Canada. However, there has been limited exchange of knowledge and practice across boundaries into the U.S. education context. As a result, there is a need to identify options for connecting with non-education brokers.

• Develop a system for sharing, accumulating, and organizing craft knowledge. Participants recognized that there are no formal mechanisms for building or accumulating practice-based knowledge that can inform the work of research brokers.  This gap may prevent learning, slow efforts to strengthen the role of brokers, and contribute to persistent disconnects between research and practice.

• Create a professional association for brokers. One way of formalizing the work of brokerage is to create a professional association which can facilitate many of the aforementioned activities.

In addition to opportunities to work and grow together, those who work as brokers in the education sector need opportunities for learning. Several activities were recommended:

• Define an evidence-informed set of standards and practices. The work of brokers is ill-defined and broad at present, which creates challenges for preparing, hiring, and supporting brokers.  Efforts to understand effective practices can help prioritize and define competencies, standards, and practices for brokers. 

• Develop and offer specific, formal training available across the education system. Brokers often report learning how to work as a boundary spanner and knowledge mobilizer on the job or informally. This can make it difficult to be effective and may be a barrier to finding people to take on broker roles. Suggestions included training programs offered through professional organizations, institutes of higher education, or other organizations and networks.

• Establish career pathways for those interested in brokerage. Central to strengthening links between research and practice are ensuring that there are formal roles and career pathways for research brokers. These positions, and pathways to them, can be informed by examples in other sectors (e.g. health) or those that have been established in the education system (e.g district research leads).

Current barriers between research and policy create challenges for the work of brokers.  In an effort to advocate for change more broadly, to not only improve the effectiveness of brokers but also improve and align research production and use, these were proposed:

• Develop measures of social impact. At the core of our collective efforts is the desire to improve educational opportunities and outcomes for students and their communities.  Yet there is little consensus on how to capture the longer term impact for research, research use, and research brokerage.  

• Link funding to brokerage. Some suggestions focus on incentivizing researchers and practitioners to work with brokers as a means of ensuring collaboration and communication that supports evidence use. This could be achieved through funding schemes administered by research funders, philanthropic organizations, or state and federal agencies.

• Address research use and research brokerage in teacher/leader and researcher preparation. A perpetual challenge to linking research and practice is the lack of capacity to engage across these boundaries. There was a call for skills and knowledge related to research use and knowledge mobilization to be embedded into preparation programs for both researchers and practitioners. By improving the capacity of these communities to interact on common interests, brokers can focus on other critical roles.

• Rethink how universities function. Several issues pertaining to how universities function were raised as barriers to the production of relevant research, the communication of research, researcher engagement with brokers and practitioners, and more. Calls for systemic change were duly noted.

Consistent with earlier recommendations for improved communications among research brokers, participants also felt that the system lacked appropriate channels for communicating ideas across the educational ecosystem.

• Create and promote pathways for practice knowledge and local evidence to add to the larger body of knowledge on an issue. Participants acknowledged the prioritization of evidence from academic and other research institutions, and sought better recognition of local evidence as part of the knowledge base. This expands what is known about an issue for both researchers and practitioners and achieves greater equity among research and practice.

• Institutionalize and scale up strategies that help researchers to respond to practice needs and understand current practice. Few mechanisms exist to help the broader research community understand and address the needs of educational decision-makers, and these are often informal or lack recognition. Participants called for new, systemic ways to elevate these voices in setting research agendas.

• Create feedback loops that can help brokers improve their strategies. Brokers, whether working locally or nationally, lack mechanisms for collecting information about the value and utility of their work and products or how to improve them. Structures that provide or enable feedback can improve the effectiveness of our brokerage system.

• Generate an accessible, usable map of the brokerage system. A key lesson from this convening was recognition of the diversity and enormity of the brokerage system that links research and practice. Coupled with the lack of infrastructure for communication and collaboration, it is difficult for researchers, educators, and even brokers to leverage the system. A map of the terrain would help researchers plan for mobilizing knowledge, practitioners to understand where to find research, and brokers to determine how to maximize their efforts. 

Through rich dialogue, questions surfaced that were difficult for the community to answer. This often was because so little is known about how the largely informal system of brokerage works, or how it could work, to better link research and practice. Four priorities for developing an evidence-base were noted:

• Engage in formative evaluation of brokerage activities and knowledge mobilization initiatives.  Building on the prior recommendation for feedback loops about brokers’ work, efforts to evaluate strategies and activities can help entities improve and  also help the field understand what it means to be an effective broker. 

• Develop a research agenda based on the core problems of practice experienced by brokers. The field is lacking research that examines and addresses the needs and practices of brokers in the education system.  Key questions include: What products do practitioners need/value? What are the most effective ways to disseminate knowledge? What skills are most important for brokers to have/use, and when are they most important to use? 

• Create useful syntheses of existing evidence of effective broker practice that is informed by related literatures. Brokerage and knowledge mobilization are more frequently discussed and studied in other sectors (e.g. health) and countries (e.g. Canada, U.K.). There is much to learn from those literatures in ways that can inform our understanding of these processes in education. Further, that literature is a starting point for understanding effective practices and what measures/approaches are used to evaluate the outcomes of brokerage.

• Develop and establish (common) measurable outcomes for research brokerage. In addition to earlier calls for measures of social impact, broadly, identifying and agreeing on some common measures of successful brokerage that can be used for formative evaluation and as targets for the development of knowledge mobilization initiatives would fill a void.

Throughout the convening, participants described how historical roles, practices, and structures serve as barriers to accomplishing their goals and perpetuate deficit-oriented assumptions and inequities in both the research-practice relationship and across the education system. In their efforts to ultimately strengthen education opportunities and outcomes, these narratives must be challenged as we engage in all of the recommendations described above. 

• Respect, value, and encourage practitioners as researchers. The dichotomy of research and practice - which is admittedly taken up in this report - perpetuates a distinction in roles between researchers and practitioners, often reinforced within the education and research systems. This discredits the skills and capacities of practitioners as researchers and positions them as recipients of knowledge rather than producers of it. By respecting, valuing, and encouraging practitioners as researchers, the system benefits from more diverse forms and sources of evidence.

• Re-evaluate what knowledge “counts.” Relatedly, the evidence-use agenda in education privileges research knowledge, and sometimes narrow forms of research. Participants expressed the value of not only research, but practice-based and craft knowledge seeking greater equity in knowledge mobilization and exchange. This, like the prior recommendation, demands a shift in how we understand the relationships between research and practice.

• View impact differently than publish or perish. Consistent with calls to shift incentives and address higher education institutions, expectations for “impact” must be broadened and valued differently. Emphasis on social impact can surmount historical barriers to the relationship between research and practice by better aligning the incentives and expectations for researchers to the needs of educators, students, and communities.

• Pay attention to which voices are heard and which are overlooked. At all levels of the education system, we must work to become more inclusive. This includes rethinking whose knowledge is mobilized, whose needs are served by research, how research represents the communities it intends to serve, with whom are relationships built and how, whose ideas are elevated, who participates in decisions, and more. These questions must sit at the forefront of our work as educators, researchers, and brokers.