The professional learning team at Learning Without Tears leads the design, development, facilitation, impact assessment, and progressive improvement of professional learning for thousands of educators, therapists, and other practitioners who use Learning Without Tears integrated solutions to build children's foundational early literacy skills. The…

The flipped classroom is an innovative pedagogy that shifts content delivery outside the classroom, utilizing in-class time for interactive learning. The preclass and in-class activities in this framework encourage individualized learning and collaborative problem-solving among students, fostering engagement. The Innovative Flipped Learning…

The Annual Conference for Mississippi State University Extension is the sole event at which the majority of Extension personnel gather for networking, organizational updates, recognition of efforts, and professional development. Extension leaders plan this conference with intended outcomes but without ever evaluating those outcomes beyond attendee…

A relevant learning space for academics, especially junior researchers, is the academic conference. While conference participation has long been associated with personal attendance at the conference venue, virtual participation is becoming increasingly important. This study investigates the perceived value of a purely virtual academic conference…

Many postsecondary institutions host a knowledge dissemination event for students to publicly share their scholarly, research, and creative works. These events improve student communication skills and self-efficacy. The authors propose that these events also can affect students' sense of belonging. CREATE is Vancouver Island University's…

Objectives and Setting: Student physical and psychosocial health is an area of concern in Canadian schools, as poor health can be a disrupting factor to both academic performance and quality of life. The Comprehensive School Health (CSH) approach is an internationally recognised framework that can promote student health and academic outcomes in…

Following a set of state meetings held throughout fall 2020, the Virginia Education Assessment Collaborative (VEAC) decided to offer a mini-conference in November 2020 to round out offerings and to buttress conversation around topics of high need and interest to Educator Preparation Providers (EPPs). Leveraging the familiar process of the…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine the effectiveness of attending the IDEAcon Conference virtually compared to attending the conference in-person. The study was conducted by surveying educators who attended both the IDEAcon conference in 2020, which was in person, and IDEAcon 2021 which was virtual. Using a Likert-like online…

Youth from socially marginalized populations are at increased risk of experiencing adolescent dating violence (ADV), since they are often directly impacted by root causes of violence (e.g., homophobia, racism). Because structural inequalities impact youth's experience of ADV, ADV is a social justice issue. In this paper, we describe a symposium…

The need for young leadership in the beef industry has become a rising concern as the average age of primary operators increases. Extension educators developed a leadership conference for beef producers with the primary objective to educate and develop leadership qualities in young cattle producers. To achieve the objective participants, age 18-40…

Vol. II: Short-Term Programs features eight OST STEM programs for females from across the United States that run one to three days in length, in most cases, a single day. In this book, the chapter authors describe their programs, the effectiveness of those programs, and practical implications of their program evaluation data. This book series is…

This paper considers the under researched area relating to defining and conceptualising non-formal teacher professional development. It makes the case for adopting the general term grassroots professional development, specifically when this is self-directed activity led by educators. The article serves the purpose of being a position paper for…

Teachers enhance their professional competencies, knowledge, and performance by attending various professional development activities, whose main goal is to assist them in helping students to achieve better results. The effectiveness of such events depends on matching the professional development to teachers' needs, experience, and objectives.…

Background: The COVID-19 outbreak came with an unprecedented opportunity to investigate how the new reality of social distancing and limited international travel will affect the organization of academic conferences. Objectives: Drawing on conceptualization of academic conferences as professional learning spaces, in this study, we examine the…

An unconference foregrounds informal, collaborative, participant-generated exchanges of information. Originally associated with technology firms and startups, unconferences are increasingly being held on topics like professional development in education. This paper discusses an unconference convened at Santa Barbara City College on online pedagogy…