Research practice partnerships for sustainable school improvement

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

School improvement is an international undertaking. Decades of implementation research has shown that many improvement efforts are either poorly implemented or do not last. This is especially the case for schools that serve disadvantaged and marginalized student populations. Research-Practice Partnerships between university-based researchers and practitioners in local systems (Coburn, Penuel, & Geil, 2013) are a recent innovation that has two aims: by closely working side by side with practitioners, researchers produce knowledge that is more relevant for the urgent problems of practice faced by challenged schools, and school systems attain capacities that enable them to organize improvement efforts from the inside-out as opposed to being mere implementers of reform packages developed externally. This panel brings together researchers from four countries, Chile, United States, Germany, and Norway, who are actively involved in research-practice endeavors oriented to create a productive synergy between external support and internal school needs for improvement. Chile, the United States, Norway and Germany differ in the degree to which they traditionally put weight on outside-in or inside-out dynamics, with Chile emphasizing the former and Germany emphasizing the latter, to name two extreme cases on this continuum. The proposed presentation of papers from the four countries explores how these institutional differences shape the internal workings of the research-practice partnerships.
In an outside-in dynamic, standards and assessments reveal the gap between what a given school"is" and what it "ought to be." The schols are to avial themselvs of ‘best practices developed externally and provided by researchers, technical assistance providers, agencies of quality assurance, inspectorates, and so on (Mintrop, Zumpe, & Baral, 2018). Thus, internal problems of schools in need of improvement all too often become problems of alignment with external demands (Achinstein & Ogawa, 2006; Daly, 2009; Trujillo & Woulfin, 2014).
In an inside-out dynamic, problems flow from the interactions between teachers and students or from interactions between adults in the school. Many of the urgent problems generated in the relational and instructional core of schools facing difficulties do not come with easy solutions. Often times, neither governments nor technical support providers have answers that are sufficiently convincing or that speak to the specific needs of a given school. Btu at the same time, schools or local school systems are often times not equipped to develop solutions on their own.
Given these limitations there is a growing interest among scholars and reformers for an alternative approach that creates better synergy between externally and internally driven dynamics of school improvement (Mintrop et al., 2018). Synergies would help schools and leaders to focus on their more pressing problems and to develop solutions that respond to context-specific needs while at the same time drawing from external expertise. Research–practice partnerships are the vehicle that is to facilitate such synergies (Coburn et al., 2013).
Research–practice partnerships are long-term, mutualistic collaborations between practitioners and researchers that are intentionally organized to investigate problems of practice and solutions for improving local school and school system outcomes (Coburn et al., 2013). Partnerships between education leaders and researchers have taken a variety of shapes (Mintrop et al., 2018). The contributions of this panel are expressions of this diversity. Weinstein, from Chile, share two experiences for building leadership capacity to encourage school improvement from the inside-out. Ordenes, also from Chile, shows the experience of a master program for leaders, which introduced a design-based research methodology to identify problems of practice and possible solution paths. From the U.S., Mintrop, Zumpe & Cruz show the development of an on-going district-university partnership that aims to foster deeper learning and increase student academic engagement. Jensen & Møller examine how professional learning plays out empirically in the interactions among members of a school improvement team in a Norwegian context. Finally, Bremm from Germany explores how an evidence-orientated and design-based improvement logic can help schools during their professional development process. In each case, the chosen structure of the research-practice partnership and the encountered problems implementing them are a reflection of institutional traditions that give differential weight to school-based professional practitioners versus external agencies.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Rick Mintrop, University of California, Berkeley

Individual Presentations

• Fostering Deeper Learning through a Design-Based Approach to School Improvement – The U.S. Experience - Elizabeth Zumpe, University of California, Berkeley; Rebecca Cruz, University of California, Berkeley

• Building Capacities of School Principals to Improve from The Inside-out. The Experience of CEDLE in Chile - José Weinstein, Diego Portales University

• Design-based Problem Solving as a Strategy to Build Capacity in Education Leaders in Chile - Miguel Ordenes, University of California at Berkeley

• Fostering professional development of principals through partnerships between schools and university – A Norwegian example - Ruth Jensen, University of Oslo

• In-house professional development as a tool of design-based school improvement: Learning from an evidence-based school development project in Germany - Nina Bremm, Universität Duisburg-Essen

Discussant

• Erin Murphy-Graham, University of California, Berkeley