Using video interviews from the 2018 Empirical Educator summit, I reflect three months afterward on the lessons learned and the progress that was beginning to coalesce. It’s easy to get smart people together and have a satisfying conversation. Much harder is making something happen afterward.
Drawing inspiration from the wisdom of our 2018 Empirical Educator summit attendees, I wrote a short post on e-Literate about the need for a clearer sector-wide mission statement that can help us to identify and tackle the big challenges together.
After the first day of our first summit—at Stanford University in late February of 2018, we asked our diverse cohort of attendees a few questions about empirical education, starting with what they thought an empirical educator is. Keep in mind that many of the attendees were meeting for the first time and had relatively little idea of what we were trying to accomplish coming in.
We were startled by how much progress we made on finding common ground in just one day. The results are shown in the video footage on the home page of this web site.
Inspired by their answers, I wrote my own post expanding on my idea of what an empirical educator is. Specifically I wrote about four levels of empirical education: (1) intuitive, (2) mindful, (3) meta-cognitive, and (4) social.
Duke University’s Bridgette Martin Hard and Matthew Rascoff write about the value of medium-scale collaborations—using the Empirical Educator Project as an example—at Inside Higher Ed.
In this post announcing the formation of the project in early February 2018, we describe our thinking at the time. In keeping with the spirit of the idea, we framed the idea as very much an experiment. We still approach it with that spirit.
Our thinking has evolved since then and will hopefully continue to evolve, but you can see the seeds of the current incarnation in the original post.