Getting Started on Your RPP Learning Journey

There are a number of organizational to-dos to consider when starting an RPP, but much more important is the kind of pre-work and reflection that asks “What are necessary predispositions to do this work well? Do my goals and values align with those of RPP work?”. RPPs require a different way of working than traditional academic research that research-side participants might be used to and trained in, as well as a different way of working than is common in practice-side settings: In their 2015 paper, Penuel, Allen, Coburn, and Farrell described RPP work as “joint work at boundaries” (p.184) where those participating in partnerships  “engage in boundary crossing, and … joint work is accomplished through boundary practices, which are routines that only partially resemble the professional practices of researchers and practitioners” (p. 187). This boundary-crossing nature of RPP work requires those working in RPPs to cultivate certain dispositions and skills (p. 192). Reflecting on your willingness to and curiosity in engaging in boundary spanning collaborative work is an important first step.

As we also outline elsewhere on our website, power and positionality show up in many ways in RPP work, including power differences between the research-, practice-, and community-sides and how they are negotiated, power in terms of who within a partnership receives funding or is named the Principal Investigator on a grant, hierarchies and positionality within the organizations involved in the RPP, and histories of oppression of marginalized or non-dominant populations that have often been the subject of research. Anyone considering launching or working in an RPP must be willing to critically examine their own power and positionality and to intentionally work towards equity: equitable participation in RPPs, equity-related goals for the research and inquiry activities of the RPP, and intentional RPP efforts to confront and dismantle systemic outcomes that contribute to persistent inequities in education (see more under Three-Pronged Vision of Equity in RPPs).

We therefore recommend reflecting on these elements before you take any other step related to either launching a new RPP or joining an existing one – and then continue reflecting on and learning about these elements all along your learning journey! At NNERPP, we share an unwavering commitment to continuing to learn how we can get better at centering equity, supporting anti-racism, and dismantling oppressive power structures.

In the initial phases of starting an RPP, it can be hard to know which activities and goals to prioritize. Our NNERPP-created guide and accompanying checklist “What Are the Essential Milestones New RPPs Might Work Towards in Their First Year?” is intended to help emerging  partnership teams collaboratively plan their work during their first year together and also brings awareness to potential challenges that might occur. The Milestones tool is based on recommendations from NNERPP members representing both research and practice settings working within early-phase and more mature RPPs, spanning a variety of partnership types, structures, and research foci.

We recommend you explore the full guide for more detail. Below, we briefly outline the activities that were identified as high priority milestones for the first year of an RPP by NNERPP members.

• Cultivate trust among partners and attend + respond to power dynamics
• Co-create a shared vision with all partners
• Co-develop learning priorities for the partnership’s work
• Identify + create feedback loops to support RPP health and shared goals
• Initiate processes to establish data infrastructure
• Recruit or hire key personnel
• Initiate funding discussions

We’ve adapted the recommendations below from “Developing and Sustaining Community-Based Participatory Research Partnerships: A Skill-Building Curriculum” to tailor them to education RPPs and to also reflect what we’ve learned across the RPPs in NNERPP. In identifying and selecting a partner, whether it be from the research or practice side, there are several important angles to consider:

• Are they willing and committed? Does the potential partner understand the time, energy, and resources required to establish and maintain this new relationship? Are they open to changing their current working protocols or environment?
• Is there mutual respect? Do partners recognize and value critical expertise and experiences that come from having a diversity of perspectives? Is there evidence that ideas and knowledge will be shared, honored, and taken up as appropriate across the many sides of the partnership, at every step of the process?
• Can you trust each other? Or at the very least, is there a possibility of trusting each other with time? Is there prior evidence that the potential partner is trustworthy (i.e., through other projects or partnerships)?
• Do they have the capacity to partner? Is there sufficient staff to support a new partnership? If key interpersonal skills are not present (i.e., effective negotiation, problem solving, conflict resolution, or fostering collaboration), are they willing to seek extra training in order to improve?
• Are they committed to improving local conditions through the use of evidence? Do they have the same desire to center localized problems of practice with evidence? Is there a shared understanding of the importance of high-quality evidence in the decision making process?
• Is there organizational support for the partnership? Are the appropriate and relevant leaders involved in the partnership? If decisions are made, will either organization provide support for implementation? Is there recognition of the underlying value in regards to the partnership?

Additionally, we also recommend checking out the Madison Education Partnership’s “First Date Protocol,” featured in the NNERPP RPP Brokers Handbook. The tool provides an overview of what to expect when setting up a first meeting among potential partners, as well as a sample meeting agenda.

State education agencies (SEAs) are increasingly partnering with external researchers to form research-practice partnerships. There are several examples of state-level partnerships in NNERPP, including Education Policy Innovation Collaborative, Georgia Policy Labs, Illinois Workforce and Education Research Collaborative, Partnership for Early Education Research, and many more. At NNERPP, we have developed two resources specifically for SEAs who are considering partnering with external research partners:

• Are You Ready to Work in a Research-Practice Partnership?: This self-directed guide is intended for SEAs interested in working with external research partners in the context of an RPP. The guide walks readers through four dimensions related to an SEA’s capacity to engage productively with an external partner, with a set of exploratory questions to help provoke conversations within an SEA or between an SEA and external partner around the potential to engage in RPP-related work.
• Research-Practice Partnerships for School Improvement: A Primer for SEAs: This guide is intended to help SEA leaders unfamiliar with RPPs understand what RPPs are and how they can support school improvement efforts.

Securing initial funding is one of the key tasks that must be addressed when starting a research-practice partnership; securing longer term funding is crucial to RPP sustainability.

Here are some funding opportunities that may be worth looking into from the national scene. This is not an exclusive list and the availability of these programs might change, so please be aware. In addition, we strongly recommend exploring your local funding scene as well, which might have more relevant opportunities to consider.

1. NSF: Computer Science for All (CSforAll: Research and RPPs)
2. Spencer Foundation: Research-Practice Partnerships: Collaborative Research for Educational Change
3. Spencer Foundation: Racial Equity Research Grants
4. Spencer Foundation: Research Grants on Education: Large
5. Spencer Foundation: Research Grants on Education: Small
6. Spencer Foundation: Conference Grants
7. William T. Grant Foundation: Research Grants on Reducing Inequality
8. William T. Grant Foundation: Research Grants on Improving the Use of Research Evidence
9. William T. Grant Foundation: Institutional Challenge Grant

Aside from knowing where to look, we suggest keeping in mind the following:

• Fundraising takes time and effort. Several of our members note that it can take up to a year or longer to secure start-up funding. Moreover, establishing and developing relationships with foundation representatives is essential – and this takes time as well.
• It is best to start local. Are there private foundations in your area whose interests align with your partnership? Are there local public funds that can be applied for?
• Be flexible. Competitive funding rules can sometimes restrict what a potential grantee can and cannot do. Try to remain flexible in the types of questions your partnership is interested in addressing, the structural arrangement of the partnership itself, and timelines for completing tasks.

For more detailed lessons on securing general operations support –flexible funding that is not tied to specific research projects–, please explore our NNERPP Extra article “​​Research Lessons from the Pandemic: Why Unrestricted Funding is Critical to RPPs,” where Ruth López Turley, Director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research and founder of the Houston Education Research Consortium, shared lessons learned over the last decade of securing grants for RPP work. The article also shares case studies of three RPPs in NNERPP that demonstrate the importance of flexible funding by recounting how the RPPs were able to respond to the needs of their practice-side partners during the pandemic and in the wake of the racial justice movement.

Here, we provide a short version of Ruth’s section on recommendations for requesting general operations support:

• Start local: General operations support is most compelling to local funders because their mission often focuses on local issues, and education is frequently among them. Since much of the work of RPPs is primarily relevant for local agencies, this is a good fit for local funders. However, a strong case has to be made for how supporting a local RPP will benefit local students and what the return on investment will be.
• Develop long-term relationships: Funders need to know who they are investing in. Ultimately, they are investing in students, but they are also investing in the members of an RPP, so funders need to know them well – beyond the type of information you can get through a website, brief, or proposal. They need to know the RPP team members, particularly those in leadership positions, on a personal level, so they can hear and see directly that the people doing this work truly care.
• Generate compelling deliverables: When making a request for general operations support, be sure to generate compelling deliverables. Just because you’re not requesting project-specific support doesn’t mean that you don’t have specific deliverables to provide. If anything, it’s even more important to develop a strong list of deliverables resulting from general support, such as developing a longitudinal database or generating a specific number of research briefs.
• Mitigate risks: General operations support may seem riskier to funders due to factors such as leadership turnover, school board dysfunction, natural disasters, and anything that can interfere with the work of the RPP. In addition to generating a compelling list of deliverables, it’s helpful to make clear to funders that you are aware of potential risks and that you are taking steps to mitigate those risks
• Build funder partnerships: Another way to mitigate risk for funders is to help build funder partnerships that can jointly invest in your RPP. By working together, funders don’t have to single-handedly take on the risk of a failed effort. Furthermore, joint investment can increase the amount of funding and in turn increase the likelihood of a successful RPP.

Thinking through a few key organizational items early on in your RPP launch journey will provide important infrastructure from which the partnership can launch. You might want to consider the following questions:

1. What will the mission, vision, and objectives of the partnership be? The answer to these questions may come after discussing the RPP’s theory of action between partners and may then be codified into the partnership’s charter.
2. What foundational documents will we need to have in place? The number and types of documents you will need to work through together will depend on the types of organizations that will be participating in the partnership as well as the nature and scope of work the partnership is interested in taking on.
3. What type of staff will be needed to carry out the work? The number and type of staff needed for the RPP will vary depending on the structural arrangement, the scope of work, and the amount of funding available, among other things.

Additionally, some key issues to keep in mind:

• Differences in culture and training often found amongst research-, practice-, and/or community-side members will require the partnership to consider communication styles, needs, and capacities early on. For example, academic researchers do not often receive explicit training in how to communicate with non-academic audiences during their PhD programs and this skill must often be developed within the partnership.
• How will the partnership utilize post-doctoral researchers, graduate students, and even undergraduate students? These groups of students are often eager to participate in partnership work and can provide research support to the partnership in ways that may be complementary to the existing research team.
• Will your partnership have sufficient funding to perhaps cover all or part of the salary for a staff member on the practice or community team? Having someone “on the inside” may help expedite data requests and can also enable the partnership to stay on track with proposed activities.
• At some point, depending on the size of the partnership, it may make sense to hire a communications person that will handle many of the outward-facing activities of the partnership. Keeping this in mind earlier rather than later can facilitate better planning.

Data sharing arrangements between researchers and practitioners are one of the most important topics to consider when starting a research-practice partnership. It should be broached early, since multiple iterations of drafts describing agreements may be necessary given the sensitive nature of the data. Many of the partnerships in NNERPP utilize administrative data, but other considerations may be necessary if the partnership intends on producing and collecting its own data. Here is one example of a NNERPP member’s data sharing agreement: “Master Research Services Agreement: The University of Chicago, for its Consortium on Chicago School Research.”

Additional guiding questions:

• Which agency (the research side or the practice side) will house the data to be used within the partnership?
• How often will data pulls occur? Under what conditions will data pulls occur (e.g., every semester, only if a project requires it, etc.)?
• What steps will be taken on both sides of the partnership to ensure quality and security of the data?
• Who will handle external data requests? In some cases, the education agency partner may continue to address these, but in others, it may make more sense to have the research agency manage it.

In addition to data sharing agreements, there are a variety of other foundational documents that you’ll want to think about when building your research-practice partnership. Which ones apply to your context and how they will be used will depend heavily on the types of organizations involved in the partnership, how the organizations expect to work together, and the scope of work guiding the partnership’s activities. We’ve listed a few common ones here, but keep in mind that your context may require the development of additional documents to fully support the work.

• Charter: The partnership charter generally lays out the mission, vision, and objectives of the partnership, all of which may be decided upon after working through the RPP’s theory of action. Here is one example of a charter from a NNERPP member that shares how they’ve codified this: “Baltimore Education Research Consortium (BERC) Executive Committee Charter”.
• Memorandum of Understanding (MOU): The MOU is typically an agreement between both partners describing the scope of the work, expectations, and assignment of responsibilities (individually and shared). See a sample MOU here: “Memorandum of Understanding … Regarding the Baltimore Education Research Consortium.”
• Job Descriptions: The number and type of staff needed for the RPP will vary depending on the structural arrangement, the scope of work, and the amount of funding available, among other things. Until some of these questions are resolved, we recommend exploring some of the job descriptions provided in the RPP Knowledge Library to get an idea for how other partnerships are staffed.

Below, we list some key readings related to getting your RPP started. You can browse a full list of resources in our RPP Knowledge Library.