The UP NISMED Knowledge Sharing Sessions (KSS) continued to serve as the institute's regular venue for internal capacity-building this year, giving staff opportunities to share knowledge, experiences, and lessons on research and publications. The KSS is part of the institute's efforts to build a strong, knowledge-driven culture in support of its strategic goals of increasing research outputs and improving how these are disseminated and utilized. Two sessions held in the first half of 2026 highlight the range of topics taken up in this series.
On 17 April 2026, Ms. Queenie Pearl D. Salazar led the 19th installment of the KSS, a hands-on workshop titled "Navigating and Visualizing Bibliometric Networks: Getting Started with VOSviewer." VOSviewer is an open-source application used to construct and visualize bibliometric networks, and the session walked participants through its interface, key features, and basic functions for mapping relationships among authors, keywords, and publications.
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| (Left) Ms. Queenie Pearl D. Salazar explains the characteristics of the generated visualization. (Right) Participants generate their own bibliometric networks using VOSviewer. |
The workshop opened with a springboard activity in which participants manually built a word map using pieces of paper taped to a wall before moving on to the application itself. Ms. Salazar discussed the application's five panels and demonstrated how to generate a visualization from sample data, covering steps such as selecting the data type and source, uploading a text database, choosing a field of terms as a filter, selecting a counting method, and setting occurrence thresholds. Participants also learned to create and upload a thesaurus file to better classify their data and were taught to customize and interpret the resulting visualizations. By the end of the session, participants were able to generate their own bibliometric maps.
The 20th installment of the KSS, held on 17–18 June 2026, took the form of a two-day workshop titled "Evaluating the Impact of Lesson Study: Aligning Future Programming Approaches with Teacher Development Policies in the Philippines," led by Dr. Ivy P. Mejia. The workshop provided a foundational orientation for the institute's study on outcome harvesting as an approach to evaluating the impact of lesson study.
As an introduction, Mr. Michael Anthony B. Mantala presented the origins of lesson study and its use by UP NISMED as a professional development model for public school educators. Dr. Mejia then led Day 1, which focused on identifying outcomes based on staff members' professional experiences. Participants documented school and teacher outcomes on color-coded metacards and then reviewed these outcomes as a group.
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| Dr. Ivy P. Mejia orients participants on the outcome harvesting process. |
Day 2 carried the process further through primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of coding. Groups organized their identified outcomes into labeled themes such as pedagogy, attitude, professional growth, community of practice, and strategies. They then reviewed one another's clusters to draw out similarities and differences. Attendees also examined how lesson study mechanisms, such as reflection and collaborative planning, contributed to the identified outcomes.
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| Participants organize their identified outcomes into labeled themes. |
Together, these sessions reflect the continuing value of the KSS as a space where UP NISMED staff build shared skills and understanding, whether in adopting new research tools like VOSviewer or in strengthening the institute's own evaluation practices through outcome harvesting.
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