Building And Sustaining Research-Practice Partnerships
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 second of two posts on research-practice partnerships – read the part one here; both posts are part of The Social Side of Reform Shanker Blog series.
In my first post on research-practice partnerships, I highlighted the need for partnerships and pointed to some potential benefits of long-term collaborations between researchers and practitioners. But how do you know when an arrangement between researchers and practitioners is a research-practice partnership? Where can people go to learn about how to form and sustain research-practice partnerships? Who funds this work?
In this post I answer these questions and point to some resources researchers and practitioners can use to develop and sustain partnerships.
Defining Research-Practice Partnerships
In a white paper developed for the William T. Grant Foundation, my colleagues Cynthia Coburn, Kimberly Geil, and I identified some defining features of partnerships. After reviewing the literature and interviewing leaders from a number of partnerships, here’s what we found:
Partnerships are long-term. In a partnership, everyone’s in it for the long haul. A good indicator that a collaboration is a partnership proper is they’ve made it through turnover, and the participants have worked on more than one project together. In other words, they’ve had to grapple with two big threats to partnerships, changing people and the end of funding.
Partnerships are mutualistic. In a partnership, there’s a commitment to contributors benefiting from their participation in joint work. Here, “benefit” means more than an exchange of money for services or data. It means that there’s a give-and-take with respect to the focus of the work, and a genuine interest in helping other people address their problems, whether that’s a teacher who needs better curriculum materials or a researcher who needs data on a new approach to professional development she’s developed.
Partnerships are intentionally organized. Partnerships don’t happen by accident. Teams forming partnerships need to carefully consider who needs to be at the table, how they are going to decide on the focus of their work, and how they’ll know when they are successful. They need to attend to equity, taking into account what voices typically get left out when naming problems and searching for solutions.
Partnerships are focused on problems of practice. Researchers typically study what other researchers think is important to study. But, in a research-practice partnership, the focus is on problems of practice defined in collaboration with educational practitioners. Successful partnerships may also include youth, family, and community voices in defining the problems to be studied and addressed.
Collaborations that share these features are not particularly common in education. They require a lot of effort to develop and maintain. The outcomes are often difficult to define, and it’s easy for participants to become discouraged by turnover in the partnership and sudden changes to the priorities of policymakers at the federal, state, and district level. At the same time, lots of people are excited about partnerships, and they want to know how to get started and how to find resources to support their work.
Getting Started with Research-Practice Partnerships
There are a number of places to read about examples of research-practice partnerships and to find tools that can help newly forming partnerships decide on a focus of their work together and study the impacts of solutions they Shanker Blog » Building And Sustaining Research-Practice Partnerships: