The Regional Educational Laboratory Midwest (REL Midwest), one of ten regional educational laboratories funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, serves the educational needs of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Explore these vidoes and documentaries to learn more about the topics we cover.

Rural school districts, educators, and students have different experiences than their urban and suburban counterparts. The Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs) are designed to help fill this gap. These labs, which are funded by the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education, serve as research alliances that examine and address high-priority regional needs, such as college and career readiness, educational equity, and teacher preparation and performance.

Repackaging findings in an accessible way for practitioners to understand may be a good first step towards research impact, but without practitioner involvement from the outset, the research may still be deemed irrelevant. In this commentary originally published on the London School of Economics and Political Science's Impact Blog, Julie Kochanek looks at how education researchers have formed partnerships with practitioners to negotiate the research agenda itself.