Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) emerged as a promising strategy for generating new knowledge and building new capabilities for improving teaching and school systems through research. Defined as “a long-term collaboration aimed at educational improvement or equitable transformation through engagement with research,” partnerships are “intentionally organized to connect diverse forms of expertise and shift power relations in the research endeavor to ensure that all partners have a say in the joint work.” What this definition doesn’t capture, however, is the complexity of standing up an RPP.
This paper presents a framework and a reflective tool for partnering for instructional improvement at scale. The framework is composed of four elements: (1) the commitments partners make to each other to solve the problem they set out to solve, (2) the structures an RPP puts in place so that partners can learn together, (3) the expertise it initially brings together and continues to develop as it learns about improving instruction, and (4) the social learning capabilities the RPP develops so that partners can learn together. The interactions among the components create the conditions for learning through partnering that, in turn, influence whether a partnership could be up to the task of achieving equitable instructional reform at scale.
