A planning framework for learner–teacher partnerships

Abstract

Learner-teacher partnerships (L-TPs) increasingly feature in student engagement research in further and higher education (FHE). This flourishing literature raises important questions about such partnerships, for example, what is their purpose? what roles do partners play, who leads in a partnership and how? Various purposes and roles have been identified and are generally accepted. These include that learners and teachers working as partners make equal but not necessarily the same contributions to the partnership; that there is open dialogue between partners, collective decision-making; and consensual action. What is missing is an overarching planning framework that addresses all these questions. In this article, we sketch such a framework in the expectation that it will help teacher and student partners make conscious and consensual decisions about how specific partnerships in curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation will work. The paper first outlines distributive leadership as a heuristic device to provide a conceptual foundation for the framework. It then develops the planning framework using the heuristic tool to explore purposes, student roles, leadership and levels of influence in partnerships.