Designing Successful Professional Meetings and Conferences in Education: Planning, Implementing, and Evaluating

Susan Mundry, Edward Britton, Senta Raizen, and Susan Loucks-Horsley

Foreword

The authors' idea for a guide to designing and convening effective conferences and meetings has grown over many years of putting together meetings of all sizes, from 6 people to 600 people, convened for various purposes, and from attending many more. In searching for help in their own endeavors, they found some guides that dealt very generally with the what, where, and how of holding conferences, but none that addressed the importance of designing meetings to promote learning. This guide emphasizes how to have people work together effectively, understand new ideas, and produce tangible outcomes.

Our perception that such a guide was needed has been reinforced by our experience in conducting Annual Forums for the National Institute for Science Education (NISE). The Forum is the largest and most visible of the Institute's meetings, through which it reaches out to professional organizations, scientific bodies, and educational associations to communicate about its research, help shape its work, and disseminate its findings and recommendations. 

The Forum is unusual in that even though it draws 300 individuals from all educational levels and institutions, the various science and mathematics fields, and government and industry, it is designed for a great deal of give-and-take among the participants. It includes opportunities for every person to contribute to the substance of the discussions, because we learned to design the meeting for productive engagement and learning for all. Similarly, the Forum Proceedings include not only the papers of invited panelists, but also a careful analysis of the discussions and individual think pieces produced by the many other participants. In this way, the Forum is able to draw on the rich expertise of all participants to advance the state of knowledge in a particular area of importance in science and mathematics education.

The authors wrote this guide initially to help all staff and clients of the Institute, but we now hope it will be useful to many more who plan conferences and meetings. We particularly want to thank the National Science Foundation for its continuing support of the Institute and the Annual Forum. Special thanks are due to all our colleagues at the Institute who collaborate with us each year to make the Forum and its proceedings an integral and successful part of our joint endeavor.

Andrew Porter
Director, NISE
Madison, Wisconsin

 

 

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