How can research-practice partnerships help us reimagine teaching and learning in schools? In his keynote address at the recent Redesigning Pedagogy International Conference 2024, Professor William Penuel from University of Colorado Boulder at the United States of America shares his experiences through the USA-based research-practice partnership that he had been involved in helping to create and maintain. Below is an edited transcript of Professor Penuel’s keynote address titled “Reimagining Teaching and Learning in Schools with Research-Practice Partnerships”.

Address Complexities Through Collaboration

Whether in highly decentralized systems such as those in the USA or in more well-coordinated and coherent systems like in Singapore, partnerships push for the agency and voice of educators within research endeavours to be spread across different levels of the system and across research, policy, and practice.

In various sectors, collaboration is increasingly vital for tackling complex challenges that require deep expertise. This trend is driven by the recognition that many important tasks of today surpass individual capabilities. It’s particularly accelerated by the urgency to address complex environmental, social and public health issues that are facing humankind today.

Consequently, there is a corresponding necessity to integrate collaborative problem-solving into academic endeavours and workforce development to prepare young people to envision and contribute to efforts to make our world a better and more sustainable place. Preparing for tomorrow will require us to engage young people and practices in the disciplines that draw on multiple ways of knowing and being.

Three things stand out about reimagining pedagogy: First, we need to present students with images of where disciplines like science are headed, not just where the mainstream is today or where disciplines have been in the past as is represented in typical textbooks. Second, we need to prepare students to appreciate the power of multiple knowledges in the world around and be prepared for collaboration that require the use of multiple knowledges. Last, we need to consider that we are preparing students for collaboration, not just so they can perform well as individuals, but so they can contribute to ongoing endeavours to make sense of phenomena in the world and solve problems in the world.

Power of Research-Practice Partnerships  

Research-Practice Partnerships (RPP) are long-term collaborations aimed at educational improvement or equitable transformation through engagement with research.

Problems of educational inequity are not the fault of individual students, their families or their communities; they are caused by system level failures. As scholars in research, we tend to focus on only one level of a system, whether it’s the classroom or on policies. In addition, there is an asynchrony between researchers, policymakers and practitioners. The speed at which we do research and the timing of the generation of findings doesn’t work to inform actual educational decision making.

A partnership provides a means for leveraging this expertise from researchers, local policymakers and practitioners to solve those problems. Establishing synchrony, that is syncing up the timelines of research with cycles of decision making, is something an RPP can do that a typical researcher-initiated study cannot do.

Importantly, partnerships value wisdom from what might be called the “shop floor of teaching practice” to better inform management decisions at the top. Perhaps most importantly, when researchers work in partnerships with policy and practice, they come to ask questions that people really want to know the answers to and produce more timely findings that can be used to inform decision making. In RPPs, in contrast to situations where leaders in the research and policy have all the say, because it’s assumed when people come together, we work equitably with one another.

An RPP Example: Design-based Implementation Research

We established partnership in 2007 between the University of Colorado Boulder and Denver Public Schools, originally through projects funded by the US National Science Foundation. Those early projects established a focus for us on supporting inquiry science through a combination of high-quality instructional materials and professional development.

Over the years, we’ve added district and research partners as our portfolio of projects has expanded to address emerging matters in technologies like artificial intelligence in education, assessment, and policymaking related to knowledge mobilization.

Our partnership won a contract from a nonprofit organization to serve as a lead development team for a development consortium that consisted of 10 states, our key partner district, Denver and three other research organizations.

This led to the inception of OpenSciEd. It is a nationwide initiative to develop free educational resources that are high quality, which are aligned with the next generation science standards, along with the professional development to support effective use of the materials. These secondary science materials are available at OpenSciEd that any teacher can download for free.

However, from this initiative emerged a couple of questions: How can we work to support more equitable implementation of OpenSciEd? How can we create more equitable and effective classroom cultures?

Student Experience Inquiry Cycle

To understand how we can support more equitable implementation of OpenSciEd, our team developed, with partner districts, a cycle of teacher collaborative inquiry called the Student Experience Improvement Cycle (SEIC). It’s a novel form of assessment and focuses on supporting students in using evidence of the quality of student experience formatively to make classrooms more equitable.

We had initially anticipated we’d integrate SEIC into the district’s routines looking at classroom or test data. But soon, we found the best pathway was to work with a district science coach as she worked with individual student teachers in the coaching cycle. So, we sought to modify that in the process. This is key in partnership work – you have to be willing to let your intervention be mangled to fit the local context.

As part of our initial work with district leaders, we spent time reviewing research together related to key aspects of experience that were assessed and then co-designed two-page practice briefs that summarized research findings in a way that could be useful and relevant to teachers and summarized the choices of strategies they could try in their classrooms.

In conclusion, RPP work is very diverse. It covers a wide range of territory, and it actually leads to new problems that are amenable themselves to study and to tackle. Second, collaborative design across different levels and role groups is essential for success. Without young people and involvement and input as well as that of educators, none of this work would be off the ground. And then research, lastly, is critical for informing iterations to design and identifying new works.

Finally, I want to add that this is both incredibly hard and rewarding work. My sincere wish is for those of you who wish to take this up as an approach for reimagining and transforming pedagogies, that you will find it revitalizing and powerful.