Chapter 17: How Research–Practice Partnerships Learn To Develop Goals For Math And Identify Local Problems Of Practice

Research–practice partnerships (RPPs) are an efficacious and increasingly common structure for bringing researchers and practitioners together to advance educational improvement. RPPs engage researchers and practitioners in joint work around local problems of practice (Farrell et al., 2021)— that is, user-centric problems that are observable and actionable (City et al., 2009). They also promote evidence-based inquiry into how such problems might be addressed through the identification and application of relevant, extant research, including the development of new evidence (Penuel et al., 2011). However, RPPs are generally uncommon approaches undertaken by school districts, as they often lack the capacity to promote quick instructional improvements and develop the organizational infrastructure to sustain these improvements effectively (Henrick et al., 2019). Meanwhile, the factors most critical to their effectiveness, both from the outset and over time, are still unclear. In this chapter, we accordingly describe and analyze findings from the Collaborating Around Structures, Processes, and Instructional Routines (CASPIR) Math Project, an NSF-funded project in which researchers and professional developers from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) formed RPPs with several diverse K–8 school districts to improve math teaching and learning. We detail these RPPs at their earliest development, including how a university and school districts jointly addressed local problems of practice.