School–university partnerships are widely promoted as vehicles for simultaneous renewal, yet leaders often lack conceptual tools for examining how coherence for learning is actively constructed across institutional boundaries. The purpose of this paper is to introduce and elaborate on the Organizational Learning Core (OLC) and its extension, the Simultaneous Renewal Learning Core (SRLC), as heuristics for making visible the leadership, learning, and coherence-building work required to organize SUPs as learning-centered systems rather than as collections of aligned activities.
This paper adopts a conceptual–analytic approach that theorizes practice through illustrative scenarios rather than reporting empirical findings. Drawing on organizational learning, coherence theory, and Complexity Leadership Theory, the paper uses analytically constructed scenarios to “open the glass box” of partnership work, making visible how shared learning priorities, distributed leadership, learning-oriented followership, and horizontal and vertical coherence interact under partnership conditions.
The analysis shows that coherence in SUPs is not achieved through alignment alone but is actively constructed through shared sensemaking, boundary-spanning inquiry routines, and learning-oriented participation across roles and institutions. Extending the OLC to the SRLC highlights how negotiated authority, parallel accountability systems, and relational leadership practices shape learning across autonomous organizations. Problems of practice function as generative sites for inquiry, with coherence emerging through both sustained redesign and productive engagement with unresolved tension.
For partnership leaders and teacher educators, the OLC/SRLC provides a design and reflection heuristic to move beyond transactional collaboration toward partnerships organized as learning systems, focusing attention on who learns, what learning is prioritized, and how leadership and followership interact to support learning under conditions of complexity.
By foregrounding coherence for learning and shared responsibility across institutions, the SRLC supports the development of more responsive and sustainable educator preparation and professional learning systems that better serve teachers, schools, and students.
This paper advances partnership scholarship by extending coherence theory into cross-institutional systems and contributing to leadership studies by centering learning-oriented followership as a condition for coherence. The SRLC offers scholars a conceptual tool for analyzing how learning is organized across institutional boundaries and provides practitioners with a heuristic for designing and reflecting on partnerships organized for simultaneous renewal over time.
School–university partnerships (SUPs) are increasingly recognized as a vehicle for addressing the complex challenges of teacher preparation, educator development, and student learning (Dresden et al., 2025). As pathways into teaching diversify and districts assume greater responsibility for preparing and supporting new educators (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017; Darling-Hammond et al., 2017), collaboration between universities and school systems has moved from optional to essential. These partnerships hold promise for strengthening educator pipelines by supporting sustained professional learning across career stages (Dresden et al., 2025).
Central to this promise is the idea of simultaneous renewal, a longstanding principle in partnership scholarship that emphasizes the reciprocal improvement of schools and universities through shared learning and transformation (Goodlad, 1993; Yendol-Hoppey et al., 2025). Rather than positioning one institution as the site of reform and the other as a service provider, simultaneous renewal frames partnerships as relational, inquiry-driven systems in which both organizations evolve together as they address complex instructional and organizational challenges.
Despite their potential, SUPs remain difficult to enact and sustain as learning-centered systems. Because they cross multiple organizations, SUPs require intentional coordination of human, fiscal, and knowledge resources while navigating competing priorities, accountability pressures, and institutional norms (Heffernan et al., 2021; Shepard, 2022). In the absence of shared sensemaking tools, partnership leaders often make decisions about collaboration and improvement without clear ways to examine how routines, relationships, and decision-making processes interact across institutional boundaries to support reciprocal learning rather than one-directional reform.
While frameworks such as the Professional Development School Nine Essentials articulate partnership purposes and outcomes (NAPDS, 2021), they offer limited guidance for how partnerships organize the everyday leadership, learning routines, and sensemaking processes (Weick, 1995) required to enact simultaneous renewal in practice. Similarly, much of the organizational learning literature focuses on single institutions, such as school districts (Shepard, 2022) or universities (Becher, 2022), leaving the layered complexity of cross-institutional partnership work under-theorized. As a result, leaders lack practical ways to make visible how coherence and shared learning are developed and sustained across organizational boundaries.
To address this gap, we apply the Organizational Learning Core (OLC) to partnership work as a research-based, practice-oriented heuristic for supporting coherence and learning within complex systems (Shepard, 2022). In organizational learning and partnership literature, heuristics function as shared, practice-based guides that support sensemaking and coordinated action in uncertain environments rather than as prescriptive models (Bingham & Eisenhardt, 2011; Loock & Hinnen, 2015). Used heuristically, the OLC foregrounds the roles of change facilitators and learning agents, the co-construction of shared learning priorities, and the development of horizontal and vertical coherence, making visible the often-overlooked routines through which partnerships learn and adapt over time.
This article is a conceptual–analytic paper that theorizes practice through illustrative scenarios rather than reporting empirical findings. The scenarios are used analytically to open the “glass box” of partnership work by making visible how routines, relationships, and sensemaking processes support coherence within and across organizations. Together the paper presents the Organizational Learning Core as a design and reflection heuristic, illustrated through practice-based scenarios, to support school- and university-based teacher educators in recognizing, designing for, and sustaining learning-centered simultaneous renewal. Having clarified the purpose, genre, and analytic approach of the paper, we now turn to the conceptual grounding that guides this work.
The role of coherence in organizational learning
Across the literature, organizational coherence for learning is framed as a matter of how organizations are designed to produce outcomes. Pritchett (2015) makes this distinction explicit by arguing that many education systems are coherent, but coherent for schooling rather than learning. In schooling-oriented systems, enrollment, staffing, and procedural compliance function as the primary performance signals, while learning outcomes remain rhetorical rather than operational. From this perspective, organizations become coherent for learning only when learning itself functions as the central signal shaping decisions, behaviors, and system design (Pritchett, 2015). Coherence, then, is not a product of individual effort but a property of organizational design, emerging when delegation, resources, information, and motivation are intentionally aligned toward learning goals.
Extending this learning-centered view, Spillane et al. (2022) conceptualize coherence as a multi-level organizational challenge that must be actively constructed across roles and layers of the system. Their work demonstrates that coherence is undermined when conflicting expectations from multiple authorities fracture instructional focus. Rather than being achieved through alignment alone, coherence is built through leaders' ongoing collaborative sensemaking as they interpret external demands and reorganize structures and practices to support instructional improvement (Spillane et al., 2022). Importantly, this work positions coherence not as a static state that organizations “have,” but as an ongoing organizational process that must be continually built, rebalanced, and sustained as contexts shift.
This process-oriented conception of coherence is echoed in Holst's (2023) review of whole-institution approaches, which frames coherence as a form of continuous organizational learning rather than an episodic reform effort. Across Spillane et al. (2022) and Holst (2023), a shared insight is that learning-focused coherence requires intentionally designed infrastructure. Spillane et al. (2022) emphasize instructional frameworks, routines, roles, professional learning structures, and monitoring systems that stabilize high-quality practice, while Holst highlights the integration of governance, curriculum, professional learning, communication, and partnerships. In both accounts, coherence emerges through infrastructures that support learning-oriented practice rather than through mandates or technical alignment alone.
Holst (2023) further extends coherence theory by foregrounding organizational culture, hidden curriculum, and rules-in-use. From a whole-institution perspective, coherence depends not only on formal structures but also on alignment between stated values and lived experience. Cultural norms, routines, and informal practices communicate messages about what is valued, shaping learning in ways that can either reinforce or undermine organizational goals. Hirsch and Schechter (2024) provide an empirical illustration of this dynamic in professional development contexts, showing that coherence is strongest when educators share understanding of purpose and means, particularly around peer learning, intrinsic motivation, and the study of practice. Their distinction between conceptual coherence (shared beliefs and goals) and structural coherence (programmatic alignment) underscores that technical alignment alone is insufficient for meaningful learning (Hirsch & Schechter, 2024).
Leadership and coherence
Across this literature, coherence is consistently linked to leadership sensemaking. Leaders negotiate tensions among accountability, standardization, and professional discretion as they work to organize learning-oriented systems. Spillane et al. (2022) highlight how coherence efforts are shaped by judgments about effectiveness and responsibility for learners, while Hirsch and Schechter (2024) show how incoherence often emerges when system-level priorities fail to align with school-level conditions and professional judgment. Together, these studies position leadership not as directive control, but as relational and interpretive work central to sustaining coherence for learning.
To theorize how such leadership enables coherence, we draw on Complexity Leadership Theory (CLT). CLT conceptualizes leadership not as a position or set of individual actions, but as a process that enables learning in systems characterized by uncertainty and interdependence (Uhl-Bien & Arena, 2017). From this perspective, coherence does not result from top-down alignment or formal agreements, but through leadership that creates adaptive spaces for interaction, experimentation, and sensemaking. This enabling work aligns with Pritchett's (2015) argument that systems improve when accountability, information, motivation, and resources are coherently oriented toward learning rather than compliance. Within CLT, leadership involves identifying shared problems of practice, reframing work through collective inquiry and experimentation, and building routines, roles, and structures that support learning (Uhl-Bien et al., 2007; Spillane et al., 2022).
School–university partnerships represent a particularly complex context in which these coherence-building processes are intensified. Because partnerships operate across multiple organizations with distinct histories, accountability structures, and institutional demands, coherence cannot be assumed or mandated. Instead, leadership for simultaneous renewal requires deliberate efforts to build shared learning priorities, coordinated professional learning, joint inquiry routines, and evidence-informed decision making across organizational boundaries. As in other multilevel systems, partnerships must be organized for learning rather than compliance or placement logistics (Pritchett, 2015; Spillane et al., 2022). This work entails navigating tensions between pragmatic legitimacy (meeting accreditation, accountability, and performance expectations) and learning legitimacy (advancing professional learning and shared responsibility for student success). Through collective sensemaking and adaptive leadership, school and university partners can transform partnerships from transactional arrangements into sites of shared learning (Pritchett, 2015; Spillane et al., 2022; Uhl-Bien & Arena, 2017). What follows is an overview of the Organizational Learning Core and how it is expanded to the Simultaneous Renewal Learning Core as a heuristic for examining and designing coherence-building processes in partnerships.
From organizational learning core to simultaneous renewal learning core: a heuristic for developing partnership coherence
Transforming partnerships into sites of collective learning requires attention to how coherence is built and sustained. Organizational learning and leadership scholarship consistently emphasizes coherence as essential for sustained improvement in complex organizations, particularly when work spans roles, levels, and institutional boundaries (Holst, 2023). Without coherence, learning efforts fragment, initiatives compete for attention, and organizational actors struggle to align purposes, practices, and decision-making (Argyris & Schon, 1978; Weick, 1995). Consistent with this literature, leadership is understood not as top-down control but as distributed and relational work that supports shared sensemaking, coordinated action, and learning-in-practice across the system (Spillane, 2006). In such conditions, organizations require tools that help actors interpret complexity and align work without oversimplifying it. Heuristics serve this function by providing shared, practice-based guides that support sensemaking and coordination under conditions of uncertainty rather than prescribing fixed solutions (Bingham & Eisenhardt, 2011; Loock & Hinnen, 2015).
Drawing on this tradition, we build upon the Organizational Learning Core (OLC), originally developed to explain how school districts cultivate coherence and continuous improvement (Shepard, 2022), to establish the Simultaneous Renewal Learning Core (SRLC) as a heuristic for understanding how coherence is produced within school–university partnerships over time. While the OLC was designed to illuminate learning within a single organizational system, the SRLC extends this framework to account for learning that unfolds across institutional boundaries, roles, and structures.
As conceptualized in the Organizational Learning Core, collective growth within an organization is supported by three mutually reinforcing components: change facilitators, learning agents, and shared learning priorities. Change facilitators, who may occupy formal or informal roles, support collaboration, build vision, and guide communication across organizational boundaries. Learning agents engage in inquiry, reflection, and experimentation, contributing to shared knowledge and improvement. These roles are situational and fluid rather than fixed. Individuals may enact different roles depending on the learning priority and context. Together, change facilitators and learning agents enable learning-in-practice, while shared learning priorities anchor collective investment and coordinated action. When these roles and priorities are aligned, they position an organization for coherence and shared learning. Without shared priorities, organizations risk diffusion rather than growth.
In addition to coherence, the OLC emphasizes differentiation, recognizing that coherence must coexist with context-sensitive learning and support. Stakeholders bring distinct expertise, constraints, and opportunities to their work, and honoring these differences strengthens collaboration rather than fragmenting it. Differentiation enables engagement in ways aligned with roles, capacities, and responsibilities yet remaining connected to shared learning priorities. As conceptualized in the OLC, routines for joint planning, shared tools, inquiry cycles, and coaching conversations function as connective mechanisms through which learning and coherence are sustained over time. Figure 1 illustrates the OLC as a glass box heuristic.
The Simultaneous Renewal Learning Core builds on these mechanisms by foregrounding how such routines operate across institutions, enabling reciprocal learning and renewal for schools and universities. In this way, the SRLC opens the glass box of collaboration by making visible who learns together, what learning is prioritized, and how learning is supported over time. Figure 2 illustrates how the Organizational Learning Core expands to the Simultaneous Renewal Learning Core, a glass box heuristic revealing the interactions across partnerships. At its center is simultaneous renewal, anchored by shared learning priorities and enacted through distributed learning and leadership roles. Horizontal and vertical coherence guide interaction and alignment within and across institutions, while differentiation and boundary-spanning structures support adaptability. Together, these elements position the SRLC as a practical and theoretically grounded approach for nurturing simultaneous renewal and sustaining collaborative learning over time (Shepard, 2022; Goodlad, 1993; Yendol-Hoppey et al., 2025).
While the Organizational Learning Core provides a heuristic for understanding how coherence and learning are cultivated within a single organization, it is insufficient on its own for theorizing learning across school–university partnerships. The OLC assumes a shared organizational authority structure within which learning priorities, leadership roles, and accountability mechanisms can be aligned. Under conditions of negotiated authority partnerships operate across autonomous systems with distinct governance structures, accountability demands, and professional norms. The Simultaneous Renewal Learning Core extends the OLC by making visible forms of coherence work that emerge under these conditions, including boundary-spanning learning and the navigation of cross-system accountability tensions. Rather than representing a new framework, the SRLC retains the core learning and leadership constructs of the OLC while foregrounding the relational, political, and organizational work required to sustain learning when no single actor holds formal authority and when renewal must occur simultaneously across institutional boundaries. To clarify how this extension operates conceptually, Table 1 summarizes how the SRLC retains the core learning constructs of the OLC while reframing them under the authority, accountability, and boundary conditions of school–university partnerships.
Opening the glass box: illustrating the simultaneous renewal learning core
The preceding section introduced the Organizational Learning Core and its extension, the Simultaneous Renewal Learning Core. In this section, we use the SRLC as a heuristic to open the “glass box” of partnership coherence by making visible how its components were enacted through leadership routines, inquiry practices, and shared learning over time. Consistent with the view of coherence articulated earlier, we trace how learning priorities were negotiated, how influence and communication moved across organizational levels, and how leadership and followership were enacted in fluid, situational ways. In doing so, we translate the abstractions of the SRLC into visible decisions, artifacts, and interactions that shaped partnership development. Because the SRLC is offered as a heuristic rather than a recipe, attention to contextual conditions is essential.
The illustrations draw from a long-standing school–university partnership between the University of [Pseudonym] College of Education and a nearby school district, embedded within a U.S. Department of Education Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) initiative, Project [Pseudonym]. Project [Pseudonym] encompassed five interconnected collaborations including high school teaching academies, initial certification, induction, teacher leadership, and school leadership with each co-led by university faculty and district leaders with shared responsibility for educator effectiveness and student outcomes. Together, these initiatives addressed persistent teacher shortages in [Pseudonym] through coordinated partnership work (University of [Pseudonym], n.d.). The illustrations presented here are not findings from a single bounded case. Rather, they are purposefully selected moments that illuminate how the SRLC was enacted in practice.
School–university partnerships are inherently complex contexts in which coherence must be actively constructed across systems. In this partnership, leadership and learning were enacted under conditions of negotiated authority rather than assumed alignment. Strengthening partnerships for simultaneous renewal required more than formal coordination or structural alignment. It depended on shared responsibility for learning and improvement across roles and organizational levels (Pritchett, 2015; Spillane et al., 2022; Uhl-Bien & Arena, 2017). This commitment is notable given that typical organizational conditions in universities and school districts often constrain such work, privileging individual autonomy or compliance-oriented improvement structures that limit shared sensemaking and adaptive learning (Coburn, 2003; Kezar, 2005; Spillane, 2006).
Against this backdrop, the partnership represented in these illustrations constitutes a non-normative context. Participants across institutions engaged in joint problem-solving, surfaced tensions, and adapted their work in response to collective learning. As conceptualized in the OLC, leadership and learning-oriented followership were enacted as situational and relational practices rather than fixed roles tied to position. Participants actively followed evidence from practice and the expertise of others, regardless of institutional affiliation, while collectively negotiating shared learning priorities.
This pattern aligns with scholarship on active followership, which emphasizes engagement through agency, responsibility, and contribution rather than passive compliance (Carsten et al., 2010; Uhl-Bien et al., 2014). From a complexity leadership perspective, such engagement supports adaptive space by enabling participants to work productively with uncertainty, experimentation, and tension (Uhl-Bien & Arena, 2017). Within this partnership, learning agents and change facilitators moved fluidly between roles, assuming leadership and followership roles in adaptive spaces. This fluidity enables generative learning across organizations and levels. Although these conditions cannot be assumed in all contexts, they were essential for enacting the SRLC here.
Problems of practice as sites for enacting the Simultaneous Renewal Learning Core
Across this collaboration, district and university partners encountered a set of interrelated problems of practice that surfaced tensions among preparation, induction, mentoring, and system-level support. These problems were not predefined or addressed through isolated initiatives. Instead, they emerged as partners aligned their learning across roles, programs, and institutions. Consistent with an inquiry-oriented view of coherence, problems of practice became visible through the work itself and were taken up as shared learning priorities.
Table 2 summarizes these felt difficulties and the collaborative projects through which partners engaged them. The table is not intended to catalogue outcomes or assess effectiveness. Rather, it illustrates how problems of practice became sites for collective learning by showing the projects that emerged in response, the forms of collaboration they required, and the evidence through which learning and sensemaking became visible. Some problems prompted sustained experimentation and redesign, while others surfaced tensions that informed later work but remained only partially addressed within the grant period. The analytic focus of this paper is not whether problems were “solved,” but how partners engaged them productively through shared inquiry and coordinated learning.
As conceptualized in the Simultaneous Renewal Learning Core, these collaborative projects functioned as enactment sites rather than discrete solutions. Coherence-building conditions including shared learning priorities, adaptive spaces for joint inquiry, horizontal and vertical alignment, and legitimized experimentation enabled partners to surface, examine, and revisit problems of practice over time. In this sense, the SRLC supported ongoing learning under conditions of uncertainty rather than linear implementation toward closure. Not all problems were taken up with equal intensity or duration. Some led to sustained redesign. Others revealed structural constraints or emerging needs. This unevenness is treated here not as a limitation, but as a defining feature of partnership work under conditions of negotiated authority, underscoring the importance of coherence-building conditions that support adaptation, coordination, and learning over time. To illustrate how the SRLC functioned, the sections that follow examine two problems of practice in depth. These illustrations are intentionally asymmetrical, demonstrating how coherence is actively produced through both sustained redesign and productive engagement with unresolved tension.
Illustration 1: mentoring as a site for establishing coherence through the simultaneous renewal learning core
Across the Project, mentoring emerged as a persistent problem of practice that revealed misalignment across university coursework, supervision, and school-based support. Mentor teachers, field supervisors, and leadership independently noticed that mentors were drawing on different tools, frameworks, and expectations when supporting teacher candidates. These differences were not framed as deficiencies in mentor effort, but as indicators of a system in which shared knowledge and coherence had not yet been established. Leaders repeatedly heard mentors and supervisors name the challenge of “everyone not being familiar with the same tools,” signaling a need for coordinated learning rather than isolated professional development.
In response, change facilitators did not attempt to standardize mentoring practices or impose uniform tools. Instead, consistent with the emphasis on coherence as a learning process, a cross-institutional team of school- and university-based Teacher Leadership Certificate leaders convened to examine mentoring as a shared learning problem. This team, composed of district professional development leaders and teacher education faculty, treated mentoring as a coherence challenge requiring joint inquiry across roles and contexts. Over time, this work expanded to include field supervisors and mentor teachers themselves, creating adaptive spaces where participants surfaced dilemmas, examined existing tools, and articulated what mentors needed to know and be able to do across varied settings.
As conceptualized in the SRLC, participants enacted learning-oriented followership and leadership as situational and relational practices. Mentor teachers contributed practice-based insights from classrooms, supervisors shared patterns observed across placements, and faculty reflected on how mentoring expectations were communicated through coursework and supervision. Inquiry functioned as a shared pedagogy, shaping how participants examined evidence, tested approaches, and revised their thinking. This inquiry stance was intentionally embedded across multiple learning spaces, including Teacher Leadership Certificate coursework, clinical experiences, and district-based teacher leader learning.
Horizontal coherence became visible as mentoring work connected learning across schools, programs, and professional learning contexts. A concrete example occurred when leaders intentionally embedded teacher leadership work within the district's Teacher Leader Academy. By aligning teacher leadership experiences with district-wide leadership development, mentors began developing shared language and expectations that traveled across partnership boundaries. This coordination strengthened mentoring practices, supported more coherent clinical experiences for teacher candidates, and extended leadership learning beyond participants to a broader group of district and university educators.
At the same time, vertical coherence developed as learning from mentoring spaces informed leadership decisions and program design across organizational levels. District leaders revised and aligned the Teacher Leader Academy through ongoing collaboration with university faculty who were simultaneously revising graduate teacher leadership coursework to align with district priorities. Learning was intentionally connected from teacher candidate preparation, to mentor and supervisor learning, to teacher leadership development, to university faculty and principal learning. The work ultimately led to district- and university-level enacting shared learning priorities while adapting practices to specific needs and conditions.
While the mentoring illustration demonstrates how the SRLC supported coherence through sustained redesign and coordinated learning across multiple organizations, roles and levels, not all problems of practice unfolded in the same way. Some challenges were taken up more tentatively, surfaced tensions that could not be fully resolved within the grant period, or revealed limits in what could be redesigned at a given moment. Examining such cases is essential for understanding the SRLC not as a mechanism for guaranteeing solutions, but as a set of conditions that shapes how partners engage consequential work over time.
Illustration 2: special education as a missed opportunity and a site for building coherence through the simultaneous renewal learning core
This illustration is not presented as a case of comprehensive program redesign, but as an example of how coherence-building can occur through shared sensemaking, held tension, and differentiated enactment even when full integration remains incomplete. Across the project, limited special education knowledge among teacher candidates surfaced as a problem of practice through collaborative leadership work focused on preparation and mentoring contexts. During leadership conversations examining coursework and clinical experiences, district partners identified a persistent concern: although inclusive practice was a central district learning priority, special education was largely absent from the grant design and the university's undergraduate program.
This absence was experienced not simply as a curricular gap, but as a coherence challenge between district learning priorities and university preparation. The tension was named by district-based leaders and reinforced by principals describing classroom realities where inclusive practices were expected but unevenly supported. faculty acknowledged the concern and named it as consequential, surfacing the problem within an existing adaptive space rather than treating it as an implementation failure.
Under conditions of negotiated authority, change facilitators treated this moment as a shared learning problem requiring cross-role sensemaking. University faculty in special education, general teacher education faculty, district partners, leaders, and program decision makers convened to examine what the absence of special education signaled about alignment, responsibility, and learning priorities. These conversations revealed resistance, as addressing the gap would require rethinking program design and displacing other coursework. Rather than resolving this resistance through authority, facilitators held the tension open as part of the learning process.
As the work unfolded, participants functioned as learning agents, contributing distinct forms of expertise shaped by their roles and contexts. District leaders articulated system-level priorities related to inclusive practice. Special education faculty emphasized instructional and legal complexities. Teacher education faculty reflected on program constraints. Principals named the realities of inclusive instruction in schools. Through this distributed participation, learning moved beyond individual perspectives toward a more collective understanding of the problem.
A concrete collaborative moment emerged when leadership conversations led to the creation of a special education–focused inquiry space within department meetings. This space enabled partners to examine how inclusive practices, mentoring, and teacher learning might be better supported. Faculty revised coursework expectations to foreground inclusive instruction, and teacher educators reconsidered how special education knowledge was positioned within preparation. Special education was increasingly recognized not as an add-on, but as requiring intentional attention within undergraduate program design.
Horizontal coherence became visible as learning connected district priorities, school-based practice, and university coursework through shared inquiry. At the same time, vertical coherence developed as insights from school-level experimentation informed faculty conversations and program-level responsibility. Although formal integration across coursework and fieldwork remained uneven, learning moved across organizational levels rather than remaining siloed. Importantly, differentiation was legitimized rather than treated as deviation. Special education supports were configured differently across schools based on teacher expertise and student needs, while remaining anchored to shared learning priorities focused on high-leverage practices.
Clear boundaries remained. Full integration of special education across coursework and clinical experiences was not realized within the grant period, and scaling beyond initial sites proved difficult. However, the partnership conversations catalyzed longer-term programmatic change as university teacher educators increasingly took responsibility for addressing the gap. In this sense, the Simultaneous Renewal Learning Core functioned as enabling infrastructure by creating conditions for shared inquiry, coordinated learning, and sustained responsibility across systems.
Viewed through the lens of the Simultaneous RenewalLearning Core, this illustration makes visible how coherence is built through leadership that holds tension, learning that crosses roles and institutions, and structures that allow differentiation while sustaining shared purpose. The problem itself was not fully resolved, but the conditions for simultaneous renewal were established as district and university partners began learning differently together around a shared, consequential challenge.
Discussion
Together, these illustrations show how problems of practice functioned as generative sites for coherence-building rather than as discrete challenges to be solved. The mentoring example demonstrates how coherence was actively constructed through sustained collaborative redesign, while the special education example illustrates how coherence also emerged through held tension, partial movement, and differentiated enactment. Across both cases, problems of practice became sites where district and university partners learned together under conditions of uncertainty, creating early conditions for simultaneous renewal across the partnership system.
Viewed through the Simultaneous Renewal Learning Core, these cases illustrate coherence as a product of everyday learning practices rather than formal alignment or uniform solutions. Extending the Organizational Learning Core beyond a single organization, the SRLC foregrounds how negotiated authority, role interdependence, and boundary-spanning inquiry shape learning in school–university partnerships. As a glass box heuristic, the SRLC makes visible how partnerships become organized for learning through leadership moves, inquiry routines, and shared sensemaking across organizational boundaries. Table 3 synthesizes these illustrations by showing how SRLC components were enacted in practice across both sites. Rather than operating as sequential stages, change facilitation, learning agency, shared learning priorities, horizontal and vertical coherence, differentiation, and adaptive capacity functioned interdependently to support learning across roles, levels, and contexts. Read together, the cases and the table offer a practice-facing account of how coherence-building work can be designed and sustained in school–university partnerships.
Designing coherent learning systems for simultaneous renewal
Taken together, the illustrations demonstrate how the Simultaneous Renewal Learning Core functions as a glass box for understanding how school–university partnerships organize for learning rather than merely align activity. While the Organizational Learning Core was originally developed to explain coherence and learning within a single organization, this paper extends its use to partnership contexts in which renewal must occur simultaneously across systems. In doing so, it contributes to partnership scholarship by offering a heuristic that makes visible the relational and learning-oriented work through which coherence is constructed, sustained, and renegotiated over time.
Across the illustrations, coherence is shown not as a stable condition or structural achievement, but as an ongoing organizational accomplishment. Learning agents, change facilitators, and shared learning priorities operate interdependently rather than sequentially, with their effectiveness dependent not only on role clarity or structural alignment, but on participants' engagement in learning-oriented followership. Learning agents enact followership by engaging in inquiry, surfacing questions from practice, and following evidence and peer expertise as learning unfolds, while change facilitators rely on these forms of participation to design and sustain adaptive spaces oriented toward learning rather than compliance. Consistent with organizational learning scholarship, coherence for learning requires that learning priorities function as operational signals shaping decisions, routines, and resource use rather than remaining rhetorical commitments (Pritchett, 2015). The illustrations show that partnerships become coherent for learning only when participants are willing to follow learning itself, allowing inquiry findings, practitioner knowledge, and collective interpretation to guide action across institutional boundaries.
Applying the OLC to partnership work extends coherence theory in three key ways. First, it foregrounds learning as the central organizing purpose of partnership systems, echoing Pritchett's (2015) distinction between coherence for schooling and coherence for learning. Second, it makes visible the multi-level nature of coherence, showing how coherence must be constructed horizontally across institutions and vertically across organizational levels, extending insights from single-system studies (Spillane et al., 2022). Third, it surfaces the cultural and relational dimensions of coherence by showing how trust, inquiry norms, and learning-oriented followership enable infrastructures and routines to function as intended (Holst, 2023; Hirsch & Schechter, 2024).
The SRLC also contributes to leadership theory by clarifying how complexity leadership is enacted in partnership contexts. Rather than locating leadership in formal authority, the illustrations show leadership as a distributed and relational process that depends on participants' movement between leading and following. Change facilitators respond to emergent ideas, hold productive tension, and adjust designs in response to feedback, while learning agents alternate between leading inquiry and following shared learning priorities as contexts shift. This dynamic aligns with Complexity Leadership Theory's emphasis on adaptive space, emergence, and collective sensemaking under conditions of uncertainty (Uhl-Bien & Arena, 2017).
Finally, the partnership examined represents a non-normative context. The conditions that enabled the OLC to unfold including high levels of commitment, relational trust, and learning-oriented followership cannot be assumed in university or district settings, where siloed work structures, accountability pressures, and hierarchical decision-making often constrain shared learning (Coburn, 2003; Kezar, 2005; Spillane, 2006). These conditions were constitutive of the work. It was participants' willingness to act as both learning agents and change facilitators, and to follow learning rather than position, that made enactment of the SRLC possible and allowed coherence and renewal to emerge across the partnership system.
Conclusion
The Organizational Learning Core is not offered as a model to be implemented with fidelity or a checklist for partnership success. Rather, it functions as a design heuristic for examining how school–university partnerships become organized for learning rather than compliance. By opening the glass box of partnership work, this study makes visible the relational labor, learning routines, and sensemaking practices through which coherence for learning and simultaneous renewal are enacted across institutional boundaries.
In extending the OLC to partnership contexts, the Simultaneous Renewal Learning Core advances coherence theory by foregrounding learning as the central organizing purpose of cross-system work, highlighting the multi-level construction of coherence across organizational boundaries, and surfacing the relational and cultural conditions such as trust, inquiry norms, and learning-oriented followership that enable coherence to be sustained over time (Pritchett, 2015; Spillane et al., 2022; Holst, 2023; Hirsch & Schechter, 2024). The SRLC also contributes to leadership scholarship by clarifying how complexity leadership is enacted in partnerships through distributed, relational practices that depend on participants' movement between leading and following (Uhl-Bien & Arena, 2017).
For partnership scholars, the SRLC offers a conceptual tool for analyzing how learning is organized across institutional boundaries and how coherence is produced, rebalanced, and renegotiated over time. For practitioners, the heuristic provides a way to move beyond transactional partnership arrangements toward partnerships as sites of collective learning by focusing attention on who is positioned to learn, what learning is prioritized, and how leadership and followership interact to support learning under conditions of uncertainty. Future research might examine how SRLC components function in partnerships with varying levels of readiness, how learning-oriented followership develops or is constrained within institutional cultures, and how boundary-spanning infrastructures support coherence amid shifting policy and accountability pressures.
