Fostering educational improvement with research-practice partnerships 

By partnering with educators and community members, researchers are helping schools address the urgent problems they face each day. 

 

Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are long-term, systematic efforts to improve schools and school systems through research. However, instead of requiring educators to implement policies, programs, and practices that have been created elsewhere — by outside experts, vendors, or university-based researchers, for instance — RPPs aim to build the capacity of teachers, administrators, district staff, state officials, community leaders, and others to analyze and address the specific challenges they face. In short, RPPs offer a locally driven, collaborative approach to educational improvement and transformation, in which researchers, schools, and community partners pursue improvement goals they define together, drawing on the expertise of each partner. 

In the last two decades, the number of RPPs has grown exponentially across the United States, such that they have become an important part of the educational ecosystem that connects research, policy, practice, and community work (Arce-Trigatti, Chukhray, & Lopez-Turley, 2018). Partnerships have been established between researchers and a range of educational organizations, including schools, school districts, state departments of education, and community-based organizations. They have focused on issues as diverse as reducing dropout rates, designing and implementing science curricula, improving instruction for language learners, evaluating district policies, designing systemwide approaches to teacher professional learning, linking organizations serving community youth, and many others.  

Why research-practice partnerships? 

For decades, educational research has been the subject of intense criticism from all sides. Researchers themselves have raised concerns about the field’s “awful reputation” (Kaestle, 1993), describing it as a perpetually “contested terrain” (Lagemann, 1997) and noting that even when the research is of high quality, it rarely makes its way into the hands of practitioners (Corcoran, Fuhrman, & Belcher, 2001). Policy makers have often decried the slow pace of research studies and their lack of relevance to the most urgent challenges facing K-12 education (Cousins & Simon, 1996). And such criticism has been exacerbated by a history of distrust between practitioners and researchers, partly rooted in broader tensions between universities and their communities and partly due to decades of personal experience, with many educators feeling that they have been disrespected by researchers and/or have reaped little benefit from participating in studies (Tuck & Yang, 2014; Vakil et al., 2016). 

Yet, around 20 years ago, at a time when criticism of educational research seemed particularly intense, a small number of researchers and practitioners began experimenting with new models of collaboration meant to address some of these criticisms (Coburn & Stein, 2010). Their approaches were diverse, but they shared some common DNA: They aimed to create long-term relationships, rather than to conduct a single research study. They gave priority to practitioners’ concerns, questions, and challenges, rather than choosing topics designed to fill gaps in the research literature (Burkhardt & Schoenfeld, 2003). Sometimes, they involved researchers and practitioners codesigning solutions to pressing problems (Cobb & Jackson, 2012; Penuel et al., 2011), a practice that challenged the traditional separation between researchers and practitioners, as well as long-held ideas about researcher independence and objectivity (Kelly, 2004). And some partnerships also brought together schools and other youth-serving agencies and community-based organizations (Coburn, Penuel, & Geil, 2013), breaking down long-standing barriers separating those who serve children in school from those who serve them outside of school. 

By 2012, these disparate approaches had begun to coalesce into a movement of sorts (Coburn, Penuel, & Geil, 2013). Dubbed “research-practice partnerships,” this family of approaches has garnered support from private philanthropies and governmental funding agencies alike (Tseng & Coburn, 2019). What began as a few isolated experiments has blossomed into hundreds of RPPs, a national organization (National Network of Research Practice Partnerships, https://nnerpp.rice.edu), and an array of books that describe promising partnerships (Penuel & Gallagher, 2017). Further, RPPs themselves have become the subject of an emerging research agenda that examines whether, how, and under what conditions such partnerships contribute to educational improvement and address systemic inequities in schools and districts. 

What do RPPs have in common? 

Contemporary RPPs share some common features. First, they are research partnerships focused on educational improvement or transformation. Partners come together with the shared commitment to doing research that meets the educator partners’ pressing needs. For example, the DU-DPS Partnership on Equity in School Discipline is a collaborative effort focused on addressing racial disparities in student suspensions, expulsions, and other forms of discipline. The partnership involves district leaders at Denver Public Schools (DPS) and the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Denver (DU), with meaningful engagement efforts with Padres & Jóvenes Unidos (a local organization led by people of color focused on educational equity, racial justice, and immigrant rights), The Advancement Project (a national racial justice organization), the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, and the National Education Association. 

To advance their goal of reducing racial disparities in school discipline, the partners conduct research to inform local district policies and practices and identify strategies that can be disseminated more broadly. They have engaged in research on policies that contribute to the higher suspension and expulsion rates of boys, students in special education, and Black, Latinx, and Native American youth in general. They also tracked improvement outcomes among students who participated in restorative justice practices. Other RPPs have chosen to focus on all sorts of other topics, but they all share with the DU-DPS Partnership a commitment to research that aims to help solve the real-world probems that practice partners are grappling with. 

Second, RPPs are long term. RPPs involve more than a single study or project; instead, they represent a commitment to working together on research and development that may deepen and shift over time, as the collaboration fosters new learning or the practice partners’ priorities shift. As one state policy maker, who has been involved for many years in an RPP in a Midwestern city, explained: 

It’s not just limited, with one or two research questions, and then the project is over, and we move onto something else with someone else. Rather, [an RPP] means to tackle a particular area of research that is of interest to us. We may start out with a concrete set of research questions, but those may change or otherwise evolve over time as we learn new things. 

Perhaps the best example of partners who have made a long-term, formal commitment to the work is the Consortium for Chicago School Research. Generally viewed as one of the first RPPs, CCSR — a partnership between researchers at the University of Chicago and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) — recently celebrated its 30th year. Over that time, the partnership has tackled a wide range of district issues, with sustained efforts on dropout prevention, social-emotional learning, the impact of school closings, and the factors that support improvement at the school level. The consortium’s advisory board, which helps define the focus of the work, includes representatives from the school district, members of the teachers union, and community leaders.  

Members of the partnership argue that working together for a long time has enabled the group to develop a high degree of trust and has fostered among the researchers a deeper understanding of the school system, which helps them do higher-quality research that better informs practice. This longevity also creates some stability in a system that has experienced a great deal of turnover. Not all RPPs are as long-lived, but they usually get started with the intention of working on more than a single project.  

In addition, RPPs are intentionally organized to draw on diverse knowledge. In RPPs, researchers are not the only ones positioned as knowledgeable. For instance, district leaders may have deep knowledge about the conditions in various schools, the constraints the school system faces, and local processes for getting things done, while other partners, such as community leaders and family members, contribute expertise based on their lived cultural, historical, and political experiences. RPPs draw on these diverse kinds of expertise in different ways. Some RPPs engage partners in setting research agendas and jointly interpreting findings. Others involve researchers and practice partners designing solutions together and then jointly studying how they play out in practice. Still others involve practice partners leading the way in designing and testing solutions or gathering data and interpreting evidence with researchers in support roles. For example, the inquiryHub RPP created by Denver Public Schools and the University of Colorado Boulder has engaged educators and researchers in codesigning yearlong courses in biology and chemistry aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards. As part of the effort, the RPP has not only studied curriculum implementation, but  also developed critical supports for teacher implementation, including professional development designs and assessments (Penuel, 2019).  

Given existing power dynamics, which can create rifts between researchers and practitioners, between district leaders and teachers, and between educators and community members, collaborative research of this sort requires strategies to ensure that all voices matter in the joint work (Vakil et al., 2016). The Aquinas Center-Penn Partnership takes this on explicitly. A collaboration among the University of Pennsylvania, Teachers College at Columbia University, and a school, Catholic parish, and community center, this RPP aims to investigate and take action on educational inequities facing families and youth from the city’s Indonesian, Vietnamese, Latinx, and Black communities. To ensure that all voices are heard, each research project within the partnership is co-defined by researchers and the participants from the partner organizations (Ghiso et al., 2019). The RPP draws on a tradition of practitioner-oriented research that regards everyone involved in a project as fully capable of taking on overlapping roles of designer, implementer, and researcher. Long-standing power dynamics can be quite durable, so partner organizations must explicitly address those dynamics and create participation structures to amplify the voices and knowledge of those most directly affected by systemic racism. (See Brown & Allen, 2021, in this issue, for an extended discussion on this topic.) 

Paying attention to power dynamics is essential because the work of an RPP is collaborative. In an RPP, research is conducted with and alongside partners, rather than being done to partners. While all education research requires educators’ cooperation — giving consent to participate, contributing data that benefits the study, and adherence to expectations that research findings will be shared with participants — RPPs are premised on the idea that educators will help define the research goals. In a collaborative research project, all partners agree on what the research is about and are able to recognize their own hand in shaping the research and the stake that their organization has in the findings.  

What can RPPs accomplish? 

While it is important not to overstate the evidence on the effectiveness of RPPs (Coburn & Penuel, 2016), it is clear that they are promising strategies for fostering educational improvement and transformation. Some RPPs have been able to inform educational decision making in real time. For example, one partnership that focused on improving mathematics instruction in a midsize Western school district generated ideas that were incorporated into district mathematics policy and resulted in shifts in how district leaders supported school improvement (Farrell, Coburn, & Chong, 2019).  

Some RPPs have contributed to long-term, sustained improvement efforts. For example, in a much-replicated approach, researchers and practitioners at the Chicago Consortium identified key factors that predicted whether 9th graders were likely to drop out of school. The district then worked with researchers and others to develop a set of practices to intervene with 9th graders who appeared likely to drop out. Thanks in large part to this work, the district was able to increase its graduation rate from 57% in 2006 to 74% in 2016, substantially outpacing national gains (Phillips, 2019).  

Other RPPs have resulted in the development of much-needed, high-quality instructional materials that have generated strong outcomes for students. As part of its work in the Minority Student Achievement Network, for example, researchers and educators from the Strategic Education Partnership codesigned a program called AlgebraByExample made up of Algebra I assignments that included worked examples of problems that past research indicated students find challenging. In a random assignment study in eight partner districts, students in the program significantly outperformed students not receiving the program (Booth et al., 2015).  

Still others have brought the voices of marginalized communities to the decision-making table. For example, the Family Leadership Design Collaborative, a network of RPPs across the U.S., is dedicated to positioning parents and communities as educational leaders and codesigners of just futures. This collaborative has brought teachers, parents, and community members together to codesign solutions to local problems and, in the process, move away from more conventional deficit-oriented approaches to involving parents as partners in their children’s education (Ishimaru et al., 2018).  

And other RPPs have created infrastructures for practice organizations to learn from one another. For example, the Central Valley (CA) Networked Improvement Community, organized by the Tulare County Office of Education, brings together district leaders and math teachers from eight districts to investigate and test strategies aimed at improving students’ mathematics learning. A key feature of the RPP is the joint exploration of strategies and data throughout the network.  

Of course, not all RPPs thrive. Productive working relationships across different institutions, perspectives, and levels of status  can be hard to develop and maintain (Farrell, Harrison, & Coburn, 2019). And it can be difficult to sustain a long-term vision when educators are buffeted by crises, changing policies, and evolving priorities (Glazer & Peurach, 2013). In addition, funders are often more interested in supporting individual research projects than in providing the long-term operational support necessary to develop institutional relationships, build trust, maintain open channels of communication, and go beyond the production of research findings to work together to support solutions informed by these findings (Coburn, Penuel, & Geil, 2013). 

But even with these challenges and limitations, RPPs have begun to show how some of the long-standing criticisms of educational research can be addressed. Their very mission refocuses research efforts on practitioners’ pressing needs, while also providing a venue for researchers, practitioners, communities, and families to envision new futures together. They create structures for ongoing communication and trust among all participants, including those whose knowledge has been devalued in the past. And this kind of ongoing investment in relationships, communication, and tangible real-time benefits becomes especially valuable when schools and communities face urgent and intractable challenges, such as those associated with systemic racism and the COVID-19 pandemic.   

References 

Arce-Trigatti, P., Chukhray, I., & Lopez-Turley, R. (2018). Research-practice partnerships in education. In B. Schneider (Ed.), Handbook of the sociology in education in the 21st century (pp. 561-580). Springer. 

Booth, J.L., Cooper, L.A., Donovan, M.S., Huyghe, A., Koedinger, K.R., & Paré-Blagoev, E.J. (2015). Design-based research within the constraints of practice: Algebra by example. Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, 20, (1/2), 79-100. 

Brown, S. & Allen, A. (2021). The interpersonal side of research-practice partnerships. Phi Delta Kappan, 102 (7), 20-25. 

Burkhardt, H. & Schoenfeld, A.H. (2003). Improving educational research: Toward a more useful, more influential, and better-funded enterprise. Educational Researcher, 32 (9), 3-14. 

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Coburn, C.E. & Stein, M.K. (Eds.). (2010). Research and practice in education: Building alliances, bridging the divide. Rowman & Littlefield. 

Corcoran, T.B., Fuhrman, S., & Belcher, C.L. (2001). The district role in instructional improvement. Phi Delta Kappan, 83 (1), 78-84. 

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Farrell, C.C., Harrison, C., & Coburn, C.E. (2019, April). “What the hell is this, and who the hell are you?” Role and identity negotiation in research-practice partnerships.” AERA Open. 

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