Sharing Our Findings Together: Collaborating With Educators to Disseminate the Research Findings of Research-Practice Partnerships

• In Event: Advancing Research-Practice Partnerships: Leveraging the Positionality of Graduate Student Researchers

Abstract

Purpose:

Prior research on RPPs has examined their outcomes (e.g., Coburn & Penuel, 2016), the characteristics of effective RPPs (e.g., Henrick, Cobb, Penuel, Jackson, & Clark, 2017), and the processes by which educators and researchers establish effective working relationships in RPPs (e.g., Henrick, Munoz, & Cobb, 2017). However, few studies have examined how researchers and educators collaborate to analyze data and report on findings from their joint work. This study examines a case in which a graduate student and district leaders collaborated to analyze data from a district-wide coach professional development design study, summarized these findings in a research presentation, and then presented the findings at a national research conference.

Theoretical Framework:

RPPs involve a bi-directional approach to research in which educators and researchers investigate shared problems of practice (Henrick, Munoz, & Cobb, 2017). All too often this bi-directional approach ends when it comes to analyzing data and reporting research findings. In this study, I extend the idea of bi-directional research to argue that collaboratively analyzing data and reporting on findings provides opportunities for both researcher and educator learning.

Methods and Data Sources:

This case originates from an RPP aimed at investigating how districts can support mathematics coaches’ professional learning by designing and facilitating coach professional development (PD). Data for this case included audio recordings of meetings between the district leaders and graduate student in which they worked together to analyze data from the PD design study, identify findings based on this analysis, and then summarize the findings for dissemination. Data also included artifacts from these meetings, such as planning documents, memos, and provisional slides. Using grounded methods (Glaser & Strauss, 2017), I analyzed these data to identify themes regarding educators’ and researchers’ collaborative approach to this work.

Findings:

District leaders initially deferred to the graduate student in meetings. However, as the graduate student consistently positioned the analysis as a genuine collaboration (e.g., “This is a genuine question, what do you think about…?”), district leaders began to take shared ownership over the process. In particular, district leaders identified their own “lessons learned” based on their analysis of the coach PD data. These lessons learned marked significant takeaways for the graduate student as well as the district leaders. Consequently, the district leaders and graduate student decided to feature the lessons learned as findings in the subsequent research presentation.

Significance:

Extending notions of the bi-directionality of RPPs to the dissemination of research findings involves engaging educators in the process of analyzing data and reporting on research. This study indicates that engaging educators in this process involves negotiating issues of expertise and authority. It also involves positioning the analysis of data as a genuine partnership. Graduate students may be uniquely positioned to engage in this kind of work, as they themselves are in the process of developing expertise in conducting formal research.

Author

• Nicholas M. Kochmanski, University of North Carolina - Greensboro