In-Person Convening Child Care Policy Research Partnership - Participant Feedback

Brainstorming and Topic Selection Exercise

(These instructions will be shared during the final session on Thursday, ~4:20 p.m., Thursday Dec 5; there is no paper handout associated with these instructions. Grantees may consult their notes on the Seeking Opportunities Handout to participate in this brainstorming session.)

We’d like to hear your ideas for how the Community of Practice can support you and the goals of cross-collaboration. As you can see from the slide, we have two questions before us:

1. Keeping in mind the goals of cross-project communication, collaboration and dissemination, how can the Community of Practice best support you and these goals?

2. What cross-collaboration topics would you like to discuss?

First, I’d like some quick responses on the first question.

Does anyone have a response? I’m going to ask ___________ to write the responses down so we can all see them.

And now, let’s spend some time brainstorming on specific cross-collaboration possibilities or other topics you would like to discuss further. We’re particularly interested in identifying areas for further exploration, such as:

• common research questions (i.e., decline in family child care, equity of access to care)

• common research methods (i.e., engaging home-based providers in research),

• common measures or instruments (i.e., measuring PD experiences)

Please note that the topics may be broad or narrow. We are interested in topics that we can discuss further tomorrow, as well as topics that we can discuss at future web meetings or in-person meetings.

Let’s try generating topics. Anyone want to toss out a topic that we can put up on our list?

[Moderator leads group through brainstorming. After brainstorming, there is a period where participants are invited to ask any clarifying questions and to identify if any topic areas should be aggregated into a larger topic, or spilt into smaller topics]

We now want to select topics of highest interest. You all should have 2 yellow dots, 2 green dots and 6 blue dots.

• Place up to two yellow dots next to topics you would like to discuss tomorrow.

• Use up to two green dots for additional topics of high interest, that either aren’t in your top two, or are things you would rather discuss in the future.

Place as many blue dots as you like on topics that are of medium interest to you. Things that don’t rank in the top 4 topics, but still are topics you would enjoy hearing more about or discussing in the future.

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