Partnering with practitioners

In this paper we describe a research-practice partnership between the Woolf Fisher Research Centre and the Digital Schools Partnership, a group of 84 schools in 11 geographically-based clusters that were implementing a ubiquitous digital teaching and learning platform within their face-to-face classes. The model of research-partnership employed is the Learning Schools Model (LSM), which is a design-based research approach that has been tested and replicated over 15 years and across diverse contexts and countries. We reflect on benefits and challenges of working in partnerships to achieve practice and research aims, which are to improve valued learning outcomes for students historically under-served in education and to advance research knowledge more generally (Lai, McNaughton, Jesson, & Wilson, 2020). We describe a recursive process of collective inquiry that involves researchers and teachers: working together to identify valued learning outcomes (VLOs) on which to focus our improvement efforts; developing a rich profile of students’ strengths and areas for improvement with respect to those VLOs; generating and testing a set of possible explanations for that profile of learning; co-designing and implementing targeted interventions, and; evaluating the extent and  impact of changed practices. We reflect on the importance of building relational trust and approaches for doing so.