The Collaborative for Educational Services (CES) is proud to announce the launch of the CES Center for Emerging Educational Practice, a cutting-edge resource hub dedicated to supporting PreK-12 educators and administrators, particularly those in small and mid-sized districts. This dynamic new website, emergingedpractices.org, provides free, practical, research-based resources to address some of the most pressing challenges in public education today.
Empowering Educators and Administrators
The CES Center for Emerging Educational Practice is designed to support educators who face unique challenges in providing equitable and innovative education. By offering research-based guides, toolkits, and frameworks, the Center helps to equip educators and administrators with the tools they need to help all students thrive, particularly in the face of persistent equity and opportunity gaps, emerging technologies, and the increasing need for specialized support for marginalized student populations.
“Public education is at a crossroads, with unprecedented challenges requiring new approaches,” said Dr. Todd H. Gazda, Executive Director of the Collaborative for Educational Services. “The Center for Emerging Educational Practice is a collaborative space where educators can access innovative, equity-centered solutions and services that respond to the complex realities of today’s classrooms.”
A Collaborative and Interdisciplinary Approach
The work of the Collaborative for Educational Services specialists combines expertise across multiple disciplines—content specialists, social justice trainers, instructional technology, research, and evaluation—to advance education through comprehensive and customized approaches, grounded in an equity lens and responding to challenging district, school, and educator concerns. The Center for Emerging Educational Practices has been created to offer educators the practical, evidence-based tools, guides, and frameworks that have been developed through that work.
Said Rebecca Mazur, Ph.D., CES Senior Evaluation Research Scientist, “Speaking as an evaluator at CES, a lot of the work that we do with districts and schools is small scale and targeted. That can make it hard to tell the story of our work through an outcomes lens, because the objectives of the work are very specific to the case. But we are still employing theories, research, and ways of being and knowing that offer huge benefits elsewhere. There’s a really lovely challenge here about how we tell the story of our work when we are not talking about statistically significant outcomes from a numbers perspective; yet, the work may have real value for others.”
Innovative Resources for Educators
The Center offers a growing library of easily digestible, research-based resources available free of charge under Creative Commons licensing. The current resources provide actionable insights and guidance on critical topics, including:
- Generative Artificial Intelligence Policy for K-12 Education
- Equity Audits and Inquiry Cycles
- AI Policy and Instructional Techniques
- Teacher-Student Boundaries
By sharing these tools, CES aims to save educators time and provide a springboard for innovation in their own practice.
Said Sahara Pradhan, M.Ed., CES Research and Evaluation Specialist, “In the course of our work, CES has developed deep and ongoing expertise in many facets of educational and leadership practice, especially in the context of small districts, that could be of immediate and meaningful use to educators. By fostering an iterative process of research, reflection, dialogue, and design, CES is working to ensure that the resources chosen and created for the Center are useful, accessible, and responsive to the needs of educators.”
New Learning, Grounded in Research
The mission of the CES Center for Emerging Educational Practice is to empower educators and administrators as thought partners, providing them with the tools, insights, and support needed to navigate an ever-changing educational landscape.
The Center also makes connections between the work with educators and the research basis that supports it. Part of the intention is to bridge research and practice. When the work of CES generates new learning that is different or applied differently, the Center seeks to share that in order to advance the practice.
“We see ourselves as allies, fostering collaboration, grounding it in research, and co-creating practical solutions that make a real difference in classrooms, schools, and communities. I have learned that even the most brilliant ideas can be ethereal and ephemeral until they are made tangible. What’s in the Center is the work made real; the tangible artifact of the work and approach.” said Mazur.
About the Collaborative for Educational Services (CES)
The Collaborative for Educational Services (collaborative.org) is a public nonprofit, educational service agency that offers direct and support services to its 37 member school districts and to various state and district-level clients in Massachusetts and across New England. The work of CES includes a range of direct services for children and youth particularly those at risk; professional development and training for educators and professionals; and coaching, training, evaluation and technical assistance for districts, schools, and community organizations. CES work combines expertise across multiple disciplines in PreK-12 education to advance equity and innovation. Through its work, CES develops practical, evidence-based tools and frameworks that respond to the challenges faced by districts, schools, and educators. The CES Center for Emerging Educational Practice is the latest initiative in CES’s commitment to empowering the educational community.
Visit the CES Center for Emerging Educational Practice.
