Introducing CEDER's Blog: Sharing experiences and learning together
As a dynamic university-based center, we at the School of Education Center for Education Design, Evaluation, and Research (CEDER) would like to share our experiences and provide a platform for our students, staff, and partners to be able to communicate across a range of topics.
By showcasing a wide range of projects, partners, and expertise, we believe this blog will be useful to new and veteran evaluation, education and research professionals, and potential partners. Our team's expertise represents CEDER's three strands: education design, evaluation, and research. The work we do is guided by a utilization-focused, equity-based approach, which serves our mission of advancing equity and excellence in education.
We invite you to learn with us as we adapt our practice to an ever-changing landscape. We will be sharing resources, stories, and tips and tricks across our three strands.
With respect to instructional and curricular design, you will learn about our overall approach to design work as well as gain insights into our ongoing curriculum development and teacher professional learning projects. You'll also learn about our collaborations with a variety of partners, both within and outside the University of Michigan. From statewide education initiatives like the Essential Practices for Disciplinary Literacy to targeted curriculum development projects with partners like the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, our design team is engaged in an exciting range of work that we look forward to sharing.
Related to evaluation, we will cover topics such as evaluation design, data visualization, and quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods analyses and reporting. You will learn about our work with a diverse range of partners, including, for example, work on federally funded projects with faculty across campus, with the State of Michigan, foundations, and with community-based organizations in Detroit. Our evaluation work includes multi-sited and single site projects that offer college-access and K-12 STEM programming. Our team also provides high-quality experiential training in evaluation to interns from the School of Education master's programs as part of our mission to provide authentic student experiences and build the field of evaluation professionals
Finally, CEDER staff support high-quality research through activities such as crafting proposals, stewarding proposals through the U-M submission process, managing active research projects, and mentoring students to become better researchers. We frequently work with faculty from within SOE and across all three U-M campuses to help them tell their stories to potential funders. In our posts related to research, we will discuss topics such as grant proposal preparation, budgeting tips, and what to do when your proposal isn't funded.
Contributing to the blog over the upcoming year will include a variety of stakeholders, including faculty, full-time staff, graduate students, clients, and interns. We look forward to highlighting a variety of work from a variety of perspectives. Please subscribe, reach out if you would like a certain topic covered, or have questions about our work, or if you’ve just found something particularly useful. We hope to hear from you.
Until next time,
The CEDER team
