Chapter 13: Research-Practice Partnerships: An Innovative Approach to School Improvement

Research brokering organizations play an important role in the movement of knowledge and the development of connections among different education stakeholders and contexts to improve the use of research. Traditional research brokering organizations (e.g., the American Educational Research Association; the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; the RAND Corporation) represent just one of the brokering mechanisms that support the policy relevance of research for school improvement. Innovative brokering mechanisms such as researchpractice-policy partnerships (RPPs) blur the boundaries of research and policy contexts by positioning brokering as “joint work at boundaries” (Penuel et al., 2015) and by recognizing that research use in policy is a “many faceted social process involving multiple actors engaged in assembling, interpreting, and debating what evidence is relevant to the policy choice at hand” (National Research Council, 2012). RPPs are long-term, mutualistic collaborations among researchers, practitioners, and policymakers “that are organized to investigate problems of practice and solutions for improving schools and school districts” (Coburn & Penuel, 2016, p. 48). Three main types of RPPs have been recognized in recent years: research alliances, design-based partnerships, and networked improvement communities. Moreover, as interest in these brokering mechanisms grows, hybrids and entirely new types of RPPs continue to develop (Tseng et al., 2017; Henrick et al., 2017). In contrast to “the predominant producer-push dynamic of research to practice [and policy]” (Coburn et al., 2013, p. ii), the integrated, multi-stakeholder approach of RPPs can create opportunities to accelerate the impact of research on school improvement. Coburn et al.’s (2013) definition of RPP is about practice; however, our environmental scan looked for and uncovered many RPPs that also have a policy focus, such as the KNAER network in Ontario, Canada. Similarly, many RPPs were focused and aligned with policy agendas (e.g., increasing math scores); as such, we argue that policy cannot be divorced from our considerations. Consequently, policy relevance of research in our chapter refers to the ways in which evidence is used in RPPs around key policy priorities of the school districts.