Navigating literacy policy and practice with rural elementary teachers in a professional development partnership

In this section, we summarize insights from existing academic literature that are relevant to this inquiry, including (1) the need for school-embedded professional learning opportunities, (2) two designs for professional learning and their benefits, (3) characteristics of RPPs and (4) nuances of rural school contexts like the one where we built our partnership.

Recent studies (Gibbons et al., 2017; Ghousseini et al., 2022) suggest that place-based, relational opportunities for teams of classroom teachers and teacher educators to engage in cycles of shared learning in moments of practice hold special potential to deepen collaboration, create a sense of shared ownership over pedagogical dilemmas and zoom in on the complex, moment-to-moment decisions teachers make in every lesson. Additionally, researchers have urged a view of professional learning that sees issues of student equity as connected to issues of teacher equity (Carter Andrews & Richmond, 2019; Cochran-Smith, 2015, 2020), which imbues teaching context, teacher identity and collective efficacy with particular importance. These ideas from the literature informed our study’s goals to design and study opportunities for collaborative teacher learning that centers both teachers and students as knowledge-holders.

We brought a vision for professional learning to the partnership that drew on two main structures and tools: a design called Learning Labs (LLs) as a way to collaborate across a cycle of instruction and a routine known as a Teacher Time Out (TTO), which allows for pausing during instruction for teachers to deliberate and make decisions in the moment that honor students’ knowledge, ideas and responses (Gibbons et al., 2017). The lineage of these design approaches to PD, specifically LLs and TTOs, derives from mathematics education research and recent work, including our own collaborations across disciplines (Kavanagh et al., 2022) and studies in literacy contexts (Caasi et al., 2023; Kavanagh et al., 2022). Together, this scholarship has shown the potential for LLs, TTOs and other practices to enrich moments of pedagogical decision-making in literacy by allowing decision-making to become shared across a team of collaborating teachers and to exist in real time, rather than waiting to reflect on an instructional move after it has already been made. These features mean that a LL design for professional learning is inherently collaborative, school-embedded and practice-focused. We find these features especially valuable and timely for literacy educators, given heightened policy pressures from the SOR (e.g. MacPhee et al., 2021), including disharmonious policy messages from states, districts and schools (Woulfin & Gabriel, 2022), and politicization of content and instruction (Villavicencio et al., 2023).

Existing research has documented the benefits of RPPs, such as their capacity to generate relevant and actionable research by emphasizing joint ownership of problems (McGill et al., 2021) and coordinating “diverse forms of expertise…to ensure that all partners have a say” (Farrell et al., 2021, p. 5). Researchers have also explored the challenges of building and sustaining generative, responsive collaborations (e.g. Denner et al., 2019; Walsh & Backe, 2013) and the imperative for researchers to cultivate an authentic understanding of the practitioners with whom they hope to work, rather than impose a one-size-fits all approach (Lentz et al., 2024). Building partnerships across institutional contexts is intensive work, even when partners work in close geographic proximity. For instance, partnerships require attentiveness to the various goals of stakeholders and ongoing negotiations of reciprocity, mutual trust, identity and roles in the joint work (Jones et al., 2016; Farrell et al., 2019). In building and studying our partnership with teachers and administrators, we recognized these general insights about RPPs more broadly, while also carefully considering elements of a rural context that may be salient for our work.

Among many, we see three elements of teaching and learning in rural schools that hold particular importance for our partnership. First is the importance of remaining rooted in place-based approaches (Reagan et al., 2019) when partnering with teachers and administrators to resist reproducing “the rural school problem,” a historical trend in which researchers viewed rurality as anti-modern, thus motivating a research agenda focused on ways to achieve parity between rural schools and urban schools (Biddle & Azano, 2016). Second, we recognize the distinct challenges faced by rural schools in our state related to staff turn-over, strained financial resources and access to instructional support (Hesbol et al., 2020), as well as inequitable access to healthcare and employment for some families (Vernon-Feagans et al., 2018). Finally, despite efforts to attract teachers from metro areas to rural locales (as described in Cowen et al., 2012; for example), research indicates that “teaching is largely a ‘home-grown’ workforce” in rural schools, making accessible place-based PD all the more vital in efforts to support teachers’ practice (Barrett et al., 2015). Given these particular nuances of a rural context, the broader complexities of building school-university partnerships and the opportunities such partnerships can foster, this paper zooms in on some of the key issues that arose as we pursued our work with our school partners.

Theoretically, we ground our vision of partnership and collaborations with school partners in theories that emphasize learning as a social and cultural process impacted by and implicated in power (Nasir et al., 2021), including long standing inequities in U.S. schooling that often disproportionately impact rural students and teachers. Sociocultural theories of learning guide our processes of inviting partners into collaboration that is responsive to particular teachers and students in specific contexts. These lenses view learning as a cyclical, ongoing process of being and becoming through shared activity, rather than contained activity toward a pre-conceived end goal (Herrenkohl & Mertl, 2010).

Further, the idea of mediation in sociocultural theory emphasizes the dynamic interplay between people, their social environment and cultural tools, including language, ideas and physical and textual artifacts (Doehler, 2002). Here we particularly focus on interactions and collaborative activities that provide opportunities for individuals to engage in mediated learning, drawing on the resources provided by the social and cultural context (Wertsch, 2007). With reading policy as one shared cultural context, the varying positions, identities and experiences we brought to our interactions as partners served as mediating tools for navigating both the partnership and policy. For instance, and as we will discuss, we were a mediating presence in our partners’ understandings of some aspects of the state policy, including the role of the curriculum they had adopted, just as our partners’ talk and ideas related to their histories and hopes for professional learning mediated our learning about the school, the community and what it might mean to be responsive to partners’ goals.

We also draw on critical theories that conceptualize storying and reciprocal witnessing of identity and experience as an always-present, relational and embodied practice that is central to humanizing pedagogy and responsive research partnerships (Campano et al., 2020; Cruz, 2011). Our goals resonate with what San Pedro and Kinloch (2017) describe as the urgent need for humanizing, collaborative inquiry that values “stories, dialogic listening, and self-determination” (p. 375). These lenses demand analytic attention to reciprocity, storied knowledge and how forms of participation provide insights into collaborators’ positioning in relation to one another through the histories and identities they embody, as well as the policies and practices that are present in this particular school and community context over time.

In addition, these theories inform our analytic tools for understanding the process of partnership-building among the layered presence of micro contexts of the rural community, school context and relationships among researchers, teachers, administrators and children, alongside the macro contexts of pressing state literacy policies and related shifts in curriculum and instructional practices.

Before turning to our methods for examining our focal question of how the partnership has developed over time, including our data sources and tools for data analysis, we describe the context of our work with rural elementary educators in this RPP. The work takes place at an elementary school in rural eastern Colorado, East Bridge Elementary (EBE, a pseudonym), that receives Title 1 funding. The town where the school is located has 3,013 residents and is located about 40 miles east of a metropolitan area via a major interstate highway (US Census Bureau, 2019). Along the 59-mile drive there from our university campus, we noticed an abundance of construction vehicles and signs advertising newly constructed homes in former ranch and farmland, representing one sign of the rapid growth in the area and the demand for more affordable housing.

We are a team of two teacher educators and literacy researchers who work at a large flagship research university in a metro area of the state. Olivia is a white, cis-gender, straight doctoral candidate with seven years of experience in elementary classrooms, first as a K-1 teacher and then as an instructional coach. She drew on her experience in implementing standards-based literacy instruction and designing teacher PD to deeply understand our partners’ goals for teaching and learning. Elizabeth is a white, cis-gender, straight professor and former elementary teacher with more than 20 years of working as a university teacher educator and partnering with classroom teachers and students in inquiries focused on pedagogies responsive to students’ lives, identities and knowledge. She also has deep familial roots in a rural region of this state that provided some of the impetus to launch this partnership.

During our partnership, we have worked with two principals, both white women and two assistant principals, one white woman and one white man (we note that we only name identities that our partners have explicitly shared with us). The teachers who volunteered to participate in our PD partnership are women, and the group varies in age and racial identities, with the majority being white. Our partners’ experiences range from a teacher entering her first year to teachers with more than 20 years in the classroom. According to the state’s publicly available student demographic data, 544 students attended EBE in the latest year of reporting (CDE, 2025). 15.1% of those students have been identified as English language learners and 39% qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. According to CDE, of the 544 total students, 312 are White, 197 are Latino, 7 are Black or African American, 4 are Asian and 24 are Two or More Races (CDE, 2025).

We draw on the fields of RPPs and practitioner inquiry to build and study our partnership-building processes with rural elementary educators. Studies of RPPs investigate the collaboration between sociocultural communities engaged in meaningful joint work on shared and individual goals (Akkerman & Bruining, 2016; Penuel et al., 2015; Farrell et al., 2021). Equally important, practitioner inquiry seeks to “generat[e] deeper understandings of how students learn – from the perspective of those who do the work” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009, p. 58). In RPPs, all participants engage with each other’s knowledge and develop new, innovative practices (Wenger, 1998) that provide mutual benefit, such as decomposing practice (Resnick & Kazemi, 2019) or implementing and evaluating induction programming for new teachers (Gilbertson et al., 2024). Practitioner inquiry likewise emphasizes how teachers work individually and collectively through iterative cycles of collaboration to define problems, plan action and reflect to make context-specific classroom decisions (Butler & Schnellert, 2012).

Our RPP is a qualitative study oriented around a model of school-embedded professional learning, Learning Labs (LL) (Ghousseini et al., 2022), in which teachers and researchers have opportunities to learn together in a cycle of collaboration across four phases: teachers sharing their PD goals, working together to identify or develop relevant instructional resources, trying out their goals in classroom enactments, and debriefing as a team (see Table 1). Over two academic school years, we worked to launch the LL structure with our partners at EBE, maintaining a monthly presence at the school by spending at least one full day per month on site in classrooms, observing or co-teaching with our partners, participating in grade-level planning meetings and sharing lunch or other informal time with our teacher colleagues. This allowed us to explore how the LL cycle unfolded and, in the focus of this analysis, to learn from our experience and documentation of building the partnership. As the partnership evolved from the early stages (first two years) described in this paper to later stages, which continue today (into year 4, as we write this), we have consistently had sense-making conversations with our teacher and administrator partners about what we are all learning about school-university partnerships while working on practice together. These conversations were more informal, taking place between formal interviews as check-ins in the hallway or afterschool phone calls, and we used them to make adjustments to the LL cycle, such as scheduling changes.

One feature of the lab-type structure for professional learning is that it allows teachers to make and discuss instructional decisions in the moment, rather than reflecting on pedagogical dilemmas after they have arisen. Another feature, emphasized by Gibbons et al. (2017), is the way the structure makes enactments of teaching shared, not solo. This commitment to shared enactment is significant because it intentionally subverts a prominent paradigm in teacher education and PD: that there is one teacher who does or performs the teaching, separated from a group of fellow teachers and teacher educators who watch or spectate the teaching, playing no active role until the performance is concluded. These cornerstones of the LL as a structure for professional learning shaped our vision for the kind of work we hoped to do with teacher and administrator colleagues and informed the way we went about building a partnership at EBE.

Our data (see Table 1) include field notes, research team memos, audio recorded conversations and written reflections to document the partnership building process. We also collected data during each phase of the LL cycle, which served as artifacts to capture teachers’ collective planning processes as the partnership took shape.

In order to explore how elementary teachers and university researchers build partnership across geographic contexts, we used a collaborative, iterative coding process. This process began with “pre-coding” (Saldana, 2015), as we spent each drive back to our campus after a day at EBE discussing significant conversations or interactions that represented “codable moments” (Boyatzis, 1998) to which we wanted to return during analysis. Next, members of the research team individually annotated data sources with descriptive codes, short words or phrases that captured what was going on in a particular piece of data while linking it to a larger analytic issue, such as statewide reading policy. We then conferred as a team about the descriptive codes assigned by each researcher, collaborating to resolve disagreements and generate what Maxwell (2012) called “substantive categories,” broader themes that provided more direct insight into our research question about processes for building partnership in a rural context.

In one transition from descriptive codes to substantive categories, we began with the descriptive code, “confusion about partnership” to mark moments when teachers seemed unclear about what working together would entail, such as when the second-grade level lead implied that we might serve in a coaching capacity. After the research team’s collaborative coding conversation, we clustered this “confusion” code into a larger theme about teachers being “caught between” what administrators and researchers hoped literacy PD might accomplish. Discerning nuances like this in how participants positioned themselves, others, reading policy and literacy within those expectations required close analysis of the language within some of the artifact and transcript data.

Our analysis surfaced complexities and shifting opportunities connected with our question about the process of building a partnership across geographic contexts toward collaborative school-embedded professional learning. A central finding is important tensions emerged on the part of administrators, researchers and teachers about what working together would involve. We organize this section around those layers of expectations we found from members of the partnership, drawing on examples and illustrative moments from our work with teacher and administrator colleagues at EBE across two academic years (2021–2022 and 2022–2023).

The nearly 60-mile physical distance that separates EBE from our university campus is an overarching complexity in building the partnership with teachers and administrators at the school, which speaks to the importance of partnerships with rural schools and studying the processes of such partnerships over time. This coincided with an additional layer, one that involved important tensions between what administrators, researchers and teachers expected of the partnership and how those expectations shifted over time. We found that administrators, specifically the principal, assistant principal and former superintendent tended to view the partnership as providing targeted PD that would address purported gaps in teacher practice, while researchers held the expectation that the partnership would allow for the co-design of non-traditional, teacher-driven PD. It is important to note that we view administrators’ desire to provide PD opportunities for their teachers as a supportive practice in school settings. We acknowledge the many roles that administrators navigate, as well as the pressure they felt to “home-grow” their teaching workforce, that is to bolster effective practice among their existing teaching staff. We strived to continually show appreciation for the hopes and visions they described having for teaching and learning in their school’s classrooms.

As we discuss below, our data show how two slightly different visions of the partnership persisted, where teachers’ expectations were often obscured by the expectations of others, a conundrum that we believe (a) is a manifestation of the intensive policy context around elementary reading education in Colorado and across the U.S. and (b) has been ameliorated over time, as personal and professional relationships between teachers and researchers have grown stronger.

From the very beginning of our efforts to build a partnership at EBE, administrators expressed interest in the literacy PD we could provide because of its capacity to address perceived needs and gaps in instruction. It made sense to us that the principals would adopt this focus, given the general pressure they faced to complete teacher evaluations and comply with state mandates, as well as issues they navigated as rural school administrators, involving the need to recruit, retain and invest in the teachers in their building, since attracting teachers from elsewhere does not always prove to be an effective strategy (Barrett et al., 2015). Because of the turnover in administrator positions, another challenge shared by other rural districts in this state and beyond, there was some variation in how each of our administrator colleagues expressed their expectations of the PD partnership and the needs they envisioned being fulfilled by the PD (e.g. from wording that conveyed weaknesses in instruction to an emphasis on both strengths and areas in need of growth).

For instance, in our very first meeting in December 2021 with a former superintendent and principal of EBE (both exited those positions in spring 2022), the superintendent lamented that many teachers who had completed the state-required 45 hour training in reading instruction were treating the training as “just a course,” something to “sit and get,” rather than applying the methods or “embedding” those methods in whole group reading instruction (Field Notes, 12/1/21). Elaborating, she explained that one of her goals for the PD was to help “teachers get the basic skills that literacy specialists have” in order improve whole-class instruction, meet the needs of students who were “farther behind because of COVID,” and prevent the state-required training from being a one-time, decontextualized experience that teachers simply forget (Field Notes, 12/1/21). The principal, concurring with this hope for the PD, asked about whether all 32 teachers at the school could participate, indicating her interest in spreading to the whole staff a model of “not sit and get, but embedding” (Field Notes, 12/1/21). When our team explained that the vision of collaboration we hoped to enact with teachers tended to work better with teachers who opt in, the principal adjusted, naming a few grade level teams that might benefit from the work and offering us a chance to present at a staff meeting so we could invite interested teachers from across the school.

In some ways, this exchange represented the first micro-difference in expectations between researchers and administrators: the principal and superintendent had in mind an across-school PD need–the need to embed evidence-based practices for teaching reading into whole group instruction – and saw the PD as a way to meet that need for all teachers. We, the university-based literacy researchers, recognized that our work with teachers related to supporting enactment of the required instructional shifts should align with this administrator goal that extended to classrooms across the school. However, we also held firm to the idea that it should arise from teachers’ individual interests and priorities rather than something that required everyone to work on the same goals. The principal’s support for that vision of the PD allowed teachers across grade levels to opt into the experience, which approximately half of them did at the time; though, as we explain, shifts in leadership necessitated changes to those structures the following year.

The 2022–2023 school year brought a new principal and assistant principal, and our first conversation with them in fall 2022 held similar threads, with enthusiastic support for continuing the partnership and hopes for the PD including curriculum fidelity and the observation of “exemplary” teaching. In some ways, the new principal echoed the former superintendent’s priority to “embed” state mandated, SOR instructional practices into classrooms, adding an additional layer to her description of the school’s PD needs by pointing to teachers’ “lack of exposure” to the SOR and their attachment to balanced literacy and the “old” way of teaching reading. Despite having completed the state-mandated training, teachers “didn’t know other possibilities for doing things,” according to the principal, and, in her view, still did not know or understand distinctions between phonological awareness, phonics, fluency and other reading foundational skills (Field Notes, 10/10/22). The school’s reading curriculum, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s (HMH) Into Reading served as one tool for navigating these perceived gaps in teacher knowledge, but, as the assistant principal elaborated, there were teachers who felt unsure of the curriculum and departed from it liberally, creating a conundrum around implementation fidelity explained, in her words, as “we won’t know if the curriculum is working or if there are gaps in it unless it’s being followed with fidelity” (Field Notes, 10/10/22). These moments where administrators shared what they hoped for relative to school embedded PD, as well as challenges related to curriculum fidelity, show how tensions in administrators’ expectations of the PD evolved across time as there was turnover in school leadership positions and as pressure from the state department of education became more salient.

This issue of fidelity, in particular, became increasingly complex when the researcher team realized that HMH was not fully aligned with the SOR in ways administrators expected, even though it was on CDE’s advisory list of approved curricula for district adoptions. As we explored the curriculum in preparation for an upcoming lesson demonstration, we discovered that some areas of reading instruction, such as approaches to teaching sight words and some decoding strategies, only partially met state evaluators’ criteria for SOR alignment (and found where the CDE acknowledged this in a rubric document on their website) We shared this information with administrators via email and administrators expressed their gratitude for “digging in so deeply” (Email communication, 11/30/2022). First through this email response and in later conversations as the partnership continued, administrators explicitly expressed their trust in members of our research team to support teachers in navigating contradictions like the one involving HMH, where some aspects of the curriculum were not aligned with SOR methods, thus necessitating that some curriculum routines should not be followed with “fidelity.”

Out of these general administrator concerns–around teachers’ knowledge of the SOR and implementing curriculum with fidelity–emerged an expectation about what the partnership with literacy researchers could accomplish. Namely, it could show teachers “new” ways of doing things that are aligned to the SOR and to the school’s curriculum, through a particular means to which our administrator colleagues seemed especially drawn: the “demo lesson.” “Demo lessons,” or demonstration lessons, arose in the first conversation with the new principal and assistant principal as a key PD activity that could serve their hopes for what the PD would provide, even though demo lessons, as such, were not explicitly part of the LL cycle of professional learning proposed by the research team.

As we discuss in the next section about researcher expectations for the PD, we were open to the idea of demo lessons, but our view of them resonated more with the “Try It Out” phase of a LL, representing an opportunity for a member of the research team to “go first” in enacting some co-planned or co-imagined lesson, instructional practice or routine. Our coding and analysis of the notes from this first conversation with our administrator colleagues, showed the murkiness of what “demo lesson” could mean in the PD activities, likely due to the layered goals both administrators and researchers were bringing to the table. For administrators, they were sharing their perceived needs for instructional support for teachers, while affirming our presence and acknowledging our assumed expertise. We were eager to be responsive to the needs and instructional goals of the new administrators and build trust and relationship with them. When discussing what we could do together and reacting to the LL cycle, the principal and assistant principal remarked that their teachers “love watching experts teach,” thus positioning any teaching that we would do in classrooms as exemplary, something that teachers should “watch” and not necessarily participate in. In this way, we and our administrator colleagues were oriented differently to what it meant for university-based literacy researchers to be involved in classroom enactments at the school. These different orientations represent one layer of complexity in the partnership-building process, posing implications for how teachers understood and approached our work together.

Across all stages of building the partnership with teachers and administrators at EBE, our hope was to create PD with our partners that would challenge traditional notions of PD that can tend to promote a sit-and-get model, be located at a distance from classroom practice and position university teacher educators as experts who hold knowledge and teachers as those needing to receive knowledge. Rather, our goal was to engage a collaborative process of professional learning that viewed knowledge-producing as reciprocal and shared, positioned all participants as holding expertise, was driven by teachers’ learning goals, and occurred in the context of classroom practice. In addition to learning about the process of building a partnership across regions of the state and around this vision for collaboration, we also wanted to gain insight into how such approaches to professional learning might support teachers against a policy landscape shaped by SOR-inspired mandates.

In our very first introduction to EBE teachers, which took place in January 2022, following the December 2021 meeting with the former principal and superintendent, we presented a graphic representation of a LL and a list of some features we hoped would characterize the PD we created with teachers, such as, “opens possibilities for co-teaching and co-observation,” “helps the READ Act training come to life in your classroom” and “is collaborative and aligned to goals that matter most to you.”

One month after this introduction to the partnership, with a group of about eight of the thirteen total teachers who self-selected into the partnership, we proposed some norms to guide the work that we hoped reflected the collaborative, mutualistic vision we held for the PD, including: “it is okay to share ideas in progress and revise your thinking (experimentation not performance!), collaboration not feedback, [and] no one’s teaching is ever being evaluated” (Launch Agenda, 2/3/22). These two example artifacts–the list that communicated our vision for co-designed PD and an excerpt from our proposed norms – reflect our efforts to articulate our expectations of the partnership and what PD collaborations might accomplish. As discussed previously, there were subtle ways in which these expectations departed from what administrators expected of the partnership, especially in terms of demo lessons.

In noting that teachers “love to watch experts teach,” administrators implicitly framed any teaching we, as researchers, might do in classrooms as exemplary. Internally, our team struggled with this framing, not just because it existed in tension with our hopes for the PD, but also because it seemed to suggest that we were more knowledgeable than our teacher partners about things we were still learning at the school. As we wrote to one another in a memo in January 2023:

In the course of building the partnership, then, one tension that came to the surface was between the expectation held by administrators on the one hand that we, as university-based researchers and supposed experts in the SOR, should deliver professional learning opportunities to teachers by modeling exemplary teaching, and our vision for the partnership on the other, which saw PD as co-built with teachers and expertise as distributed among all participants.

After discussing this tension as a team and exploring what was contributing to it, we endeavored to reframe demo lessons as one of multiple ways we might learn in partnership with one another. In practice, we found that this attempt to reset and reframe expectations of the partnership, particularly related to demo lessons, did not address the assumption of our instructional expertise quite as much as we hoped. We did complete four LL cycles during the remainder of the 2022–2023 school year, after attempting to reframe demo lessons as one option on a menu of ways we might learn together, such as through co-teaching, co-observation and video analysis. Yet in each LL, the default scenario continued to involve someone from our team leading a small group reading lesson while teachers from the participating grade level watched and took notes. On the surface, then, it appeared that the assumption persisted that we, the literacy researchers, would demonstrate exemplary teaching. However, we also found that over time, some of our practices and routines began dismantling that assumption, including spending more informal time in classrooms to strengthen relationships with teachers and children, seeking out and celebrating teachers’ own expertise and simply asking teachers to launch lessons in LLs once they felt comfortable.

The teachers with whom we worked at EBE were navigating the administrator expectation that the partnership would fill pressing gaps in teacher knowledge and practice and the researcher expectation that the partnership would provide non-traditional, collaborative, teacher-driven PD. Upon being introduced to the idea of the LL cycle and the TTO routine during our first introduction to the EBE teaching staff in January 2021, a number of teachers seemed to appreciate and endorse the notion of school-embedded, active PD that departed from the style of one-time trainings or workshops. When we shared a video recording of a TTO from another school-university partnership, a number of teachers reacted positively to the idea of being able to make instructional decisions collectively and in real time. Responding to the video, one teacher remarked that the TTO routine made a lot of sense to her because “two heads are better than one” when deciding on the next instructional move (Field Notes, 1/26/22). In this way, teachers expressed initial openness to the researcher vision of the PD partnership, but a number of factors interacted to cloud what teachers themselves wanted or could expect from the partnership.

One such factor, discussed previously, derived from the general sense that EBE teachers should learn by observing model instruction (e.g. the principal’s comment that “they love watching experts teach”). As part of the LL model, the “Try It Out” phase, our hope as researchers was always to co-enact classroom instruction with teachers, pooling the collective pedagogical expertise held by our own team and the teachers who knew their students, school and curriculum best. This expectation of researchers to share classroom enactments with teachers came into tension with the teachers’ instinct to sit and watch what they assumed to be exemplary instruction, an instinct that may have been encouraged by administrator framing of the PD and by our team’s familiarity with the instructional practices teachers were expected to enact. A brief reflection on the shape of each LL cycle from Spring 2022 into Fall 2022 illustrates how the tension developed and grew.

After viewing the video of the TTO in January 2022, we facilitated a co-planning meeting with participating teachers, but not until March because of how often inclement winter weather prevented our commute to the school. This co-planning meeting represented the “Identify Relevant Resources” phase of our LL cycle, with one team of kindergarten and first grade teachers having co-planned a lesson on mapping sounds to letters in regularly and irregularly spelled words and another team of second grade teachers having co-planned a lesson on a reading comprehension strategy to describe character thinking. Members of the research team volunteered to “go first,” or launch the lesson, although we made plans internally to pause the lesson through a TTO in case the teachers did not yet feel comfortable doing so. The enactment of those co-planned lessons happened in April 2022, with researchers mostly leading the lesson and teachers mostly watching.

Then, during the next school year, 2022–2023, our attempts to relaunch the partnership were gradual, situated within the far-reaching changes at the school, including the new administration team. The new administrators requested some changes to the original LL structure, which had direct implications for teacher expectations of the partnership, specifically related to scheduling. The new administrators asked if we could focus our collaborations with particular grade levels, namely first and second grades, rather than proceed with our open invitation model from the year before. We were happy to make that shift, as it felt responsive to the school’s needs and those grade levels included some of our most engaged teacher partners from the previous spring. Scheduling was an additional layer of change from spring to fall. The previous principal had scheduled time for PD after school each month and had given us that time to meet with teacher partners, whereas the new principal took different approaches to scheduling all-staff meetings and organized school schedules to provide time for grade level collaborations during the school day.

With these shifts, we found that scheduling conflicts made it difficult to find a time for a co-planning meeting with partner teachers, but after the principal’s enthusiasm for demo lessons and the teachers’ interest in co-observation, we wanted to get into classrooms as soon as possible. This motivated an adjustment to our original vision of the LL cycle: rather than planning with teachers, as originally envisioned by the LL cycle, we asked participating teachers to share their instructional learning goals with us, we planned a sample lesson focused on the skill or strategy teachers wanted to work on and then we visited classrooms. During those visits, we rotated between teaching the lesson, while two teachers and one of us observed, and covering classrooms so two teachers could always be together for those lessons. This departure from the LL was motivated by our desire to dig into work with teachers after the pace of the PD partnership had lagged due to the change in leadership and a delay to the start of the school year because of construction. Although modifying the sequence of the PD activities in this way seemed justified at the time, we found that it had consequences for how teachers conceptualized the work and what they expected of the partnership.

Mainly, our challenges with scheduling and subsequent decision to circumvent the co-planning phase of the LL cycle further solidified teachers’ penchant to see us as instructional experts, to label our teaching as exemplary and to defer to us. Although we found opportunities for one of us to initiate TTOs during some lessons, in the five LLs we completed during the 2022–2023 school year, teachers continued to take the role of observers without initiating a TTO or sharing in decision-making during instruction. In an email communication with the second-grade lead teacher about re-launching the partnership, she wrote, “It will be great to have your feedback and input on what we’re doing and how we can do it better!” (Email correspondence, 11/14/22). While this sentiment reflected our desire to support teachers in growing their practice, we also found that it implied a coaching or evaluative dynamic in which the teacher expected our team to identify supposed gaps in instruction and remediate those gaps from our vantage point as literacy experts. This expectation on the part of the teachers may have been connected to two factors: (1) researchers’ decision to adjust the LL cycle, thus obscuring key parts of our original vision for the PD, and (2) the administrator team’s suggestion that watching experts teach was both what teachers desired and was most effective for their learning.

Studying our processes for building partnership with rural educators across geographic distance has revealed the multiple layers of tension between what administrators, researchers and teachers expected from the work together. Each of those layers is also embedded not just within the policy landscape of elementary reading education, but also challenges particular to rural schools, such as, in our case, geographic distance, including time and weather, and the significant shifts the district and school experienced during the process of building the partnership, including new administrators with different priorities and changes to the school schedule. As we have described, administrators tended to view the PD as a means to target what they saw as pressing pedagogical problems in instruction (in relation to SOR-inspired, new emphasis in the teaching of reading). As literacy researchers and teacher educators, we viewed the PD as an opportunity to center teachers’ instructional goals and offer a learning partnership that was collaborative, embedded in practice and challenged hierarchies of expertise. Teachers, located between these viewpoints, had to keep up with what the PD was supposed to be and entail, even as we modified the structure for professional learning, further muddying the waters. This situation may, in part, reflect how our partnership experienced challenges in achieving coherence, a feature widely regarded as one cornerstone of effective PD that involves basic agreement between state/district goals, administrator priorities and the specific content or design of a PD program (Kennedy, 2016). Understanding such tension and the sources of it, which we turn to in our discussion, illuminates some of the complexities that can arise in building RPPs, particularly in the context of rural schools and state policies that create an imperative to swiftly change longstanding approaches to literacy instruction.

We contend that there are two main lenses through which to view our findings about partnership building processes at EBE, representing two avenues for answering our research question about how elementary teachers and university researchers build partnership across geographic contexts toward collaborative school-embedded professional learning. First, we suggest that administrator, teacher and researcher reactions to the prospect of working together on instructional practice in reading are deeply shaped by and cannot be separated from the intensive policy context that currently exists around elementary reading education in the U.S. Second, we characterize the role we assumed as partners in terms of the ways we strove to mediate policy mandates and requirements, thus answering the call made by other literacy researchers (e.g. Woulfin & Gabriel, 2020) to impact reading instruction by studying teachers’ relationship to curriculum and PD, rather than focusing solely on their personal levels of content knowledge (or lack thereof).

As we described in our findings, many of the complexities in building our RPP were driven by tensions between administrators’ hopes for PD and researchers’ vision for collaboration, tensions that teachers navigated while building relationships with us and participating in the early stages of work together. We assert that these tensions in what administrators, researchers and teachers hoped reading PD would achieve is intricately connected to an intensive policy context around elementary reading education, which exerts immense pressure upon practitioners to overhaul the ways they teach children to read and locate themselves on the “right” side of a constructed binary between effective and ineffective methods for teaching reading. Although the policy context in this study involved elementary literacy policy, we maintain that an implication of this work is for researchers in all disciplines to remain curious about how larger policy landscapes may be shaping their relationships, communication and collaborations with practitioners in school-university partnerships.

Again, in this case, the SOR, as a body of research that has inspired far-reaching state policy, has been instrumentalized to reform the way teachers are trained and the way reading is taught in U.S. public schools. The objective of such reform is to achieve congruence between how children are taught to read and how the brain learns to read, according to science. The reach of the reform is vast, with the same expectations for fidelity regardless of district size, capacity and geographic location. This wave of elementary reading reform has ushered in narratives about teachers, their skills and how much they know or do not know about teaching reading, such as assertions that teachers are somehow to blame for supposed reading failure in U.S. schools (Wetzel et al., 2020) or the idea that the country is besieged by a literacy crisis (MacPhee et al., 2021). While our own and our partners’ mutual enthusiasm for the partnership was explicitly connected to the demands of the policy and a desire to support teachers amid policy pressure, the policy push to pivot reading instruction quickly influenced how teachers and administrators developed expectations about what PD with us could entail.

We must consider our EBE administrator colleagues’ desire to have their teachers “watch experts teach” against the backdrop of a policy climate and media narrative that there is a problem with how teachers teach children to read (e.g. Hanford, 2018). For instance, a particularly influential aspect of that narrative is the construction of binaries (Yaden et al., 2021) that draw defining lines between effective, science-based, acceptable methods for teaching reading, compared to ineffective, debunked, unacceptable methods for teaching reading. Administrators and teachers are confronted with the urgent need to locate themselves on the “right” side of those binaries, an urgency that is stoked by mandates from the CDE and by the risk of being personally implicated in narratives that “position teachers as struggling and have suggested that they are to blame for failing students” (Wetzel et al., 2020, p. 327). Each of these layers of pressure, arising from reading education policy, the media and elsewhere, amplifies a priority long held by many rural schools, to place highly effective teachers in classrooms, even as it remains incredibly challenging to recruit and retain teachers in many rural locales (Barrett et al., 2015)(.

Our partnership with practitioners at EBE was impacted by and implicated in Colorado literacy policy. Remaining curious about the interplay between the micro, school-based context of EBE and the macro context of statewide SOR legislation allowed us to appreciate our partners’ experience more fully, especially the top-down pressure they felt to change, update or transform their teaching practice to demonstrate alignment with the scientific evidence base from the SOR. Understanding that pressure is paramount for university-based researchers who, like us, seek to build a literacy partnership to collaborate with teachers of reading. Yet this implication of our work, that the larger education policy landscape can be highly consequential in school-university partnerships, is relevant for a range of contexts and types of partnerships. RPPs inherently involve an ongoing negotiation of evolving, co-constructed agendas that matter to researchers and practitioners alike (Farrell et al., 2021; Lentz et al., 2024). As that evolution occurs, with the emergence of new problems, questions or challenges, researchers should remain attentive to the role of policy and policy messages in their work with partners. Doing so has the potential to deepen analysis of partnership work, as in this study, which shows how SOR policy pressure manifested on the ground at a school where administrators, teachers and researchers were working together. Additionally, integrating a policy focus into partnership building and inquiry points to the importance of critical perspectives on policy that provide the analytic lenses necessary to interrogate policy messages like those that blame teachers for the supposed literacy crisis in the U.S.

As literacy researchers seeking to learn about partnership building processes, we include in our inquiry how we responded to the tensions between ours, administrators’ and teachers’ expectations of the partnership, remembering that those expectations were shaped by the policy landscape of elementary reading education. Specifically, we characterize the role we endeavored to take as one involving mediation: we tried to occupy an in-between space, between state-required mandates and the teachers and administrators who felt such pressure to comply with them. While this mediation role emerged in connection to literacy practice and policy in our partnership, we maintain that researchers in a variety of disciplinary and partnership contexts could adopt a similar, buffering position between the everyday work of a school site and larger, macro forces related to policy pressure.

Here, we turn to one illustrative example from our study, drawn from our team’s decision-making upon discovering that the school’s reading curriculum, HMH’s Into Reading appeared on CDE’s advisory list of approved curriculum, but, at the time, only partially met expectations for alignment with the SOR (it has since been updated). The position occupied by this curricular program represents an occasion in which the SOR’s penchant for neatly drawing binaries between effective and ineffective becomes more complicated: the curriculum was neither entirely based on SOR approaches nor entirely discredited with that SOR stance. The curriculum’s designation as partially meeting expectations meant it was somewhere in the middle. This also introduced some issues and challenges in the principal and assistant principal’s hope that PD with us would lead teachers toward implementing the curriculum with fidelity, for by the state’s own admission, following this particular curriculum to the letter would not fully conform to the legislated intent to improve the quality of reading instruction for students or strengthen teachers’ content knowledge in SOR-informed methods. Our course of action upon making this discovery about Into Reading (which involved email communication with administrators, as described in the Findings section) represents our attempt to give voice to an instance in which the line separating “good” and “bad” reading curriculum becomes blurry, even as practitioners carve that line to guide their implementation of state-mandated instructional practices. Such blurry lines exist in many contexts outside literacy and literacy instruction, and it is our hope that this study elucidates a strategy for negotiating them. By locating ourselves as researchers and partners right in the middle of the messy places where binaries break down or implementation problems get sticky, we strived to mediate between expectation that changing practice should be as straightforward as adopting a certain curriculum and the challenges and complexities that face practitioners as they pursue that change.

Analyzing our processes for building partnership with the teachers and administrators at EBE brought to the surface tensions between what we, administrators and teachers hoped literacy PD could achieve. This paper is a step in enumerating some of those tensions, but broadly we see the tension as existing between our desire to position teachers as knowledge-holders and instructional experts in their own right, and an era of SOR reform that creates a policy context that positions teachers as “in need of change,” implicitly assuming there is something wrong about what they are doing when it comes to reading instruction. In mediating within that tension, we learned more about how to serve as responsive partners to teachers, by, for example, recognizing that we inadvertently sent some mixed messages about the central roles and practices of the partnership. Over and above its implications for the structural organization of the PD, our priority to mediate within tensions connects to the concept of mediated learning within sociocultural theory, specifically the idea that learning – including teacher learning – is cyclical and shaped by the interactions between people, their social context and the cultural and social tools at their disposal (Wertsch, 2007). All of the tensions that emerged between what administrators, researchers and administrators hoped for in this partnership illustrate a key tenet of sociocultural theories of learning, namely that learning is more complicated than movement toward a preconceived end goal like compliance with state policy or fidelity to a reading curriculum.

Through it all, we aimed to remain responsive to administrators’ school-wide goals and teachers’ felt needs in order to live out the collaborative, reciprocal vision for the joint work, a vision that was theoretically grounded in humanizing pedagogy and responsiveness within RPPs (Campano et al., 2020). Bringing that vision to life at EBE was nuanced, holding some complexities and some successes, also demonstrating how issues of coherence in professional learning (Kennedy, 2016) must be viewed as iterative and collaborative in place-based, multi-year partnerships. Additionally, we recognize that although our partnership at EBE was grounded in values of mutual learning and collaborative aims and actions in how we worked with partners in the school, our writing here is our perspective based on our analysis of the partnership, rather than a study with school-based educators as co-researchers and co-writers. Building an understanding of our partnership and the processes for fostering it is an ongoing endeavor, one that we believe can illuminate some of the on-the-ground consequences of education reform movements like the SOR and contribute to the field’s understanding of creating, sustaining and studying RPPs.

Ethical approval for this study was obtained from the University of Colorado Boulder IRB 22–039.