What are the best ways to stay current with education research?

Sector conferences are a great resource for learning about new research. If we cannot attend in person, checking conference hashtags on Twitter and Linkedin can often give great insight to the research being presented, and can even make it easy to connect with researchers directly. Many researchers are eager to share their work to wider audiences, so following them on these platforms can make it easier to be alerted about their ongoing work.

To stay current with education research, you can follow reputable education journals, such as the "Journal of Education Research" or "Educational Policy," to receive the latest research articles.

Social media: follow ADE, MIEE and Google Educators. They often curate and share content. Also, subscribe to newsletter from governmental institutions and universities.

Understanding how to evaluate research is a tool that educators should develop. While educational research is valuable, some of it is poorly done and yet the conclusions are uncritically accepted as truth simply because an article may appear in a journal or because certain organizational institutions popularize the concepts pushed in the research.

Subscribing to academic journals and newsletters is an invaluable resource for keeping abreast of the latest findings in educational research. This proactive approach allows for continual professional development and offers insights that can be directly applied to one's teaching methods, assessment strategies, or administrative decisions. Moreover, the utility of such subscriptions extends beyond the individual articles; tables of contents and abstracts often serve as curated lists of evolving research trends. Receiving notifications through email alerts or RSS feeds is an added benefit that ensures one remains current. Thus, subscriptions serve as both a repository and a conduit for contemporary educational discourse.

I believe that you need to be part of positive social circles for this. An example is groups surrounding the Science of Reading. Educators are unpacking years of misinformed reading instruction and leaning on each other for new resources and discussion.

PLC (Professional Learning Communites) have immensely helped me get introduced to new concepts of teaching pedagogies, explore writers/speakers/academicians across the globe. My network ranges from the social media groups to people we meet during a face to face PD network to subscribing to pages I happen to visit during a resource hunt.

While collegiate leaders usually have access to peer-reviewed research, this is not often the case for K12 leaders. This really limits the ability to understand what the research actually says, and its validity to the situation you may be facing. Some ways of getting access to peer-reviewed academic journals is to find out if your professional association or alma mater provides access. If these aren't ways of getting access, consider adjunct teaching at night at a community college or taking a community college course, to get access to their academic journals.

Another valuable approach to staying current with education research is to actively engage with online communities and forums dedicated to educational topics. While webinars and podcasts provide excellent opportunities to learn from experts, participating in discussions within online communities offers a unique way to share your perspectives, seek advice, and collaborate with fellow educators and researchers. Platforms like LinkedIn Groups are fantastic spaces to connect with educators, administrators, and researchers from around the world.

Consider doing lesson studies at your educational institution and publishing the results. This action research method was pioneered by Japan, and is a great way to not only test how research can be applied at your school, but also expand on how it can be used by other educators. Lesson study is where teachers collaborate with one another in small groups to rigorously go through the entire life cycle of a lesson, from learning goals, to lesson planning, to doing the lesson, and having it observed, to then revise based on what was learned, and publish what was learned for others to learn from.

This is a very good suggestion! I will try to implement it in my classroom and give feedback when possible after sufficient time has passed for the experiment to have gathered sufficient data.

Many universities and research institutes have calendars of free talks (online and in person) about their research. Attending such events, especially in person, empowers you with the latest research in bite size chunks and extends your professional network. Building such relationships with researchers in your field is a great way to keep up to date in a time friendly way for busy educators and school leaders.

I'm quite fond of ResearchGate.net - You can follow various researchers and receive alerts when new articles are published. It also gives you an opportunity to connect personally with the researchers. If you have a few key authors you would like to follow, this is a great way to keep up.

Expand beyond just "education research". Education is by definition the most trans-disciplinary field. So look at research from business, from the social sciences, from the neurosciences, as well as from the individual subject matters being taught, to see what might be of value to your school.

As a core group of learners, we get everyone in the group to bring something new to the table during our periodic interaction, with an insight of how have they being using that research. This not only exposes us to new learnings but helps us envision how it can be implemented too. Taking up a smaller courses on platforms like Coursera has helped me dig deeper into the aspects of pedagogical research. Usually they are by good University practitioners and has lots of content in them.

Adding such educational academic journals in digital formats to such services as Apple's News+ as well as making them available them easily (and cheaply if not free of cost) to K12 educators would be a great benefit.