Throughout this academic year, I have used this Initiatives column to share parts of the college’s strategic plan. My goal has been 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 be the last one in the series, and will focus on the last 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 third action item calls on us to provide consultation, mentoring and/or professional development to recent College of Education graduates employed as EC-12 educators on how to address issues of equity and diversity, mental health and well-being, and essential literacies in the classrooms and in our schools.

There are two implementation tasks associated with this action item:

• Offer professional development seminar series, including those that provide Act 45 and Act 48 hours, that address: equity and diversity in classrooms and schools; mental health and well-being; essential literacies; and the effective selection and use of technologies in content delivery and pedagogy.
• Create supports for faculty to engage in helping school district personnel develop their professional skills to address essential literacies as well as issues of equity, diversity and systemic racism.

The fourth action item calls on us to disseminate findings of research partnerships through various means.

There are four implementation tasks associated with this action item:

• Create and maintain a web space dedicated to dissemination of College of Education research for practitioners and other interested constituents including Penn State students.
• Create an in-house, free access, web-based research publication administered by College of Education faculty and graduate students that is devoted to all forms of educational research addressing social justice, essential literacies, and mental health and well-being.
• Hold an annual College of Education conference that rotates themes of essential literacies, social justice, and mental health and well-being.
• Work with the communications team and marketing specialist to showcase research addressing social issues to help establish the College of Education's leadership with a local, state, national and global presence.

As with the rest of the plan, this is a work in progress, and while we have made progress, we still have a lot to do before we can call these action items complete. Know that we are working hard to increase our resources through which we can communicate and market what we do here in the college to the greater University community, to the region, the state, our nation and the world. Stay tuned …