Why Teachers And Researchers Should Work Together For Improvement
Our guest author today is Bill Penuel, professor of educational psychology and learning sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. He leads the National Center for Research in Policy and Practice, which investigates how school and district leaders use research in decision-making. Bill is co-Principal Investigator of the Research+Practice Collaboratory (funded by the National Science Foundation) and of a study about research use in research-practice partnerships (supported by the William T. Grant Foundation). This is the first of two posts on research-practice partnerships; both are part of The Social Side of Reform Shanker Blog series.
Policymakers are asking a lot of public school teachers these days, especially when it comes to the shifts in teaching and assessment required to implement new, ambitious standards for student learning. Teachers want and need more time and support to make these shifts. A big question is: What kinds of support and guidance can educational research and researchers provide?
Unfortunately, that question is not easy to answer. Most educational researchers spend much of their time answering questions that are of more interest to other researchers than to practitioners. Even if researchers did focus on questions of interest to practitioners, teachers and teacher leaders need answers more quickly than researchers can provide them. And when researchers and practitioners do try to work together on problems of practice, it takes a while for them to get on the same page about what those problems are and how to solve them. It’s almost as if researchers and practitioners occupy two different cultural worlds.
If we want to bridge the divide between the worlds of research and practice, we need some good ways of thinking about that bridge. And if we want productive relationships between researchers and practitioners to develop, we need some robust infrastructures for collaboration, as Finnigan and Daly point out in their earlier post in this series. In this post, I argue that intentional organizing of partnerships between researchers and practitioners is hard but worthwhile work. As I explain below, this kind of effort has resulted in effective programs for students, and can support the implementation of systemic reform initiatives such as the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Next Generation Science Standards.
How Should Research and Practice Relate?
This week, education researchers at the fall conference of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness are focusing on how to design and conduct research that is relevant to practice. The sessions and conference theme, “Common Ground for Practice and Research,” underscore the need for more and better partnerships between Shanker Blog » Why Teachers And Researchers Should Work Together For Improvement: