Chapter 9: A Research-Practice Partnership as the Lever for Increased Community Engagement: Developing a Community-Minded Survey Program in a Large Urban District

In this chapter we explore the convergence of researchers, practitioners, and school community members around the development, deployment, and utilization of district-wide surveys for parents, students, teachers, and principals. Moreover, we highlight how these surveys have contributed and will continue to contribute to the discourse and practices around community and family engagement—both in terms of the manner in which they were developed and the ways they are used.

The lever behind the development of the survey program is Shared Solutions, a researcher-practitioner partnership between the School District of Philadelphia’s (SDP or the District) Office of Research and Evaluation (ORE) and the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE). As a way to bridge the divide between research and practice, the overarching goal of the partnership is to build the capacity of both organizations to develop and use a dynamic, real-time knowledge base grounded in rigorous principles of research. Our experience in building this knowledge base has provided us with critical insights into how a university and district might most efficiently collaborate, engage the field, and bridge the research-to-practice divide.