Research-Practice: A Practical Conceptual Framework

Abstract

Recent attention on partnerships between researchers and practitioners highlights the potential of these relationships to provide high-quality usable knowledge for improving schools. But how do we translate guiding partnership principles into specific actionable steps? How do we build and maintain an effective partnership? How do we reconcile and integrate multiple partnership frameworks to establish a coherent set of partnership activities? How do we evaluate partnership progress and outcomes? Building on the recent insightful work on partnerships, we offer a framework for planning, building, implementing, and moni-toring partnerships, based on the literature and our experiences in a partnership between a university-based school of education at a major research university and the research office of a big-city school district. Using a theory describing attributes that define a policy’s strength, we propose an organizing framework to transform insights about partnerships into concrete activities and mechanisms to help achieve the potential of these partnerships to use research to improve schooling.