education writers association conference 2024

education writers association conference 2024

Innovations in Education: Trends and Best Practices – Proceedings of the Education Writers Association Conference 2024

1. Introduction: The Changing Landscape of Education

In the twenty-first century, the field of education has seen considerable focus on and encouragement toward innovating approaches and programs so as to make education more equitable, more accessible, and more relevant to the lives, interests, aptitudes, and goals of a more diversified group of learners. For all the positive efforts being made in this direction, educators come up against real-world challenges wherever the momentum that seems to cost us so much in time and resources tangles with, or is shaped or strengthened by age-old or cutting-edge privilege, political power, or outdated or redefined norms. Central to our discussions here is the nature and value of innovation and how it can and/or should intersect with and inform the work of—as well as distinguish itself from—other essential elements of our success in educating global citizens – with and for equity and imagination, creativity and vision, optimism syndrome.

The world of education is ever-changing, driven by an array of factors, ranging from advances in technology to changes in social and cultural norms, changes in workforce demands to re-evaluations of pedagogy and practice. Today’s educators find themselves facing a variety of challenges that can easily become insurmountable in the absence of a dedicated focus on practical remedies and solutions. The Call for Proposals for this conference suggested a series of topics that are said to lie at the heart of the innovative approaches needed to address these challenges: innovation; equity; redesign; transformation; technology; accessibility; pedagogy; and new literacies. Today, the authors will touch on each of these themes and, at times, they will offer other words or ideas that similarly connect all the presentations they, together, contributed to this conference project.

2. Keynote Addresses and Panel Discussions

Innovations in Education: Local, Regional, and National Directions, Keynote Address with Arne Duncan, United States Secretary of Education. Over the past few months, he has hit the ground listening and collaborating across the U.S. to understand local, regional, and national needs, challenges, and innovations in education from cradle to career. Keynote Address with Arne Duncan. Schools are transformed into community centers with medical and dental clinics, social services, after-school programs, adult education, and so forth on site. New delivery systems for higher education to both increase access and outcomes. These are just a few of the education innovations we will hear about from the 30 EWA members who will report, blog, and tweet from this meeting.

Keynote addresses are major talks by leaders in the field of education and related topics. They are expected to resonate with meeting participants and connect with the themes explored in the conference as a whole. Panel discussions bring together a wide range of perspectives related to the themes of the convening. Panels are highly interactive and the goal is to find a dynamic, diverse array of people to serve on the panels, such as regional or national experts in the subject area as well as experienced educators, students, parents, policymakers, researchers, and others. Panels should be balanced and include a moderator to facilitate discussion.

The Education Writers Association (EWA) is a professional organization of members of the media who specialize in covering education at all levels. The following keynote addresses and panel discussions showcase the voices of prominent speakers and EWA members who represent a wide range of viewpoints from their newsroom coverage and are sure to engage, educate, and inform.

3. Breakout Sessions: Exploring Innovative Teaching Strategies

There will be three 30-minute breakout sessions in this portion of the programming. Attendees should select one of the following experiences in the time slot 4:30–5:00 and 5:05–5:35, and then return to the Zoom meeting link to participate in the town hall with the entire conference from 5:45-6:30 p.m.

Breakout Sessions: Exploring Innovative Teaching Strategies

Featuring insights and best practices from guest speakers well-versed in innovative teaching and approaches designed to inspire educators in every classroom, these sessions are intended to be a mix of pedagogical and practical takeaways, looking at both why each innovation was developed and how it can be best applied to different classroom settings, including large lecture halls and online courses or smaller breakouts and seminars.

Interactive sessions designed to delve into specific innovative teaching methods and approaches. From the use of virtual reality to help make abstract economic concepts more concrete, to the trends and tactics prevalent in across-the-curriculum undergraduate research, to strategies for teaching scientific writing skills—earnestly in an online or hybrid-learning environment—these breakout sessions will help attendees better understand the democratization of post-secondary research and lay the foundation for relevant coverage in the local community on everything from new academic spaces to exciting advancements in teaching and learning.

4. Research Presentations: Impactful Studies in Education

Research Presentations: Impactful Studies in Education. As we know, impactful research is essential in education because nearly all operations are scrutinized, criticized, and analyzed. We should regard research as the foundation of educational activity. We have evidence in-house that we are moving on up thanks to well-done, serious research. There are, of course, many different forms of research, but we find the most compelling contexts that bring together empirical-based research findings and contemporary, emerging issues driven by rigorous qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methodological approaches that contribute promising evidence— in other words, where researchers present emerging work that can be used to inform our next steps.

Research Presentations: Impactful Studies in Education. The presenters, representing a variety of disciplines and areas of study, will engage in initial findings, promising empirical research, and evidence-based practices that have real implications for what we know, what we do, and where we are headed in education related to human capital. Their findings contribute to important conversations surrounding student achievement, teacher exposure to learning, teacher professional development and preservation, HR in education, access and solutions to educational achievement gaps, new developments in educational technology, pre-service preparation and certification, follow-ups of promising programs, and how contextual factors may impact educational opportunities. This segment may appeal to those who write on empirical studies in education (inside academe and public policy), to those whose beat is our schools, and to those who are highly engaged in school-based issues.

5. Closing Remarks and Future Directions

It is important that we draw on the wisdom of the hundreds of presenters, the big names on stage, and the glittering cast of experts as well as the dozens of attendees who self-organized and led conversations during these past six days. All of us who come here this week are fortunate, fortunate to our very core, to be able to build on their collective wisdom and push forward its interconnected, complex, and paradoxical implications. That to me, modern collaborative, dialogic innovation, is the ultimate reassurance for human thriving and pleasure that we will carry back into our thoughts and our work. Thank you, and I’ll see you next year!

– We need to re-conceptualize students as active agents who build intelligence by doing, by speaking, and by reflecting on their actions. – Diversity is not just a slogan to be celebrated; it is an asset and a strength on which all learners can build. – The ubiquitous use of disruptive technologies to disrupt standardized expectations is a theme on the rise.

– First, more than once you were told research-informed best practices must form the scaffolding of innovative instructional strategies, curricula, and materials. – We’ve concluded that, if our aims are to help all students reach high standards, graduate from high school ready for college and careers, and participate in vibrant democratic and civic life, there are no shortcuts, and no second class. – We’ve also heard that our current educational and youth development enterprises are failing to deliver on these promises, and no sturdy foundations can be built on shifting sands. In other words: learning and development cannot be improved simply by expanding what we’re already doing. At the beginning of the week, we encouraged our speakers to challenge the conventional wisdom, so, with that imperative in mind, a recap seems fitting:

The preceding five days have shone an illuminating light on the state of American education in 2024. We have heard from scholars and educators, students, families, and practitioners; we have worked together on the issues of the day, hoping to open pathways to a better future. Together, we’ve examined how changes in society, technology, and the world of work are leading educators to question the fundamentals of instruction; and we’ve looked from school to school, community to community, scanning experiments, piloting promising pedagogy and programs, and exploring how the new competencies are being integrated—or not—into standards, instruction, and assessment systems. And while marketplace rhetoric suffused our conversations, the deeper theme reflected in panel after panel is that of preparing ourselves for the inevitable: the stark and difficult realization that to avoid the risk of a fissure of have and have-nots deepening into a dangerous abyss, we have few reasonable choices. Each of these choices, it seems, leads us directly to our central theme: innovative practices, principles, and policies for building a comprehensive approach to providing the full array of supports and opportunities at the core of our discussion—the real foundations of learning, achievement, and quality of life.

Closing remarks and future directions