Throughout this academic year, I will be using this Initiatives column to share parts of the college’s strategic plan. My goal is to help you understand the goals and how we aim to reach them, and to help you see yourself in the plan as someone who can not only help to implement it, but also can benefit from it.

This week’s initiatives column will focus on the first two action items of goal 4 (Outreach, Dissemination and Partnerships), objective 2 (Outreach and Dissemination) in our strategic plan for 2021-25. You can read the full plan on our website.

This objective calls on us to develop and implement effective outreach and dissemination strategies that ensure we are recognized widely as a leader by the general public, educators and policymakers across all levels of education at the regional, state, national and international levels.

The first action item calls on us to improve access to and visibility of work in the College of Education.

There are three implementation tasks associated with this action item:

• Assess the use and effectiveness of current outreach and dissemination strategies.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to identify effective outreach and dissemination strategies such as videos, webinars, practitioner briefs, policy briefs, research summaries and mini conferences.
• Based on results from the first two bullet points, develop a college-wide outreach and dissemination strategy that widely disseminates the variety of initiatives in the college.

The second action item calls on us to facilitate the publication of practitioner and policy briefs, particularly those focused on essential literacies, social justice, essential literacies, and mental health and well-being, by members of the College of Education.

There are five implementation tasks associated with this action item:

• Hire an expert in digital publication design and layout.
• Develop the capacity of students and faculty to write for non-academic audiences by creating a course, holding workshops and providing individual support.
• Streamline the process by which policy and practitioner briefs are reviewed and approved for dissemination.
• Publish policy and practitioner briefs that address important topics identified by practitioners around the commonwealth and distribute digitally to educational organizations, especially policies regarding equity, systemic racism, social justice, mental health and well-being, and essential literacies.
• Collect data on the reach of these briefs and use it to refine the mechanisms for dissemination to targeted audiences.

Coming up

The next Initiatives column will be the last one on the topic of the strategic plan and will review action items 3 and 4 of goal 4, objective 2.