“UNIFIED”: Bridging the Researcher–Practitioner Divide in Mind,Brain, and Education

Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) science is by definition transdisciplinary. However, the communication and collaboration between constituent disciplines needed for true transdisciplinarity remains relatively rare. Consequently, many of the potential benefits of MBE science remain unrealized for parties on all sides of the discipline. The present commentary first conducts an analysis of the current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of transdisciplinary partnerships in MBE. A new, free, and international web platform (“UNIFIED”) is then proposed to broker relationships between researchers and teachers within schools. This website would allow users to form collaborations based on a system of tags indexing their research interests as well as practicalities such as their location. Such a website appears well placed to realize many of the opportunities, and mitigate the threats and weaknesses, of transdisciplinary MBE research. The article concludes with an appeal to interested researchers and schools to contribute to the development of the project.     

Keep the “H”

This commentary advocates “keeping the H” in “human performance technology” to help make it clear to nonpractitioners what human performance consultants do. There are different types of performance (e.g., financial performance) and different means of achieving performance (e.g., engineering) that are outside the average human performance technologist's repertoire. Though the human performance technologist should target business results and intervene at more than just the individual level, ultimately, their emphasis is improving human work.     

“Interpersonal” Clients,Students, and Supervisees: Translating Robert Kegan

The counseling profession prides itself on its developmental focus. However, counselors, counselor educators, and supervisors have generally applied only phasic, and not stage, theories to counseling and supervision practice and have not incorporated developmental concepts into their teaching. This article continues the effort of rectifying this situation by explicating the relevance of R. Kegan's (1982, 1994) subject‐object theory for counseling, supervision, and counselor education. The author reviews Kegan's (1982, 1994) interpersonal and institutional stages and applies the theory to promoting development beyond the interpersonal stage in 3 case illustrations: a counseling case, a counselor educator's experience, and a supervision challenge.