LOK-SZE WONG, ALICE HUGUET, CHRISTOPHER W. HARRISON, CYNTHIA E. COBURN, AND JAMES P. SPILLANE

There are many efforts in the field to connect research to practice in schools. Some initiatives focus on the individual practitioner, building their knowledge and skills to engage with research. Other efforts aim at improving access to research by creating short research briefs or easy-to-read summaries of bodies of literature.

In our work at the National Center for Research in Policy and Practice (NCRPP), we found that supporting research use in a school setting requires taking an organizational perspective. By organizational, we mean considering the complex contexts within which teachers and school leaders work to pinpoint opportunities to bridge research and practice. To do so first requires an understanding of how educators make instructional decisions within a school setting. Then, I argue that key organizational dimensions shape these decision-making processes, broadening or narrowing the opportunities for educators to engage with research in school settings.

We know that decision making in schools is a social process (Weiss & Bucuvalas, 1980). It can include administrators, coaches, and teachers making multiple decisions. Some decisions may be made by an individual, such as a teacher making an instructional decision for their classroom. If we unpack the teacher’s decision-making process, though, we see that even these decisions are influenced by interactions with other people inside and outside of their school. The decision may be influenced by decisions made within the teacher’s team, school leaders’ instructional decisions, guidance provided by central office leaders, and events occurring in students’ communities. Decisions “accrete” (Weiss, 1980), meaning they are a series of choices and actions connected over time across departments, grade levels, and programs (e.g., general education, special education, English learners) (Hannaway, 1989; Kennedy, 1982; Majone, 1989). In our figure, arrows indicate how some decisions connect with others. Further, research – represented by the “R” – can play a role in some decisions.

The decision-making process is shaped by people’s authority (McAdam & Scott, 2005; Scott & Davis, 2007) and status (Balkwell, 1994; Dornbusch & Scott, 1974). For instance, teachers and other school leaders with authority can intentionally or unintentionally shape the decision-making process (Wong, 2019). This includes bringing in information such as research to the process and influencing how their colleagues use that information during decision making (Coburn, 2005). Similarly, people with higher status in a group might find their perspectives are privileged during decision making (Coburn, Bae, & Turner, 2008). Teachers with less experience, for instance, may defer to the judgement of their more experienced colleagues on how to use and interpret research.

Organizational routines are another school-level factor that shapes decision-making. Organizational routines are formalized, repeated patterns of interactions among members of an organization (Feldman & Pentland, 2003). In schools, routines include activities such as school improvement planning and designing & facilitating professional development. Organizational routines shape who collaborates with whom about what, determining which individuals participate in decision making and what research and other information can be brought to the table during a discussion.

Like school leaders with authority and status, central office leaders can shape the decision-making process and influence how research and other information are used in schools. We focus on three relationships between schools and central offices that help explain how central office leaders shape decision making and research use within schools.

To begin, districts differ in the jurisdiction that central offices and schools have over decision-making. In districts with site-based decision-making policies, central offices may have limited formal power over instructional matters while schools have vast decision-making responsibilities. Jurisdiction can also vary within a district. For example, some districts grant school leaders more or less autonomy based on student achievement scores. Jurisdiction may be formal or informal. We found in a recent analysis that even though school leaders in two districts had formal jurisdiction over most aspects of instruction, their central office leaders’ successfully used persuasive strategies to encourage them to make decisions in line with central office preferences (Wong, Coburn, & Kamal, in press).

Similar to school-level organizational routines, district-school organizational routines are opportunities for central office and school leaders to collaborate and share information such as research. District-school organizational routines influence which central office and school staff are involved in discussions, what research and other information are used, and in what ways.

District-school informal social networks provide opportunities for central office and school leaders reach out to each other as needed. For example, school leaders may reach out to central office leaders they know well for advice on a decision. The research and other information central office leaders offer can then shape school-level decision making processes.

Our framework opens up school-level decision making to include the impact that organizational context can have on whether and educators use research within their decision making. District-school and school-level organizational routines, informal social connections, jurisdiction, status, and authority all mediate whether educators learn about research and how, if at all, they use the research in their decision making. In addition to individual and access factors, we can examine these organizational factors to understand and better support research use in schools. Viewing research use through an organizational lens helps us situate and contextualize whether and how research is used in instructional decision making.

Balkwell, J. W. (1994). Status. Group processes: Sociological analyses, 119-148. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Co

Coburn, C. E. (2005). Shaping teacher sensemaking: School leaders and the enactment of reading policy. Educational Policy, 19(3), 476-509.

Coburn, C. E., Bae, S., & Turner, E. O. (2008). Authority, status, and the dynamics of insider– outsider partnerships at the district level. Peabody Journal of Education, 83(3), 364–399.

Dornbusch, S. M., & Scott, W.R. (1975). Evaluation and the exercise of authority. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Feldman, M. S., & Pentland, B. T. (2003). Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a source of flexibility and change. Administrative Science Quarterly, 48(1), 94–118.

Hannaway, J. (1989). Managers managing: The workings of an administrative system. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kennedy, M. M. (1982). Evidence and decision. In M.M. Kennedy (Ed.), Working knowledge and other essays (pp. 59–103). Cambridge, MA: Huron Institute.

Majone, G. (1989). Evidence, argument, and persuasion in the policy process. New Haven: Yale University Press.

McAdam, D., & Scott, W. R. (2005). Organizations and movements. In G. F. Davis, D. McAdam, W. R. Scott, & M. N. Zald (Eds.), Social movements and organizational theory (pp. 4–40). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Scott, W. R., & Davis, G. F. (2007). Organizations and organization: Rational, natural, and open systems perspectives. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Weiss, C. H. (1980). Knowledge creep and decision accretion. Knowledge, 1(3), 381–404.

Weiss, C. H., & Bucuvalas, M. J. (1980). Social science research and decision-making. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Wong, L. (2019). Administrators’ unintentional sensegiving and system reform outcomes. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 27 (3).

Wong, L., Coburn, C. E., & Kamal, A. (in press). How central office leaders influence school leaders’ decision making: Unpacking power dynamics in two site-based decision-making systems. Peabody Journal of Education.

Please find our NCRPP team (@NCRPP) and our colleagues from the Center for Research Use in Education (@Rsrch4Schls) at AERA this year. Here is where we’ll be:

Attention to Equity and Coherence Across State Systems During Educational Reform Efforts with William Penuel (Non-Presenting Author).

• In Roundtable Session: STEM Teacher Education and Cognition
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 800 Level // Hall G

Avenues of Influence: An Exploration of School-Based Practitioners as Knowledge Brokers and Mobilizers with Elizabeth Farley-Ripple (Presenting Author).

• In Symposium: Knowledge Brokers and Boundary Spanners: Strengthening Ties Between Research, Policy, and Practice in Education
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 200 Level // Room 202C

Understanding the Vision for Science in Next Generation Science Standards Adopting and Nonadopting States with William Penuel (Presenting Author).

Negotiating Mutualism: A Comparative Case Study of Researchers and Practitioners Collaboratively Scaling STE(A)M Education Initiatives with William Penuel (Non-Presenting Author).

• In Roundtable Session: Implementing and Scaling Science Initiatives
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 800 Level // Hall F

Packaging the Promise: Money, Messaging, and Misalignment with Debbie Kim (Presenting Author).

• In Paper Session: It’s All in the Messaging: How Colleges Create College (In)Access
• Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel // Second Floor // Churchill

Social Networks and Early Career Teachers’ Trajectories in the United States: Closeness and Self-Efficacy with James Spillane (Presenting Author).

• In Symposium: Foregrounding the Social Side of Teacher Education and Development: Studies From China, England, New Zealand, Spain, and the United States
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 700 Level // Room 705

Pursuing Interests and Getting Involved: Exploring the Conditions of Sponsorship in Youth Learning with William Penuel (Presenting Author).

• In Paper Session: Multiple Perspectives on Out-of-School Learning
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 700 Level // Room 713A

Designing Research With Organizational Theory with Eleanor Anderson (Chair)

• In Sheraton Roundtable Session Five
• Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel // Lower Concourse // Grand Centre

How to Realize Multilayered Curriculum Renewal with William Penuel (Discussant).

• Invited Speaker Session
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 600 Level // Room 604

How Institutional and Organizational Context Shapes Instructional Decision Making Across Multiple School Systems with James Spillane (Chair), Lok-Sze Wong (Presenting Author), Kristen Davidson (Presenting Author), Debbie Kim (Presenting Author), Cynthia Coburn, Caitlin Farrell, and Elizabeth Farley-Ripple (Discussant).

• Symposium
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 200 Level // Room 201B

The Scholarship of Improvement: Building Community Around an Emerging Tradition of Practice-Focused Research with William Penuel (Discussant).

• Structured Poster Session
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 800 Level // Room 801A

A (Mis)Match? Evaluating the Preferences of Characteristics of Research Products Among Research Users and Producers with Elizabeth Farley-Ripple (Non-Presenting Author), Henry May (Non-Presenting Author), and Kristen Davidson (Discussant).

Schools’ Capacity to Critically Evaluate Research: A Multilevel Perspective with Henry May (Presenting Author) and Kristen Davidson (Discussant).

• In Paper Session: Unpacking Research Use: Empirical Evidence About Practices and Conditions
• Fairmont Royal York Hotel // Mezzanine Level // Confederation 3

What Use Is Educational Assessment? Taking Stock and Looking Ahead with William Penuel (Participant).

• Invited Speaker Session
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 100 Level // Room 104B

What Doesn’t Kill You, Makes You Stronger: Connecting Challenges and Outcomes of Research-Practice Partnerships with Melia Repko-Erwin (Presenting Author), Mary Quantz, Caitlin Farrell, Kristen Davidson, and William Penuel.

• In Paper Session: Building Knowledge About Research-Practice Partnerships
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 200 Level // Room 201F

Ethical Dilemmas and Deliberative Dialogue as Means for Increasing Students’ Science Capital: A World Café–Inspired Design with William Penuel (Non-Presenting Author).

• In Poster Session: Learning Sciences SIG Poster Session
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 300 Level // Hall C

What Can Researchers, Philanthropies, and Practitioner-Educators Do to Democratize Evidence in Education? with William Penuel (Co-Chair), Jim Kohlmoos (Co-Chair), Megan Bang, John Diamond, Ruth Lopez Turley, Douglas Adam Watkins, and Esther Quintero (Participants).

• Invited Speaker Session
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 100 Level // Room 104A

“It’s Basically Trading Reads for Likes”: Black Adolescent Females Writing Across Classroom and Online Contexts with Heather Hill (Presenting Author).

• STEM and Literacy Education: Critiquing What Counts as Knowledge From the Perspectives of Black Youth
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 700 Level // Room 706

Fostering Pre-K to Elementary Alignment and Continuity in Mathematics in Two Urban School Districts with Cynthia Coburn (Presenting Author).

• In Paper Session: Impacts of Early Childhood Interventions
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 200 Level // Room 205A

Perspectives on Implementing State Policy at the Local Level with Eleanor Anderson (Discussant).

• Paper Session
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 200 Level // Room 202C

School-Based Professionals in Pursuit of Evidence: Effort, Strategies, and Their Relationship to Organizational Culture with Elizabeth Farley-Ripple (Non-Presenting Author).

• In Roundtable Session: Knowing and Doing: Attempts to Leverage Data and Evidence in Schools
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 800 Level // Hall F

Understanding Research Use: Theoretical Approaches and Developments with Elizabeth Farley-Ripple (Chair).

• Paper Session
• Fairmont Royal York Hotel // Mezzanine Level // Confederation 6

Districts’ Conceptualizations of Kindergarten Readiness with Cynthia Coburn (Presenting Author).

• In Roundtable Session: Promoting Language, Literacy, and School Readiness
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 800 Level // Hall F

Designing and Implementing Sensor-Based Science Units That Incorporate Computational Thinking with William Penuel (Non-Presenting Author).

• In Paper Session: Designing for Complex Reasoning in STEM
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 200 Level // Room 205A

Within-Principal Variation: Exploring the Relationships Between Time Use and School Context with Elizabeth Farley-Ripple (Non-Presenting Author).

• In Roundtable Session: Exploring Collaboration, Partnerships, and Practice Across School Contexts
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 800 Level // Hall F

Priming the STEM Pipeline: A Socially Relevant Approach to Data Analytics for Middle-Grade Students with Stephanie Timmons-Brown (Presenting Author).

• In Symposium: WOKE Educational Leaders in the Era of Alternative Facts
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 200 Level // Room 203C

Sentence Stems to Foster Dialogue: Using “I Notice” and “I Wonder” in Online Professional Development with Eleanor Anderson (Presenting Author).

• Discourse in the Digital World: Design and Facilitation of Online Teacher Professional Development
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 700 Level // Room 715A

How Do Different Pathways in the Educational Ecosystem Support Productive Evidence Use? with Elizabeth Farley-Ripple (Chair), Kristen Davidson (Presenting Author), and William Penuel.

• Symposium
• Fairmont Royal York Hotel // Mezzanine Level // Alberta

Organizing and Managing for Excellence and Equity: The Work and Dilemmas of Instructionally Focused Education Systems with James Spillane (Presenting Author).

• In Symposium: Recrafting Coherence in the Era of Common Core
• Metro Toronto Convention Centre // 200 Level // Room 201C

Finding and using research evidence to inform decisions and policies and practice can be a difficult task.

Using Research to Inform Decisions is an online course offered by NCRPP that will give you the tools to find and evaluate pertinent research, with a constant eye toward how such research can be used to inform various school- and district-level decisions. The workshop provides an overview of how practitioners use research and offers several simple tools to help you find the study you need. You will also learn strategies and structures that help foster an environment where research truly informs decision making.

• Explore the nature of research use and current national patterns in research use
• Learn how to find relevant research and read it accurately
• Evaluate research design, and be able to judge the credibility of the research
• Implement strategies for increasing the use of evidence within your own educational setting

• Video lectures with:
  • • Heather Hill, Jerome T. Murphy Professor in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
    • Bill Penuel, Professor of Educational Psychology and Learning Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder
    • Derek Briggs, Professor of Research and Evaluation Methodology at the University of Colorado Boulder
    • Cynthia Coburn, Professor at the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University
    • Caitlin Farrell, Director of the National Center for Research in Policy and Practice
• Readings of various research articles and white papers
• Facilitated online discussions
• Exploration exercises
• Job-embedded practice where you will apply the concepts and techniques learned

This two-week online workshop will be offered from February 11th to February 24th. The online instruction, discussions, and job-embedded practice should take five to seven hours over the duration of the program. Participants who complete all individual assessments and contribute to group discussions will receive a certificate indicating completion of five clock hours of instruction.

Register online here. Tuition is $149 per person and we welcome both teams and individuals to attend.

Cali Nguyen is an Education Coordinator in the Office of Education and Instructional Services (OEIS) at the UCSF School of Pharmacy. She conducted this research in her previous role as an Education and Youth Development Fellow for California Education Partners.

Research-practice partnerships (RPPs)—long-term, mutualistic collaborations that produce useful, rigorous research in response to issues of practice—offer a nuanced approach to addressing complex issues in education.

However, lasting, productive partnerships don’t form instantaneously—they take time, effort, and resources. In the first or “establishing” phase, partnership members make efforts to establish relationships, build trust, and develop a workflow. Once established, a partnership can deepen in the second or “innovating” phase, by implementing new strategies, developing new knowledge, and possibly expanding in personnel. In the third phase, the RPP’s developed practices, structures, and policies can become institutionalized within partnership organizations.

“Intermediary staff” or “intermediaries” play an important role in supporting the development and progress of all phases of partnerships by actively connecting the work of researchers and practitioners. They do so by engaging in five key functions: (1) organizing opportunities to consider research; (2) priming action items; (3) supporting funding logistics; (4) advising on next steps; and (5) establishing pathways of communication. The role of intermediaries may be taken on by members of the partnership, who serve as “boundary crossers,” or by individuals and organizations specifically hired to assist in managing the partnership. In both cases, intermediary staff can play a pivotal role in the productivity of RPPs.

Here, I share the actions that intermediary staff frequently took to connect researchers and practitioners and advance joint work in two RPPs. The RPPs discussed here were collaborations between a university and local school districts. Each RPP was in a different phase of their partnership’s life cycle: one was in the “establishing” phase, and the other in the “innovating” phase. The actions of the RPPs were documented in two years of meeting notes and email communication.

Intermediary staff may take a variety of specific actions to fulfill each of the key functions named above. In both the “establishing” and “innovating” phases of their partnership’s work, intermediaries were most frequently seen advising next steps, facilitating meetings, and passing on information. Through each of these critical actions, intermediaries promoted connections between researchers and practitioners that furthered their ability to share analyses and preliminary findings on their specific areas of research.

In advising next steps, intermediary staff provided researchers and practitioners guidance on establishing a timeline and workflow for their projects, while taking into consideration the specific context of the research question and available resources. In suggesting deadlines and providing feedback with actionable items, intermediaries were able to assist RPPs in co-creating sets of expectations regarding their work processes and products, mitigating communication obstacles that may hinder co-development of research.

In facilitating meetings, intermediary staff set agendas for meetings between researchers and practitioners, as well as asked critical questions and introduced key concepts at strategic points in the project. By carefully crafting these dialogues, intermediaries were able to project the different voices of the individuals present and promote the co-development of research questions and projects.

In passing on information, intermediaries channeled information to individuals or teams that would find it most beneficial. By providing examples of previous articles of work or highlighting opportunities for RPPs to promote their research through an education-related journal or poster presentation, intermediary staff constructed avenues of support and opportunity, while simultaneously promoting a culture of sharing information.

These three actions—advising next steps, facilitating meetings, and passing on information—were key elements of both the “establishing” and “innovating” phases of the two partnerships. However, for the partnership in an earlier stage of development, the intermediary staff spent far more time facilitating meetings—almost double the amount of time spent by the staff in the more established partnership.

The frequency of facilitating meetings as an action taken by intermediary staff may suggest that, in starting a RPP, a significant amount of energy and time must be put into organizing those initial and follow-up meetings among partners. Members in an RPP may be approaching the situation from a variety of perspectives and with a wide range of experiences. Thus, an extended number of meetings may be needed to provide context and establish a research project that is rooted in the needs, values, and missions of a community.

RPPs also carry a greater level of formality than previously seen in collaborations in education. As a result, these meetings may also serve as the primary space for members of a partnership to build these characteristic modes of formalized communication and coordination.

Identifying the specific actions taken by intermediaries can help those working in partnerships understand the key roles that intermediary staff can play as they bring together researchers and practitioners throughout the different phases of RPPs.

As RPPs continue to grow and progress into new phases of development, it is important to continue documenting and analyzing the work of intermediaries. For smaller partnerships that do not have dedicated intermediary staff, this documentation and analysis may be particularly useful as it acts as a guide for managing partnership work.

Ultimately, clarifying the roles that intermediaries play in RPPs and identifying the types of support needed by RPPs in order to produce successful, co-developed research projects with useful, actionable findings is beneficial for all those involved in advancing the work of RPPs.

This post originally appeared in Education Week’s “Urban Education Reform: Bridging Research and Practice” blog, facilitated by Paula Arce-Trigatti and Nina Spitzley, who lead the National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships (NNEERP). You can find a practitioner response to their post here.

There is increasing evidence that research-practice partnerships (RPPs) can help P-20 education researchers and practitioners connect, inform, and improve research, policy, and practice. But because education-based RPPs are a relatively recent development, questions remain regarding how and under what conditions these partnerships are able to achieve their goals. And, partnership work is not without challenges: A recent survey and interview study of 27 RPPs across the US conducted by the National Center for Research in Policy and Practice (NCRPP) suggests that partnerships are likely to encounter at least one of three common challenges: turnover of partnership members, differences in the timelines of researchers’ and educators’ work, and having the “right people at the table” to be able to act on the partnership’s findings.

These challenges to RPP work are not necessarily deal breakers, however. In fact, they can provide important opportunities for partnership growth by creating opportunities to strengthen relationships and build a stronger foundation for their work together. In this post, we draw from NCRPP’s recent study to highlight examples of partnerships whose experiences suggest that when it comes to facing challenges, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Most of the RPPs in our study experienced turnover of partnership members, particularly within the practice organizations. Reorganization of personnel—especially in school districts and state education agencies—was also common. In some cases, partners’ new roles made it impossible for them to continue working in the partnership. In other cases, partners’ time was severely limited.

While turnover and reorganization pose significant challenges, especially when originators leave, many RPPs that experienced turnover sustained and sometimes even accelerated their progress toward meeting goals. Members attributed this success to mutual trust, regular communication, and sharing a vision for educational improvement with their partners.

Some researchers and education leaders further discussed the importance of building relationships with people at multiple levels in the educational organization. As one researcher put it, “Always work on building trust with as many people as you can, because ultimately, if there’s turnover in a high level, it’s better to rely on other people to keep things going, and to aggregate on your behalf.” In this case, building trust with people on many levels who shared the partnership’s vision gave the existing partners an anchor to work through the turnover challenges.

Strong and continuing communication about roles and expectations in light of turnover was also essential. As one researcher explained: “I think the whole group needs to come together and reevaluate their roles and who is going to do or take on some of that other responsibility if they’re not bringing on new members. I think it needs to be shared decision-making for sure.” These examples—among many others—revealed that turnover, though challenging, need not be fatal for partnership work.

Many partnerships were also challenged by the differences in how researchers and practitioners paced their work. As one RPP member noted, school districts tend to be “fast-paced,” while researchers can be “slow and methodical.” Education leaders often needed data or recommendations sooner than researchers could provide. Several RPP members also had competing work demands, limiting the time available for collaborative work. Although these challenges had the potential to slow or halt partnership work, many RPPs drew on strong inter- and intra-organizational relationships in order to be flexible in accommodating each other’s working conditions.

One researcher described her practice partner’s relationships within the educational organization, which allowed their RPP to adjust timelines as necessary:

“She was also really well connected. She had her ear to the ground, or her finger on the power…of the schools and the district, and what was going on, and she was able to answer and help us in making adjustments to the timeline. I think she was—I mean, not only when it came to timelines, she was our secret weapon, and not that much of a secret, but she was really, really instrumental in making sure we didn’t face too many timeline issues.”

The district leader described above further identified flexibility as an important strategy for addressing timeline challenges:

“I felt like [the research organization] had more flexibility than we did…I think in an organization like ours there were some things we couldn’t get around, but they could. I guess whoever has more constraints placed on them, when it comes to time, maybe is the one you need to work with more.”

RPP members stressed the importance of accounting for their partners’ working conditions and adjusting timelines accordingly to support them. To do this, RPP members benefited from strong inter- and intra-organizational relationships.

Several RPPs included education leaders with limited authority to make policy or program decisions. This made it hard to act on partnership findings, or even give priority to partnership work within the educational organization. Research and practice partners addressed this challenge by involving “mid-level” education leaders who championed the RPP and could see alignment between partnership work and other goals and initiatives within their organization. In some cases, RPPs also brought in new members over time. As one researcher stated:

“I think that the real key was when we first started the partnership, we approached [our practice partners] about [who should be involved]. They were the ones that wanted to do this research, so they knew who the key players on their end would be. Then, as we started to talk about other things, they [brought] those people in. They talked about early childhood, they brought the early childhood coordinator in to talk about what we could do in early childhood.”

Even if partnerships did not have all the “right” players involved from the beginning, partnerships found that relationships and communication were key to bringing those people in later.

Though one might assume that challenges in RPPs are obstacles to avoid, we argue to the contrary: When partnerships encounter challenges, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Because at least one of the challenges we described was experienced by all of the RPPs in our study, it is likely that some challenges are unavoidable. Even more, challenges provide important opportunities for partners to both draw on and deepen existing relationships, both within and across organizations. In this way, trusting relationships are both a condition for and outcome of partnerships that sustain long-term work together.

This post is adapted from the article, “Going on a statewide listening tour: Involving education leaders in the process of research to enhance the practical value of qualitative research,” by Rebecca G. Kaplan, Robbin Riedy, Katie Van Horne, & William R. Penuel, which appeared in Evidence & Policy in March 2018.

Many policymakers and researchers wonder: How can we enhance the practical value of research findings? In our research-practice partnership (RPP) with university-based researchers and state science leaders, we tried to answer this question.

Often we think of producers and consumers of research as different groups; in this partnership, state science leaders were both. Together, researchers and education leaders took part in a participatory research process of planning, conducting, and developing findings from focus groups that involved multiple stakeholders and focused on science education. We found that this process not only resulted in immediately useful findings for education leaders, but it also shifted leaders’ perceptions of the value of the insights that qualitative data can provide for their work.

In this post, I’ll discuss why this study was promising for our field. First, I’ll touch on the issue of how research does not impact practice as often or as powerfully as researchers and policymakers would like. Next, I’ll discuss ways in which research is used by practitioners. I’ll end by sharing impacts of participation shared by our RPP participants, and takeaways for how to get more educators involved in research.

While there is strong interest in research and practice informing one another in education, research oftentimes does not make it into the work of educators. Policies such as the current federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) encourage or require education leaders to use “evidence-based” results of studies that measure the impact of policies and programs. However, educators report rarely using these kinds of results, and policy analyses have found little impact of peer-reviewed research on education policies and practices. School and district leaders report that other kinds of evidence, such as books that provide frameworks for guiding the implementation of policy, are more useful to their work than peer-reviewed impact studies.

Research does figure into education leaders’ thinking and decision making, though not always in the form of evidence from a particular study. In less direct ways, ideas connected to research often circulate in educational systems. Carol Weiss used the term knowledge creep to describe how research ideas influence policy in indirect ways, blending into a group’s collective understanding through general concepts, which gradually creep into policy decisions. Sometimes leaders also participate in research and evaluation activities directly, in what Weiss and others have termed the process use of research. Consider the differences between reading a research article and conducting an empirical study. The written report may have some influence on practice. However, the act of conducting one’s own study will result in a different type of learning, including a deepened understanding of the strengths, limitations, and applicability of research findings. Participants also are more likely to implement research findings if they are involved in the data collection process.

In our recent article in Evidence & Policy, we walk readers through the step-by-step process we designed to involve state science leaders in the collection and analysis of data, including specific details such as timing and prompts. We encourage others to share their detailed processes, hoping to increase the use of participatory research within RPPs.

State science leaders and researchers together planned and conducted focus groups of educators throughout their respective states and then analyzed the qualitative data from the focus groups. Findings from the focus groups offered insights that led education leaders to make important adjustments to their goals for improving science education in their states.

In addition, through state leaders’ participation in these research processes, they shifted their understanding of the value of qualitative research. This is significant because the majority of education leaders often use quantitative outcomes data such as test scores and graduation rates, but they do not regularly place value on qualitative data. Qualitative data can support leaders to identify where in the system they can make changes. Leaders can work with information about what is happening before, and leading up to, quantitatively measured outcomes. Consistent with the scholarship on process use, this shift in leaders’ understandings of the value of qualitative data supports the idea that more research should engage educators as researchers.

One conclusion we draw from our study is that participants in systems can benefit from taking part in research that impacts those systems.

In the context of education, district and state curriculum leaders have a number of entry points for engaging in the kind of research conducted here:

• Many districts and some states have research offices with staff who could facilitate similar processes to the ones described in our paper.
• Another vehicle for participation might be through research-practice partnerships similar to ours, where external researchers serve as facilitators and co-analysts of data.
• Outside of a partnership context, stakeholders in systems at the ground level could engage in participatory action research (PAR) efforts that are supported by leaders.

Policies that enable education leaders to participate in research, along with resources allocated to support those policies, are needed to allow for participation. These include vehicles for leaders to serve as co-Principal Investigators on externally funded grants, as well as funding for staff time and travel to participate in research activities.

Ultimately, a key benefit of engaging system leaders in research processes is to enhance their understanding of pressing issues, and skills in eliciting perspectives of stakeholders. Opportunities for education leaders to fully engage in the research process in turn may result in a greater influence of the research on practice and local policy.

Many view research-practice partnerships (RPPs) as a promising strategy to help schools and districts select, design, and adapt policies and programs rooted in evidence. One approach to organizing RPPs is as a Networked Improvement Community or “NIC.” Ideally, NICs provide a space for practitioners and researchers to come together, learn from one another through sharing and collaboration, and leave with new ideas to try in their own contexts. Here are two things you should know about these promising types of partnerships.

NICs are networks of practitioners and researchers that work together to solve a common problem. They use the methods of improvement science to get better at how they go about solving pressing problems.

The idea of a NIC comes from Douglas Engelbart. Engelbart was concerned with how to improve work practices in different industries. He observed many individuals and organizations working to improve similar practices, often attending to different problems of practice and investigating different solutions. What if, he wondered, those people could form a network to learn from each other about their efforts, and thereby “get better at getting better”? That network he called a NIC.

A NIC depends on a “hub” that sits at the center of the network and serves as an organizer of the network and its activities. The hub can comprise any type of organization or group of organizations, such as county or district leaders or an intermediary organization. It can be seen as sitting at the center of a wheel with spokes radiating outward. The spokes are network members, some of whom may be implementers of change and others who may bring the types of expertise necessary for the network to do its work.

The hub is responsible for integrating the content expertise from the ‘spokes’ into the process, building a sense of community, and engineering knowledge sharing and collective learning across different groups. This also requires knowledge and understanding of the local contexts where the work is to be done. Those in the hub have a unique vantage point to see what is working and not working across the network’s spokes. These observations can inform the training the hub provides to build the capacity across the network and open up opportunities to bring in outside expertise.

Once the NIC is established, some of the work in the spokes will likely include the teams coming together to think collectively about the problems they are facing and decide what the specific focus or ‘aim’ of the network’s joint work should be. It is important that this identified problem be ‘measurable,’ so changes can be assessed over time to determine if they are improvements. The aim statement should specify who is responsible for the change, as well as a time period for accomplishing the aim. An example of an ‘aim statement’ might be: Science teachers and school leaders will work together to increase the percent of 8th graders who are proficient in science from 41% to 63% in three years.

Additionally, part of the work in the spokes is to establish a deeper understanding of the problem. For instance, a NIC might first explore questions such as: Are there any commonalities across students whose test scores are not proficient? They use specific tools such as a Fishbone or Ishikawa Diagram to gain insight into the causes of the problem. They also may conduct a “scan” of current practices and research to identify strategies for improving science learning. Then, teams engage in a collective inquiry process, organized around a cycle of inquiry adapted from industry. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has been a leader in adapting these methods and in fostering the development of NICs for educational problems, with success in areas such as the improvement of pass rates in developmental mathematics in community colleges.

In this work, hubs such as those created by Carnegie do important coordinate work across the network that enables collective learning from the testing, refining, and integration of different improvement strategies across multiple contexts.

NICs’ use of iterative testing to learn about what works, for whom, and under what conditions makes them unique catalysts of educational improvement.

NICs use a systematic process of inquiry, guided by tools and routines adapted for education from improvement science to help practitioners try out ideas in new contexts. For instance, NICs use a formal process called a Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle to “test” their ideas. Unlike the informal tinkering many educators and leaders already do, PDSA cycles are hypothesis-driven and provide a systematic way to rapidly test, refine, and learn from small shifts.

These cycles also are documented through a system of “practical measurements”, that is, measures that can be easily used in practice to study practice. This system allows NICs to track whether individual change efforts are actually improvements and to learn collectively from these efforts. It is very possible that after several testing cycles, some change ideas may not result in any immediate improvements. These “productive failures” are just as useful!

The NIC’s membership structure is also quite useful, bringing diverse stakeholders such as researchers and school and district leaders together to create various “cross-pollination” opportunities where individuals can learn from others who might be testing similar ideas in other contexts.

The National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools (NCSU) is an example of a NIC that, for the past six years, has effectively scaled the personalization of academic and social emotional learning across high schools in one of the largest urban districts in the U.S. NCSU practitioners have shared that some of the most valuable learning opportunities stemmed from their ongoing continuous improvement efforts with other practitioners doing similar work across different contexts. This was especially compelling in the high school context, where collaboration across content areas is less common. For instance, early adopters could share the implementation successes and challenges they had faced to help new implementers avoid similar pitfalls. Teachers’ engagement in iterative PDSA cycles informed change ideas that had been tested over time, and they could offer schools unique insights about the PDSA process. The NCSU partnership still thrives today across the districts’ 24 high schools.

From a district leadership perspective, the idea of organizing multiple schools or districts into a NIC may seem like a daunting task. The good news is, not only are there resources available for engaging in the actual work, but there are many resources to facilitate the initial set up of NICs in ways that are useful for one’s own context. In addition, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching holds regular workshops on the tools of improvement science.

Special thanks to the NCRPP Qualitative PLC (Caitlin Farrell, Angel Bohannon, Eleanor Anderson, Rachel Feldman, Lok-Sze Wong, Debbie Kim, Ayah Kamel, Abby Beneke, Naomi Blaushild, Natalie Jou, Jennifer Cowhy), Kristen Davidson, and Bill Penuel for their insightful feedback on this post!

Bryk, A.S., Gomez, L.M., & Grunow, A. (2011). Getting ideas into action: Building networked improvement communities in education. In M. Hallinan (Ed.), Frontiers in sociology of education (pp. 127-162). New York, NY: Springer.

Bryk, A.S., Gomez, L.M., Grunow, A., & LeMahieu, P.G. (2015). Learning to improve: How America’s schools can get better at getting better. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Cannata, M., Cohen-Vogel, L., & Sorum, M. (2017). Partnering for Improvement: Improvement Communities and their Role in Scale Up. Peabody Journal of Education, 92(5): 569-588.

Coburn, C. E., & Penuel, W. R. (2016). Research-practice partnerships in education: Outcomes, dynamics, and open questions. Educational Researcher, 45(1), 48-54.

Peurach, D. J. (2016). Innovating at the nexus of impact and improvement: Leading educational improvement networks. Educational Researcher, 45(7), 421–429.

Russell, J. L., Bryk, A. S., Dolle, J., Gomez, L. M., LeMahieu, P. & Grunow, A. (2016). A framework for initiation of Networked Improvement Communities. Teachers College Record, 119(7).

Rutledge, S. A., Cohen-Vogel, L., Osborne-Lampkin, L. T., & Roberts, R. L. (2015). Understanding effective high schools: Evidence for personalization for academic and social emotional learning. American Educational Research Journal, 52(6), 1060-1092.

Tichnor-Wagner, A., Wachen, J., Cannata, M. & Cohen-Vogel, L. (2017). Continuous improvement in the public school context: Understanding how educators respond to Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles. Journal of Educational Change 18(4): 465-494.

There is growing interest among scholars, educators, and funding agencies in the promise of research-practice partnerships. Advocates argue that such partnerships can enable greater use of research in decision making, address persistent problems of practice, and improve educational outcomes. At the same time, empirical scholarship on research-practice partnerships is only beginning to emerge. There is a need for more research on full range of potential RPP outcomes (e.g., impacts on local policies) and on strategies for building and maintaining partnerships (Coburn & Penuel, 2016). Research-practice partnerships are atypical arrangements between researchers and educators, and so developing understanding of the dynamics and potential of partnerships is an important research goal.

This Special Topic of AERA Open seeks empirical research papers on research- practice partnerships. We are especially interested in papers that respond to calls for more research on the dynamics and outcomes of partnerships as outlined in Coburn and Penuel (2016). Papers should focus on one or more arrangements that meet the definition of an RPP: long-term, mutualistic collaborations between educators and researchers to investigate and address problems of practice within educational systems. Partners can include researchers from universities, nonprofits and government agencies, and educators at all levels of educational systems and different sectors (e.g., museums, community-based organizations). Some partnerships also include policy makers, parents, youth, and community representatives. We especially encourage papers that compare dynamics and outcomes of multiple partnerships, as well as partnerships that include novel arrangements or partners. We also welcome papers that address the challenges or opportunities of RPPs in addressing issues of equity and diversity in education. We also welcome papers that shed light on the opportunities that partnerships present for producing new knowledge.

• Challenges experienced by RPPs and how they’ve overcome them
• Problem finding / definition in RPPs
• Defining equity in RPPs
• Evaluating RPPs
• How different forms of expertise are surfaced, used in RPPs
• Relationship building in RPPs
• Capacity building in RPPs
• Preparation of researchers, educational leaders for RPP work
• Governance in partnerships
• Designs for RPPs that provide opportunities for multiple stakeholders to have a say in the focus
• Design in partnerships
• Involvement of practitioners in research activities
• Evidence use in RPPs
• Impacts of RPPs on policies and practices of systems
• Impact of RPP designed programs, practices, tools on teaching and learning

Interested authors should submit a single-spaced, one-page abstract describing their proposed article (plus a one-page description of the partnership[s]; see timeline below). Authors chosen from the pool of abstracts will be invited to submit a full manuscript. Invited manuscripts will be peer-reviewed, meaning that invitation to submit a full manuscript is not a guarantee of acceptance. Accepted manuscripts are subject to AERA Open’s introductory open access fee.

Timeline

• January 15, 2018: Due date for abstract + one-page description of the partnership(s) being studied, to help us determine whether RPP meets definition above (submit to AERAOpenEditors@aera.net)
• March 1, 2018: Invitation to authors to submit manuscripts
• August 1, 2018: Full manuscripts due
• From Late 2018 on: Articles published on a rolling basis as they are accepted

For background, prospective authors should consult: Coburn, C. E., & Penuel, W. R. (2016). Research-practice partnerships in education: Outcomes, dynamics, and open questions. Educational Researcher, 45(1), 48-54.

Please direct questions regarding the Special Topic to Bill Penuel or Heather Hill (william.penuel@colorado.edu, heather_hill@gse.harvard.edu). Please consult the AERA Open website for general guidelines on manuscript submission.

Finding and using research evidence to inform decisions and policies and practice can be a difficult task.

Using Research to Inform Decisions is an online course offered by NCRPP that will give you the tools to find and evaluate pertinent research, with a constant eye toward how such research can be used to inform various school- and district-level decisions. The workshop provides an overview of how practitioners use research and offers several simple tools to help you find the study you need. You will also learn strategies and structures that help foster an environment where research truly informs decision-making.

• Explore the nature of research use and current national patterns in research use
• Learn how to find relevant research and read it accurately
• Evaluate research design, and be able to judge the credibility of the research
• Implement strategies for increasing the use of evidence within your own educational setting

• Video lectures with:
  • • Heather Hill, Jerome T. Murphy Professor in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
    • Bill Penuel, Professor of Educational Psychology and Learning Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder
    • Derek Briggs, Professor of Research and Evaluation Methodology at the University of Colorado Boulder
    • Cynthia Coburn, Professor at the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University
    • Caitlin Farrell, Director of the National Center for Research in Policy and Practice
• Readings of various research articles and white papers
• Facilitated online discussions
• Exploration exercises
• Job-embedded practice where you will apply the concepts and techniques learned

After a successful round of this workshop in August 2017, this two-week online workshop will be offered again from February 5th to February 18th. The online instruction, discussions, and job-embedded practice should take five to seven hours over the duration of the program. Participants who complete all individual assessments and contribute to group discussions will receive a certificate indicating completion of five clock hours of instruction.

Register online here. Tuition is $149 per person and we welcome both teams and individuals to attend.

by Bill Penuel, PI of NCRPP, & Dan Gallagher, Seattle Public Schools.

Educators, researchers, and policy makers share a prevalent desire for evidence-based programs in education, and relatively long-standing policies—continuing with the Every Student Succeeds Act—have called for these research-based interventions. However, a big divide exists between almost all research and practice in education.

In hopes of bridging this divide, there is a lot of buzz these days about research-practice partnerships (RPPs). RPPs are long-term collaborations between researchers and educators that are focused on studying and addressing problems of practice. They are increasingly popular, because everyone recognizes that the complex problems facing education require an “all hands on deck” approach to addressing them. Researchers and educators working together can diagnose those problems effectively, and they can also design, test, and develop evidence for solutions to those problems together. Importantly, in a partnership, researchers stick around also to help educators address the new problems that arise from implementation of potential solutions.

Our book, Creating Research-Practice Partnerships in Education, offers guidance for both researchers and educators seeking to create RPPs. We wrote this book because we saw a need for something practical that RPPs could use to help organize their work. To us, one of the most important parts of the book are a set of tools and activities that partners can use to build and maintain healthy and productive RPPs. These include tools for helping identify potential partners, for structuring initial conversations, and for promoting equity in partnerships. There’s even a protocol for diagnosing the health of your partnership.

We also wanted something that faculty preparing future educational researchers and leaders could use in their courses that could give their students a sense of what RPPs are like and why they are catching on among so many people. The book includes stories from our own partnerships in urban and suburban environments, as well as from different types of partnerships across the country. The stories illustrate ways potential partners have gotten to know one another, develop a focus for their joint work, and address the challenges that arise within RPPs. These can also give funding agencies a sense of the potential of partnerships and what to look for in proposals as signs of a true, mutualistic partnership.

We see wide applicability of the guidelines we offer in our book for creating partnerships. For one, partnerships that co-design tools and resources to support implementation of ambitious new standards can produce professional development designs and curriculum materials that are both effective and usable. Second, partnerships can help districts and states adapt programs that have been tried and found to be effective elsewhere. For example, a partnership in Virginia between university researchers and educators in a local school district helped teachers in that district successfully adapt a brief intervention focused on helping students build a growth mindset. Third, partnerships can help districts implement policies. Research-practice partnerships may be especially valuable sources of help to districts and states implementing state plans related to the Every Student Succeeds Act.

We hope our book, alongside other resources related to partnership that can be found at the Research+Practice Collaboratory website, can help build even greater awareness of the potential of RPPs.