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Making the Ask to Seal the Deal: Approaches to Asking for Letters of Support

10/6/2021

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​Nearly all award, job, or school applications require letters of support and these letters matter!  Letters of support are used by review committees to authenticate nomination statements and learn about the exceptional qualifications of the nominee. These letters are highly valued as evidence of the extraordinary work of the applicant. In fact, I have experience in which revising only the letters of support from a previously non-winning application resulted in a win. Letters of support influence the outcome!

If these letters are so important, who should write these letters and how will you ask? When considering letter writers, it can be difficult to know where to begin. To enhance your likelihood of success, there are several criteria to consider before selecting a writer and making the ask!

Who should write my letter of support?
Identifying letter writers can be tricky business. While you may be able to think about many people who would say nice things about you (no you cannot ask your mom), there are several criteria to consider as you make your selection.
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1) Is the person a previous recipient of the award or position? Previous winners of the award or position you are nominated for are highly regarded by the organization and committee bestowing this award. In addition, previous awardees will have particular insight into the organization that may impact how they frame their comments about you and your work.
2) Does this person meet the requirements of the award or position ? Awards may have specific requirements/recommendations for nominators or letter writers. The specific award application will provide guidance regarding your selection. For example, an award may require letters from students and faculty, practitioner collaborators, letters from outside of your institution, letters from organization members, or a letter from your direct supervisor or mentee. It is essential to have a letter reflecting each required person in the application materials. Even when not specifically required, selecting a diverse group of writers can ensure writers speak to different strengths of your work. For example, for a faculty position select letter writers to share about your research and teaching excellence.
3) Does this person meet the criteria of the award or position? Awards and positions always have specific criteria that characterizes an exemplary candidate. Successful applicants select letter writers who meet these criteria. If you are applying to a research award, select writers who are excellent researchers. If you are applying to a teaching award, select writers who are exceptional educators themselves. Often award or position applications require a statement about the qualifications or the CV of the letter writers in order to frame their letter within the context of their expertise.
3) Is the person well known in the field for the criteria? After you have identified writers who meet the award criteria, ask yourself, “Is this person the top in this field?” If the writer must be an organization member, ask yourself, “Is this person active in the organization?” Ask the most prominent, active, or senior person who knows your work well enough to speak candidly about it.
4) Does the person know your work well? It is important that your writers know your work well. Informed writers can better identify which of your amazing attributes to highlight for any specific award. They will have specific evidence to provide to support the arguments they make about your expertise and extraordinary contributions to the field. Pragmatically, someone who knows you may be more likely to find the time to write your letter of support.
5) Is the person a strong mentor or advocate? If the writer is a strong mentor or advocate they are likely to be more invested in writing your letter than otherwise. At minimum, they will likely complete your letter on time.
 
How Do You Invite Letter Writers to Write for You?
 I am always asked, “How well do I need to know my letter writers?” The answer is, it depends. Some letter writers you might know very well. For example, the award criteria may lead you to select your graduate advisor, a peer colleague, a student or a mentee. For other awards or positions, you may have met your writer just a few times at a conference, but they are on the steering committee for the awarding agency or are top in the field making them an excellent selection. Proactively prepare for soliciting letter writers by intentionally meeting folks at a conference or when they visit your institution. Ask to be introduced so you can at least begin your request email with, “I enjoyed our conversation when we met at…” Whether you know your letter writers well or not, there are some important steps you should take when inviting letter writers to write for you.
  1. Make it easy for writers to agree! Provide letter writers with all of the information they need to write you an outstanding letter. This includes:
    1. The award or position announcement highlighting the required/prefered criteria,
    2. Specific criteria or strengths you would like this writer to cover in their letter (note: this will be tailored to each writer so the collection of letters reflects all of your excellent skills),
    3. Your CV or resume documenting your stellar achievements,
    4. To whom the letter should be addressed and where the letter should be sent,
    5. Due dates (request an earlier date if you will collect and submit as part of your application/nomination package).
    6. Offers to write a draft letter are typically met with great appreciation!
  2. Ask early and ask often. Be sure you provide as much time as possible for your writers. In general, three to four weeks is a good rule of thumb for asking for a letter. If that is not possible, still ask, but offer as much time as you can.
Send email reminders one week and two days before the due date. When I ask for letters, I let writers know that I will send them reminders as the due date nears to follow-up with my initial request. This sets the expectation that email reminders will be sent. It is always a good idea to check in to see if writers need any last minute support!
Once I write my first letter of recommendation, I am very happy to revise it for a new award or position. Thus, feel free to ask your same letter writers for multiple letters if you are applying to multiple awards or positions and the letter writer meets the criteria.
 
Below we provide some example emails requesting letters of support for awards or positions. We hope you find them to be useful model texts as you Make the Ask to Seal the Deal!
 
 
Example emails:
Example #1 (unfamiliar)
 
Dear Dr. XXXXX
It was a pleasure talking with you about XXXXXX when we met at XXXXX conference. I am writing to ask if you would be willing to write a letter of recommendation for me for the XXXXXX award. I have included the criteria of the award here and hope you can speak to the importance of my research for under-resourced communities. I am attaching a draft letter for your convenience and my CV. The nomination package is due XXXX so please submit your signed letter on letterhead to XXXXXX at XXXXXXX.org.
Please let me know if you are willing to submit a letter on my behalf.
Sincerely,
XXXXX
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Blog Series: Recommendation LETTERS

10/6/2021

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I’m not sure where, but I recently read that writing letters of recommendation is “ubiquitous for academics or those following a research career.” Isn’t this the truth! It seems like a very short time ago that I was the student asking for a letter for graduate school or an award, but now, I am pretty consistently asked to write letters for students moving on in their academic careers. I know the weight that these letters can carry. I also know that I didn’t ever receive any sort of formal training or instruction on how to write an appropriate, impactful letter. If you are in the same boat, then you will love the series of posts that will be coming on our website over the next 6 months!
 
Our first post, written by our very own Dr. Hope Gerde, focuses on how to ask for a letter of support.  This post will be followed by one about writing letters of support for students for grad school and for faculty positions, with more to follow. We hope you find these helpful!
 
Mindy Bridges
​Chair of the Professional Development Committee

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Mentoring Event!

9/15/2021

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By: Dr. Beth Phillips and the Mentoring Committee​

Hi again POWER, a friendly reminder about our exciting upcoming event with very special guests. This Group Discussion Event will be held on Wednesday September 29th from 1-2:30 (eastern time) via Zoom.
 
Discussion Breakout Rooms will include the following topics, each co-facilitated by our invited guests and members of the mentoring committee.
 
Careers outside academia
Supporting diverse mentees
Promoting equity in research and dissemination
Writing statements for tenure and promotion
 
Invited guests who will be facilitating discussions include:
Nicole Patton Terry -Florida State University
Julia Mendez -University of North Carolina Greensboro
Carola Oliva-Olson – SRI International
Doré LaForett – Child Trends
 
Each attendee will have the opportunity to participate in multiple extended discussions.
 
To Register click HERE: https://fsu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_4HIflZkcXEKP34a
 
Please feel free to forward this email to colleagues, peers, and friends—non-members and those considering joining POWER are more than welcome to attend! We hope this will be very well attended to show the power of POWER to our guests!
 
We look forward to having you join us and our guests!
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Preregistrations

8/10/2021

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By. Sara A. Hart, Ph.D.

​            Many people are interested in preregistrations but are worried they don’t know how to do them or will do them wrong. What’s interesting about preregistrations is pretty much everyone who has been to graduate school has completed at least one preregistration: a prospectus! In your prospectus, you lay out your research questions, hypotheses, and plan for how you will collect and analyze your data, and often, you include a power analysis. Preregistration is when a researcher publicly posts their study plans before conducting the study, including aspects such as research questions, hypotheses, sampling plan, independent and dependent variables, and analysis plans. The preregistration is then posted openly on the Internet, with a timestamp, before the study is started.
              You might have also heard of registered reports, which are a type of preregistration that occurs with peer-review. Many of our field’s journals now have registered reports (e.g., Journal of Educational Psychology, Developmental Science; a full list is https://cos.io/rr/). With a registered report, you write the introduction and the methods section, including the proposed analysis and power analysis (making them just like a prospectus), before conducting the study. You then submit this to a journal for Stage 1 review. Review then occurs normally but rather than being focused on the results, it’s focused on the importance of the research question and the proposed methods. If the journal accepts your Stage 1 manuscript, the journal accepts the paper “in principle.” Then, you go and complete the study, write up the remainder of the paper (not changing the introduction or methods other than tense changes), and submit it as a Stage 2 manuscript. At this stage, the reviewers are contacted again to make sure you followed your plan and that the results are appropriately discussed and reported. But a Stage 2 manuscript cannot be rejected *because* of the results, helping reduce publication bias and protecting you if you get null effects (which are unfortunately hard to publish normally).
              Preregistering your study has numerous benefits. First, you might be required to do it if you are a federally funded investigator (it is one of the SEER principles!). Second, preregistration makes your a priori hypotheses clear, allowing you to differentiate between confirmatory and exploratory analyses. Third, preregistration reduces questionable research practices, such as peeking at data, selective reporting (e.g., looking for an effect over many related outcome variables and selecting to publish the one that was statistically significant only), HARKing (Hypothesizing After Results Known), p-hacking, and the like. Fourth, when you do a registered report, you get the benefit of additional smart people working through your research questions and methods with you, increasing the chance of useful reviewer comments that improve your science.
              Are you interested in trying out a preregistration?  Any type of study can be preregistered, including secondary data analyses, reviews, and qualitative work. Fortunately, there is a growing repository of templates you can fill out to help you complete your preregistration. Before starting, try to Google and see if you can find a template to help guide you through the process. I’ve also found other people’s preregistrations and used them as templates when I couldn’t find a standard one. A very handy list of templates that might help you is available https://osf.io/zab38/wiki/home/, and for meta-analysis, check out https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/ (which walks you through questions and then posts your preregistration in one place).  Complete your preregistration, and then post it anywhere that will time stamp your document, and hopefully give you a DOI, making it citable. I’ve used OSF (https://help.osf.io/hc/en-us/articles/360019738834-Create-a-Preregistration), figshare (https://figshare.com/), Prospero (linked above), Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) (https://sreereg.icpsr.umich.edu), and AsPredicted (www.aspredicted.org). Then write up your study, using your preregistration as your guide for your analyses! If you’ve made a mistake with your preregistration, just note in your manuscript what is not preregistered and continue on your way.
              My own experiences with preregistrations have been mostly positive. When doing them, it feels as though you are slowing your research process and that can be frustrating. It frontloads a lot of work which we normally reserve for later, and it means a study is not “starting.” But when it comes time to write up the study paper, writing the methods and results is a breeze. I’ve also found that it really can be remarkable how reflecting on your analysis steps can be refreshing, especially firmly being able to differentiate between exploratory and confirmatory analyses. Preregistering every part of your analysis plan can be very difficult, especially for complex analyses. I have a preregistered paper published where I laid out a plan for if my variables were skewed but forgot to give a plan for if they were kurtotic! All I did was simply say explicitly in the paper that I didn’t preregister what I would do, but that I would follow my plan for if I had had skewed data (which fortunately worked to correct my kurtotic variable). I have also found that a preregistration can protect you during the review process from reviewers who want to change your paper with analyses you didn’t plan to do. In a different era, I might have felt tempted to work them into the manuscript, and maybe try to tell a story about why they were there. Now, I can either point to my preregistration and say that those analyses are not part of this study, or I can do the analyses, clearly label it as exploratory (and I’ve even explicitly said that a reviewer requested it in the text!), and just leave it there, not woven into the story. I encourage you to try out doing a preregistration. It will not be as foreign as you might think before doing your first one. It is the same research process you are used to, just in a different order than you are used to.

More resources on preregistrations, and open science more broadly:
van Dijk, W., Schatschneider, C., & Hart, S.A. (2021). Open science in education sciences. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 54(2), 139-152. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219420945267
​

Cook, B.G., Fleming, J.I., Hart, S.A., Lane, K.L., Therrien, W., van Dijk, W., Wilson, S. (in press). A how-to guide for open-science practices in special education research. Remedial and Special Education. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/07419325211019100 (open access version, https://edarxiv.org/zmeba/)
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Mentoring within Academia by Dr. Shelley Gray

4/21/2021

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In January 2021, The POWER Mentoring Committee hosted a wonderful discussion with one of our dynamic Ambassadors, Dr. Shelley Gray, about mentoring students and junior colleagues. Dr. Gray shared excellent advice regarding how to structure mentoring relationships in ways that are beneficial to both the mentor and the mentee. POWER members engaged in a robust discussion about the challenges and satisfactions of mentoring. Dr. Gray has provided us with the slides from this event with us, so the larger community can benefit from her guidance. We share them with you all here: 
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Virtual Event! Enhancing the Mentoring Experience

1/13/2021

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Date: January 28th 2021
Time: 3-4 Eastern / 1-2 Mtn

The Mentoring Committee invites you to join us and one of our esteemed POWER ambassadors, Dr. Shelley Gray, in a conversation about mentoring within academia. This event is thematically focused on mentoring from the perspective of the mentor, to provide a forum for discussion about issues such as how to establish a mentoring relationship with mentees, how to decide who to mentor and with what types of engagement, how to ensure that the mentoring relationship is beneficial for both parties, and other key aspects of a sustained mentoring relationship with students and colleagues.
 
Dr. Gray is Professor of Speech and Hearing Science in the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University. She has substantial experience in mentoring colleagues and students both within her home institution and across institutions, especially given her involvement in multiple multi-site research projects.  
 More information on Dr. Gray’s many career achievements is included in her biography on the POWER website.
 
We look forward to an engaging and enriching conversation and invite POWER members at all career stages to participate. Bring your thoughts, experiences as mentor and mentee, and questions for Dr. Gray and the community.


Enhancing the Mentoring Experience: A Conversation with POWER Ambassador Dr. Shelley Gray
Thursday January 28th
3-4 pm eastern time/1-2 pm mountain time
A virtual event hosted on Zoom by the POWER Mentoring Committee
Click on this link to signup! 


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Virtual Event! : Re-thinking educational research during the COVID-19 pandemic

10/30/2020

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Announcing a virtual event, organized by the POWER Professional Development Committee. 

Come join POWER on November 19th at 11am Eastern / 10 Central for an online discussion about how to move school-based research forward with respectful, responsible inquiry during the COVID-19 pandemic. The one-hour discussion will be based on an article written by Drs. Kathleen Lane, Sonia Cabell, and Sally Drew (https://edarxiv.org/n3hrf/) titled "Retooling to Advance Scientifically Rigorous and Relevant School-based Educational Research During the COVID-19 Pandemic." Kathleen Lane, lead author of the retooling paper, will provide an introduction. Then you will have two opportunities to go into one of three breakout rooms to discuss current concerns, suggestions, and resources related to one of the following three broad topics: 
Room 1: How do I use this time to re-think my programmatic lines of inquiry with attention to new questions and issues that have arisen due to COVID-19? (led by Dr. Drew) 
Room 2: How do I disseminate my work when my study fell apart? (led by Dr. Cabell) 
Room 3: In the time of COVID-19, how do I conceptualize future studies? (led by Dr. Lane) 

Power steering committee members will be taking notes in each of the breakout sessions, and an overview of the discussions will be posted on the POWER website in December. 

We hope to see you there! Follow this link to sign yourself up!
​




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So you want to start a HUB, now what?

10/14/2020

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By Kelly Farquharson, Nadine Gaab, and Lori Skibbe

Five simple steps to starting a POWER HUB

POWER is excited to have the opportunity to offer HUBs.  What are POWER HUBs you ask?  These are topic-specific networks of researchers who plan to further the mission of POWER through regular meetings and support of their members. Any member of POWER can start a HUB.  We have several HUBS established already, but have also received some questions asking for more detailed guidance about starting a HUB.  Below, we present five simple steps to starting a POWER HUB. 

  1. Determine your topic area.  What will be the uniting topic of your HUB? It can be specific to a research topic (e.g., dyslexia), specific to a research-related task (e.g., grant-writing), location-based (e.g., Houston), position-based (e.g., post-docs), social in nature (e.g., book clubs), or another classification that isn’t listed here.  
  2. Decide on your format. POWER HUBs can take place in any format, including both on-line and in person settings. Hubs can happen in chat rooms, coffee shops, parks, and restaurants. We acknowledge in a COVID era that most HUBs will be meeting virtually for a while, but the format can be flexible and evolve over time as the group’s needs change.
  3. Invite speakers. POWER HUBs should feel comfortable hosting events with speakers related to a collective topic of interest. Speakers can be POWER members [hint, we’ll be asking about your topics of expertise as well as topics you’d like to hear about], but don’t have to be. Speakers can be individuals available through your local community (e.g., women’s group, research librarian, etc). These events can also include HUB “cross-overs” in which, for instance, the post-doc HUB and the Boston HUB get together to host an event about pursuing tenure track jobs in the Boston area. Note that HUBs must meet at least twice per year and all meetings must adhere to the POWER code of conduct. 
  4. Keep track.  Although there are no specific rules for what a HUB coordinator should keep track of, we have a few ideas of details that may be useful to track.  How do you advertise for your HUB? Recruitment can happen in person, through email, using our POWER listserv, or via social media. Remember that we hope to include scholars from a variety of places, including community colleges, 2-year and 4-year institutions, research institutes, and non-profit organizations. How many people attend each event and what might explain differences?  There may be events or meetings that are particularly well-attended vs. some that are maybe less so. What was the difference? This brainstorming may also be useful for future coordinators. 
  5. Keep in touch. Know that at any point in time, you can reach out to the chair of the POWER membership committee, or the POWER President for guidance, ideas, and problem-solving.  We specifically look forward to your feedback on how POWER can better support you

Ready to start a HUB?  Fill out the form at the end of this page and then search our database to find HUB members!  Have fun!


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