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Henno Theisens reports from the the seminar “Sharing knowledge for innovation”
Dutch Ministry of Education, 5 June 2007, The Hague, The Netherlands
I was invited to a seminar the ministry of education in the Netherlands organised within the framework of our Schooling for Tomorrow.
The meeting was an interesting combination of the themes of “futures thinking” and “evidence based policy” that featured Prof. dr. Marc Vermeulen (director IVA) and Prof. dr. Andrew Pollard (director TLRP) as invited speakers. Clearly the combination of these two themes is important. If futures thinking is more than crystal ball gazing it needs to draw on serious evidence to built robust scenarios. At the same time evidence to support policies will be used in the future but is based on the past and therefore shares some of the inherent tensions that future thinking faces. This is a complex terrain and the event did not really succeed in bridging the gap between these two themes.
Marc Vermeulen made an interesting presentation on the inability of human beings to make rational decisions, especially about the future. This research is well-known (Kahneman & Tversky, etc.), but what does it mean for example that people on average are more risk taking when it comes to small future gains and large losses and risk avoiding when it comes to large future gains and small losses? He then continued to talk about the ways in which we can deal with future uncertainties and the role that senarios can play in this process.
Andrew Pollard gave an interesting lecture on his very impressive Teaching and Learning Research Programm (TLRP) that started 10 years ago when there was a general feeling that educational research was not very good and needed to be improved. One of the ideas was that new relations between researchers, practitioners and policy makers had to be forged to improve educational research and increase Evidence Informed Education practices. One indicator for the success of TLRP is its rapid growth: at the start its budget was approximately 10 million pound, now that has quadrupled to 40 million pounds, with which 65 projects involving more than 500 researchers are supported.
What makes TLRP special is that it is not satisfied with just funding relevant research; it employs a wide range of strategies to pursue its mission:
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Early user engagement: users are engaged as partners throughout the projects
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Knowledge generation by project themes: control of coherence through identifying themes on which researchers can bid (only 10% selected).
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Knowledge synthesis by thematic work: thematic seminar series are organised where researchers and practitioners meet around relevant themes.
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Knowledge transformation for impact: Using journalists TLRP takes academic work and transforms it in ways that are actually useful for teachers.
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Capacity building for professionals
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Partnerships for sustainability: to ensure long term sustainability TLRP has created partnerships with organisations that maintain its websites, publish its articles etc…
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