I love educational psychology conferences. I love the big fat program with 10 million presentations on some obscure facet of learning that I can file away under “Empirically Proven!” in my mind. Then, at cocktail parties or in my practice, I can merge all these facts and espouse something interesting about child development. (I do recognize that “Interesting” is a subjective term.)*
A few years ago, I helped put together an interesting conference, held in a secluded nature setting in Northern California. The conference theme was predetermined by my place of business as, “Exploring The Roots of Educational Service.” It was all about self-discovery and reflection about why you are an educator. As an empiricist from a research-oriented graduate school program, this was a challenge for me. What? No regression analyses with p