 Speaker number three, we're running through now with several ten minute presentations. So speaker number three is Garen Haller, Director of Strategic Development at the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund, and Garen's going to talk about the open science potential for early stage idea registration. Garen, yep, the clicker is here. Okay, can you hear me? Great. My name's Garen Haller, and I'm going to be talking about the open science potential for early stage idea registration. Let me just, there we go. So I'm at the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund, pronounced ERDF, where we're officially organized in 2021, and we build ambitious inclusive three-year programs with educators, researchers, and developers. And our work aims to tackle major and persistent teaching and learning challenges that disproportionately affect black and Latino students and students of all races experiencing poverty. We have a unique approach in our work in that we adopt a methodology called inclusive research and development, and it tries to, and approaches bridging researchers, educators and the development sector from the very beginning through to the end of the R&D process, all while trying to center equity by including practitioners that are closest to the problems in K-12 education that we're trying to tackle. This is what it looks like in an R&D roadmap when you have all stakeholders from the very beginning to the very end. I'm not going to talk about the entire process today because I have nine minutes, but what we're going to talk about is the early stage idea process. So when we include policymakers, developers, researchers, educators, and community members like parents and students in the conversation about what should the next major research and development initiative be to tackle issues of equity in K-12 education, we get full representation in that conversation. This is what it looks like. So when you recruit a group of people from a variety of professional experiences and lived experiences to tackle and identify what are the initiatives that should be adopted as the next major project in education to address issues of equity, you bring together a diverse group of stakeholders. This was our strategy committee. We recruited 13 people to put together a list of proposals of ideas that might be the next big idea to tackle in terms of K-12 education. This group generated 11 ideas. I asked for five. They said, could we work with six? I was like, okay, we can negotiate, we can do six. So we supported this group to form six research teams, and this is what it looks like. So now we have 60 people involved, six teams of 10 going in and getting the details of the six most promising proposals that came from our strategy committee, and this is the phase that we refer to as the study groups. The study groups are getting the details of the proposals. So effectively the stages that we've processed or looked at just recently was strategy committee coming up with the 11 ideas and down selecting to six, study groups spending months getting the details, and then we conducted a concept review in January where we had a community event and we had the community evaluate these proposals, looking at the proposals that were coming from these six groups with broad representation of stakeholders. And now we're in the knowledge sharing phase, so we're starting to share some of the work and the outcomes. So the six ideas were organized by the strategy committee into three categories of working on projects that focused on income and quality, sustainable teaching, and student-centered learning. And just as an example, to give you a sense, our program work is looking at the 20 to 30 year horizon of what are the issues that we need to be addressing today so that 20 years from now we're prepared for what we're going to be facing in terms of issues of equity and K-12 education. I think a really good example in the student-centered learning category was the opportunity for multilingualism. In 20, 30 years from now, the number of multilingual students that the K-12 system will be serving is going to just increase year over year until 20 years from now. Our K-12 system wasn't ideally designed with multilingualism as the core concept of who we're serving, and there's a lot of opportunity that we could explore in shifting what K-12 education does on that topic. But all six of these promising proposals have merit to them, and they came from community engagement. What I asked each group to produce is an opportunity study, and this opportunity study was designed to communicate the very beginning of the research process to a broad audience. You'll notice it's a really simple straightforward publication, abstract, problem, one page of text, one page of visualization, opportunity, one page of text, one page of visualization. This is a publication that's designed to reach out to stakeholders at the very beginning of the process. What I want to highlight, we had mentioned coordination of foresight in our previous conversation, I want to highlight that I asked some foresight methodologies be used in this process like the drivers. Drivers are effectively organic, changes that are going on for decades over time, and they're going to continue to influence change over the decades to come. An example driver, just for this conversation, is the notion of changing workplaces. We've been gravitating towards hybrid and remote work, but it has been going on for decades. We had a little bit of an acceleration related to the pandemic. But that's a force of change. And we need to be thinking about those forces of change as we frame the problems and the opportunities that we're going to be pursuing with research. And what's interesting is that when you get multiple proposals together to formulate opportunity studies tackling the same central problem, and you see the different possible futures that you can explore. It starts to expose a little bit of the root system, the drivers beneath. The forces of change that are interconnected around the problems and the opportunities are themselves a form of insight that can help us make better decisions about what we need to be advancing in terms of R&D and education. That's just one component of a benefit. There's benefits to both ideas and leadership. Early stage transparency can help us identify duplicative efforts. And as I said earlier today, duplication from an individualistic perspective means that they win and I didn't win. But duplication in a collective perspective is there's a collaborative opportunity there. And I think there's an opportunity and a shift that we're moving towards in scientific exploration that's moving much more in the collaborative vein. We actually have an exact occurrence of this where there's a field leading expert that led one of our study groups that was like this was a wonderful opportunity that let me pull on my strengths and let me vision a future that was desirable for education. But I like my day job and I don't want to leave it. So I want to share this idea with the field. And it's possible that there's a leader out there that's prepared to take this project on. And we need to have avenues for people that have that field leading capacity to share those ideas with the field. And then we need to be prepared to develop the leaders so that they're prepared to take on those challenges. So in the leadership development, I think by offering a publication channel of an opportunity study, we can start to acknowledge people that are giving us those field directing results in their foresight and their thinking through the future of the most desirable futures that we want to be achieving. I think we can increase visibility into collective concerns. Collective concerns and desires can form and support collaboration. And then most importantly, we can also think about the support of leadership development. So at Erative, we tackle really big projects, really big initiatives. And almost any leader that we bring in is going to require some level of development. So what we're really focused on is how do we remove barriers of entry so that when we get the right ideas and we get the right leaders, we can put all of our energy behind their success. Fourth coming in the next month or two will be publishing all six of the opportunity studies that I just illustrated, as well as a toolkit that illustrates the methodology and the rationale for how we went about producing them. And we think there's a possibility that other fields or other disciplines might benefit from exploring something like sharing early stage ideas in a registration process. Effectively, all of the benefits that we see in registering a study might have some potential applications to registering an early stage idea before a funding decision. And that's really the exploration here. And we'd like to share that and expand. And also, as we continue this inclusive R&D effort on our side, we'd like to hear from this community on what else should we be thinking about as we generate more of these studies. I've got time for questions, but I do want to say that I've got a QR code here for you to join our online community. So we have the Community Garden of Research and Development where we're coordinating expertise and lived experiences around the issues that we're tackling. And we're facilitating community events and conversations. And I'd love for many people in this room to join. So please get out your phones and scan that code and sign up your interest forms. Great, Garan, thank you very much. We have indeed got a couple of minutes for questions. If anyone would like to come forward to a microphone. Is that someone moving there on the? Oh, yes. Far off. Melissa Klein-Strule at MIT. So you asked about how a model like this might sort of work in dialogue with meta science or kind of meta scientific approaches. And at least in some parts of the meta science discipline, a lot of work gets done by individual early career researchers in their own individual particular context who just kind of race forward and build something. And that has a lot of positive and negatives. And one of the things that I'm curious about listening to your talk is that it seems like what you described requires a lot of upfront coordination, a lot of bringing together stakeholders from very, very diverse contexts that that individual person wouldn't have access to, but maybe would benefit from. So I'm curious to know maybe from kind of coming in two directions. The first is how would a project like yours kind of most productively work with these like maybe more smaller localized efforts that have proceeded quite far. And maybe on the other hand, what kind of versions of this model do you think would be achievable with maybe much, with less institutional support, let's say that. With less institutional support, yeah. Yeah, so I think that the first question that you're raising, I think we absolutely think of this model as one being extremely supportive of early career researchers. I think that one of the things that we can coordinate with the community involvement with an early career researcher is building on that momentum, but building that momentum informed by broader perspectives. So I absolutely see an alignment between people in that stage of their career and this model. And I would really encourage people at that stage in their career to click on that QR code and say that I'm ready to lead a project because that's what you're saying is that you have the momentum and you're ready to lead and there's ways that this model can be supportive of that. Is that, yeah. Great, well if there's no more, we will wrap up. Thank you again to Garen for his excellent talk. Thank you. Thank you.