A Brief How-to Guide to Public Engagement in #Academia.

📦in 10 tips . . . 1) Adopt a Healthy Mindset

Avoid public engagement burnout by deciding what amount of energy and time you want to invest. Don’t compare yourself to others by counting followers or bylines. Do as much or as little as you want, and lean into the aspects that bring you joy.

🔥Talk of teacher shortages is heating up🔥

I hope this attention elevates the importance of teachers' work and pushes us to reflect as a society about how we value and support the teaching profession.

Here are my three 🗣️ sound bites 🗣️ for framing this issue. 1. Teacher shortages are REAL, but they are not UNIVERSAL.

E.g. they occur (sometimes acutely) in pockets - in some regions, for some schools, for some position types. The overall degree of shortages can move up or down, but it is not broadly spread or distributed equally.

New @AnnenbergInst WP

🎆Second Time’s the Charm? How Sustained Relationships from Repeat Student-Teacher Matches Build Academic & Behavioral Skills🎇

We show the potential of leveraging class assignment policies such as #looping to support students

edworkingpapers.com/ai22-590

A🧵 We often pay little attention to the dynamics of how schools assign teachers & students to classes. However, these decisions matter on multiple levels because relationships are at the core of education.

Our study unpacks the multidimensional effects of having a teacher twice.
/2

Working with undergraduate RAs like Sarah is one of the highlights of my job @BrownUniversity.

Here are some of the things I've found work best (for me) when running a large undergraduate research lab.

🧵

Shout-out to my amazing team:
scholar.harvard.edu/mkraft/researc…

https://twitter.com/SNovicoff/status/1482014848586113025

I typically have between 6 to 12 undergrad RAs working with me at a time. Expectations are to work 5 to 10 hours a week w/ flexibility around midterms & finals. Students are paid an hourly wage set by University. I aim to have students be part of team for at least a year. 2/

Last fall I taught a course on causal inference & ed policy.

The authors of the papers we read were generous enough to join us to provide a behind-the-scenes account of the research process.

I'd like to share some of the wisdom & advice these brilliant scholars imparted.💯

🧵 The scholars engaged in wide-ranging conversations with my @BrownEduDept master's students in Urban Ed Policy & touched on 4 main topics

➡️Life advice

➡️Generating new research projects

➡️Conducting research

➡️Policy engagement

I'll paraphrase their insights in this order

Navigating the DiD revolution from one applied researcher's perspective.

A LONG 🧵 on what I've learned & what I'm still trying to figure out. Advice/insights welcome!

My @michaelpollan 🥦🍅🥕🫑 inspired TL;DR take:

"Apply DiD in context, not every 2x2, mostly event studies" 2. First, some framing. I study the economics of ed & ed policy. DiD is a bread & butter method in this context where there is large amounts of variation in policy adoption across states/districts/schools.

E.g. A recent paper w/ colleagues on tchr eval
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

I'm thrilled to share that our paper "The Big Problem with Little Interruptions to Classroom Learning" is forthcoming at @AeraOpen ensuring open access to policymakers & practitioners.

@AnnenbergInst WP
edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/…

@ELmagazine brief
ascd.org/publications/e…

1/n Ted Sizer (1984):

"Public address systems are the most malevolent intruder into the thinking taking place in public school classrooms since the invention of the flickering light. In the name of efficient management, they regularly eviscerate good teaching. . . "

2/n

I recently had the privilege of serving on my local public school district's Return to In-person Working Group. It was eye-opening & changed how I think about

1) organizational leadership
2) teaching in-person & remote synchronously
3) testing
4) lunch

Here is what I learned🧵 Let me start by acknowledging how thankful I am for the commitment & effort of administrators, teachers, nurses, & food prep/transportation staff under enormously difficult circumstances. I deeply miscalculated the degree of technical challenges for opening schools safely. 2/n

An idea has captured my imagination.💡

Could we equalize access to tutoring by integrating it into the public school system?

We envision a blueprint for tutoring at a national scale to inform whether this is a goal we can & should pursue.

edworkingpapers.com/ai20-335

A thread . . 2/ The short version of our vision for taking tutoring to scale via @FutureEdGU.

future-ed.org/the-case-for-a…

COVID & K12 EDUCATION

How did the rapid move to remote schooling affect students, parents & teachers?

What approaches did schools take?

What have we learned to inform how we deliver public education this fall?

A THREAD on the emerging data & resources to answer these Qs.⬇️ 1. @CRPE_UW's The Evidence Project has collected an impressive collection of studies, original data, and essays all in one place. @UWBothell @aejochim

crpe.org/current-resear…

[Thread] In honor of national teacher appreciation day, I’m going to review 18 (stylized) facts about the K-12 teaching profession in the United States that shape teacher effectiveness. Thank you teachers! @NEAToday @AFTunion

Here we go – from training to turnover. 1/ FACT #1) K-12 teachers constitute the second largest occupation in the U.S.

# of K-12 teachers ~ 3.8 million
# of lawyers & doctors combined ~ 2.4 million

The sheer size of the teacher labor market has major implications for teacher quality. 2/

nces.ed.gov/programs/diges…

[THREAD] I've grown increasingly frustrated w/ outdated & unrealistic interpretations of effect sizes that ignore costs & scalability . . . so I decided to propose a new approach

"Interpreting Effect Sizes of Education Interventions"⬇️. I welcome feedback
scholar.harvard.edu/mkraft/publica… The default approach to interpreting effect sizes is still to apply Cohen's benchmarks from a half century ago. This has a range of negative consequences: underpowered studies, gross misinterpretation, dismissal of programs w/ "small" effects, & pursuit of unrealistic gains. /2

[THREAD] Today @RANDCorporation released a major study of the @gatesfoundation's efforts to improve teacher effectiveness through evaluation & human capital reforms. I've waded through the 500+ page report so you don't have to. Here is what I took away.

rand.org/pubs/research_… If you are looking for an overview, this won't be it. Even the executive summary was 25 pages! Check out these articles published today by @matt_barnum in @Chalkbeat and @KevinMahnken in @The74:

chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2018/…

the74million.org/study-multi-ye…