It's been a little over a month since the DR K-12 PI meeting in Washington, D.C. It's been a busy time for me, but a productive one, which has allowed me to put thoughts and impressions of that meeting into perspective.

As a CADRE Fellow, I attended the DR K-12 PI meeting, which was the first PI meeting of my career. I was not sure what to expect... perhaps a kind of smaller-scale research conference? My team even prepared posters anrad materials for this meeting, as if it were a conference. As it were, I was not too far off, but the differences I noted were very instructive. While research conferences are geared towards the dissemination of research, the DR K-12 PI meeting seemed better suited as a forum for discussing future trends in research and for discussing how these trends respond to the greater interests of society as represented by the various funding agencies. I got a real sense of how funding agencies communicate their changing priorities to the research community, and how the community responds to those changes. This was a new mode of thinking for me, one that I had only encountered rarely and informally at research conferences.

As guests to the meeting, we had no set agenda, but that fact didn't get in the way of having a great professional learning experience. The greatest take-away for me was a reminder that educational research does not exist in a vacuum; it is a part of a greater ecology with many stakeholders. In our daily work as researchers, it's easy to be consumed by the vicissitudes of academia and completely lose sight of the greater forces at play, namely governments and the societal ideas they represent. Public education is a huge endeavor, and educational research is, in no small way, led by the needs of society as a whole.

These types of insights, I feel, are invaluable to me as a researcher at the beginning of my career. I see the value of keeping in mind, when planning research, not only the near effects (Will this get funded? Will this get published?), but also the ultimate benefits of contributing to the development agenda of public education.