Network Meeting 2017, Copenhagen

The NW1 meeting was attended by 57 people. In the meeting, after a short introduction and some general information, we opened the discussion about the scope and name of the network. The meeting seemingly agreed that the present name of the NW is problematic; it has been regarded as too complicated and even hard to remember. It also gives an impression that it overlaps with some other networks, especially with NW 10. "Teacher Education" and 26. "Educational Leadership". The conveners suggested a new name for the network: "Professional Learning and Development". However, a clear consensus of the name was not achieved, and therefore, we decided not to take further steps of the procedure. According to the guidelines of ECER, the network should first discuss about changing the name in the network meeting before the convenors would prepare a proposal to the Council and the annual Network Seminar or Link Convenors Meetings. Given that there was no clear consensus of the new name, we decided to continue the discussion among the conveners and the make another proposal to the NW meeting in Bolzano. We did not want to use the whole meeting time on this issue but invest it in enabling collaboration between the participants.

Thus, thematic collaboration was encouraged by dividing the group into small groups, for people to discuss in during the meeting and to continue contact. In the groups, the participants discussed about possible collaboration around themes such as induction of teachers as researchers, action research, development of experienced teachers close to retirement, induction and mentoring of new teachers, mentor training, models of professional learning and development, leadership development, professional development policies and school development strategies. The subgroups were asked to report back to the conveners if some concrete plans emerge. Some subgroups seemed to have more general talk while some others made very concrete plans about collaborative projects or organising symposia in ECER2018.

We also asked for new volunteers to participate in the NW activities. We asked the participants to write their name and email address on a list and tick the box if they were willing to review the papers for next ECER. We also asked for volunteers to chair the sessions in ECER2018, and asked also to tick the box to show the interest in joining the conveners' team. We explicitly expressed that we want to take both geographical and gender balance into account in the next elections which would take place in ECER2018.  After the meeting, we also sent a bulk email though the Conftool system to all the participants of the NW in 2017. As a result, we got 50 reviewers of proposals to ECER 2018, 31 volunteers for chairing the sessions in ECER2018, and 15 participants expressed their interest of becoming a new convener.