Over the last year, as my role has expanded to include oversight of the various communications projects that emanate from our busy Office of Communications and Marketing at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I’ve been honored to be a part of some amazing work. Our award-winning alumni magazine, Ed., comes out of our shop, with an incredibly talented editor at the helm. The school’s long-running podcast, the Harvard EdCast, is also part of my purview, and I work with the host/producer to plan episodes and seasonal arcs, as well as to plan and improve content strategy and dissemination. I oversee content decisions about the HGSE home page and our digital news operation.

And of course, I keep a close eye on Usable Knowledge, which has now drawn more than 3 million unique page views since launch in September 2014. Check out some recent editorial initiatives we’ve created for Usable Knowledge: series on teen anxiety and preventing sexual harassment in schools, a piece on new ways to bolster student success, and a piece on the pedagogy of play. Exciting stuff!

Since my last post, I’ve taken on full leadership responsibility for Usable Knowledge, a Harvard-based educational news source I’ve helped shape since its launch three years ago. The aim: to become a vital source of highly trustworthy information about what works in education. The idea is that when teachers, principals, district administrators, policymakers, or parents have questions about education, they will come to us and find credible, accessible, evidence-based answers. And we’re doing our best to live up to that mission every day, growing the site to nearly 1.7 million unique page views since launch, growing our newsletter subscription base to 46K, and contributing significantly to the Ed School’s overall growth and stature. Visit the site to get the full vibe. The work we’re doing — connecting research to practice, finding the barriers that separate *what we know to work* from what is actually occurring in schools and classrooms — reflects a growing awareness among players on both sides of that equation that educators (and students, and families, and taxpayers) have much to gain from incorporating evidence-based practices into their work. As I’ve learned — and as I’ve discussed on panels at SxSWedu and AERA — this is work that many institutions are starting to think about, but the Ed School was at the forefront in valuing this mandate highly enough to create a communications channel solely dedicated to it. We speak to an audience of educators that may be entirely unaffiliated with Harvard — a true example of how universities can lead in the dissemination of knowledge. (Which is very much part of the higher ed mission — or should be, right?)

I’ve done a couple of pieces for Usable Knowledge that look at the challenges that teens and young adults face as they navigate the online world. This piece explores new research showing that idealistic young people tend to stop talking about their civic views online as they get older, fearing repercussions and bullies. Are there consequences for our democracy if passionate civic actors go quiet in the digital town square?

Sometimes the education jargon gets you down — as a writer, and as a parent trying to decipher the instruction manual that is my son’s second-grade report card. Here’s my little blog piece about putting the edu-speak in a corner.

A new piece for Wellesley magazine, looking at one college’s battle against the runaway A’s. How do you take a stand against grade inflation without putting your students at a disadvantage (or raising the hackles of parents and faculty)?

Since late July, I’ve been working on a website launched by the Harvard Graduate School of Education that aims to put education research into the hands of teachers, policymakers, and educational leaders. The site is called Usable Knowledge —  a.k.a. @uknowhgse in the Twitterverse. It’s been pretty life-affirming to see how many good people are creating good ideas to support schools, teachers, and students. There’s a real positive charge at HGSE, and it’s exciting to bring some of that out into the world. The site launched on September 8; it’s early days yet, but here are some of my favorite posts:

• Facing a Higher Climb — raising doubts about the value of degrees from those big online for-profits.
• Making Feedback Count — new (and free, open source) survey tool, scientifically rigorous, distributed by cool analytics company Panorama Education, helps teachers get a sense of what their students are responding to and what’s holding them back.
• Adventures in Programming — time for everyone to learn to code, even nervous teachers!

And just saying, I’m feeling pretty hip — I’m a web-only writer for the first time in my career (hello, 21st century, 14 years later).

Happy to supplement my previous post with a link to the finished viewbook I helped create for the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, wonderfully assembled by BC’s Office of Marketing Communications. I wrote the profiles and program information and gathered the quotes from a series of conversations over two months last spring.

http://issuu.com/bcua/docs/bc_stm_viewbook2014?e=0/9672858

I’ve been interviewing faculty and students at Boston College’s School of Theology and Ministry this spring in order to write the copy for an ambitious new edition of the school’s viewbook. It has been a surprising and appropriately uplifting experience. The people I’ve talked to share a willingness to be contemplative, to listen, and to attend to the needs of others — none too common in the world these days. They don’t come across as overtly religious, whatever that means in my stereotyped, very-lapsed-Catholic vision of such; there’s no didacticism or sense of otherness or removal from the world. If anything, these students and teachers seem more warmly and fully integrated into the world than most people, but with an anchor and a sense of purpose that I admire. I felt inspired by so many of the students I spoke with, and I know that the world will be a better place with them out working in it.

One of my favorite tasks at Harvard was also one of the most difficult to get right, and most critical not to get wrong: Composing the citations that are read aloud each year at the Graduate School’s annual Centennial Medals celebration — an alumni award ceremony held the day before Commencement. These citations are meant to summarize each Medalist’s career, testify to her influence, and draw on the words of key friends and mentors to paint a rich portrait of a life’s work. It helps (and daunts) that the winners are always famous in their fields, highly esteemed by their peers, and revered by their former students. You can read the citations I wrote for this year’s group of award winners. Not hard to find good things to say about these folks; the challenge is to make the words match the deeds.

I recently left my full-time job as director of communications for Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, but I stayed on as a freelancer to oversee the editorial production of the spring 2014 Colloquy. As a swan song, this one was a beauty — for the cover story, we looked at work by archaeologist Jason Ur and his team to uncover ancient cities and landscapes of the Near East. Ur uses vintage aerial photography (like the 1938 image shown on our cover, from Britain’s Royal Air Force) and declassified intelligence satellite photos to trace the contours of early civilizations. I worked with the writer and the subject to shape and illustrate a story that shows how and why cities grew up where they did, and how land-use patterns remain remarkably consistent over time.

With this last issue, I also wanted to showcase, emphatically, the amazing potential of the graduate students I had covered for the past five years. After more than 15 years in higher-ed communications, I’m still idealistic about the academic endeavor, even as university marketing has become an ever bigger and steelier enterprise, often obscuring, rather than illuminating, the substance of the work being done on campuses today. In this Colloquy, I did two stories about Harvard PhD students who hope to make an impact — one group by bringing top-flight science education to their native Mexico, and the other who are making important discoveries across scientific disciplines and taking public roles in spreading the news. In an age where federal funding for science is under fire, these scientists-in-training believe it’s crucial for science to find its voice.