10 LESSONS FROM 10 YEARS OF NNERPP
INTRODUCTION
This past January 1, 2026, we marked 10 years of NNERPP! It has been an amazing adventure so far, starting with 16 founding members of NNERPP, growing to nearly 85 members today (with two of our members based internationally! …iNNERPP?). We find ourselves occupying a unique space as we create the learning infrastructure for a model that is still fairly new in education and continues to evolve. In the past 10 years, we have not only grown in numbers, but also in the breadth of our knowledge, the aspects of RPP work we jointly investigate, and the learning opportunities we offer and co-create. Our greatest privilege and honor has been and continues to be learning alongside all of our amazing members as well as close friends and collaborators who also care deeply about RPPs.
On a personal note, January 1, 2026, also marked my own 10-year anniversary as the inaugural director of NNERPP. I started with a great appreciation for the RPP model back in 2016, while being fairly new to the concept myself (in fact, I had only learned of the “RPP” phrase in 2015 at one of the pre-NNERPP meetings). I could clearly see the promise and potential of RPPs back then, in addition to feeling the commitment and excitement people had for engaging in the intersection of education research, practice, and policy in this way. I still see that very same promise and excitement today – across more people, more organizations, and a wider variety of RPP models. In fact, I think we could not be at a more exciting place in our RPP learning journey at NNERPP, with 10 years of learning together as a community behind us and some clear paths ahead of us for what to explore next.
Taking a moment to reflect on this journey, in this article, I share back 10 lessons we’ve learned with our members and friends over the years. While there are plenty more (believe me!), I selected these ten for their significant impacts on how we think and talk about RPPs at NNERPP. If you have entered any NNERPP space, many of these will be familiar – they have become part of the fabric of what is “NNERPP” – and the current celebration of 10 years seems like just the right moment to document them more formally. I am excited for these ideas to be out there and to see what the next decade holds!
10 LESSONS
There is no particular underlying order to these, although I do end with a future facing reflection to launch us into the next decade of NNERPP. Here we go!
1. We intentionally say “research-practice partnership” as opposed to “researcher-practitioner partnerships” and “research-to-practice partnerships.” We also don’t call people “researchers” and “practitioners” (unless they ask us to 😉) (circa 2016).
Why? Because being intentional about the language we are using matters. Even the shorthand we use reflects – and can reinforce – how we understand the work. When I was first introduced to RPPs in 2015, the most common interpretation of that acronym was “research-practice partnership.” Although we are not sure where the name “research-practice partnership” originated, it was codified into formal usage in a 2013 white paper by Coburn, Penuel, and Geil. Somewhere along the way in those early days I also started hearing “researcher-practitioner partnerships,” with this phrasing appearing to come from the IES-funded RPP program that briefly existed back in 2013-2019. It was at the 2016 NNERPP Annual Forum, our first annual gathering as a community, where we heard directly from RPP-ers in the room of their disagreement with this second phrasing, i.e., the use of “researcher” and “practitioner” to denote the different individuals that were participating in the RPP. In particular, district research leaders in the room, who saw themselves as researchers, pushed back on that term as for them, a “practitioner” was a school building leader, and more often than not, a teacher.
It was this confusion and articulation of preference that led us to gently nudge people to stop using the phrase “researcher-practitioner partnership” for RPP and instead, use “research-practice partnership.” In addition, we also developed a preferred way to describe leaders from the different agencies participating in the partnership, introducing the idea of “sides” – i.e., “research-side,” “practice-side,” “policy-side,” and “community-side” – in an effort to be more inclusive and reflective of our community’s preferences. These labels are meant to honor the different organizational homes that RPP-ers can come from and they invite us to better situate the cultures, norms, and incentives likely influencing how people from those organizations are able to show up and engage in RPPs. This can help us think more from a systems level in terms of how to design RPPs that can be institutionalized (i.e., those that are able to navigate systems) and not wholly dependent on a single RPP-er.
As for the phrase “research-to-practice partnerships,” we have never used this one and we are also not entirely sure where it came from! At NNERPP, we have always come from the understanding that the research coming out of RPPs is collaboratively generated, i.e., informed by the perspectives and experiences across all partners involved. The phrase “research-to-practice,” however, implies a one-way direction of knowledge flow wherein research generated in some other place gets “to” practice via a “partnership.” Because this could not be further from the collaborative model that we see as being an RPP, we prefer to avoid this phrasing altogether.
2. We anchor our understanding and conception of RPPs to the community-informed definition introduced in 2021.
As we’ve seen in the first lesson, the words we choose to describe this work matter. Given our position in this space, we think it’s important to support coherence of the model, which is why we prefer to anchor our understanding of what RPPs are with the 2021 updated definition that can be found in this white paper produced by the William T. Grant Foundation. This definition is a *community* informed definition – that is, it reflects the synthesized voices and perspectives of those actually doing RPPs, and across many of them. It is the most accurate, representative definition we have (for now), reflecting how those who do RPPs talk about their work.
On that note, there are some clear departures from the 2013 definition – as we would expect. The definition is not static because RPPs are always changing. For example, we have moved away from narrowly defining RPPs as district-level efforts; today’s RPPs work in classrooms, schools, districts, state ed agencies, museums, and more. We’ve also moved beyond the “three-type of RPPs” typology. There is no single “type” of RPP that exists today; all of them vary across a number of dimensions. And if we asked the RPP community to define the features of their work now, or in another 5 years, we would likely arrive at something different again.
There are two lessons here. For now, when we say “RPP,” the 2021 definition is where we start. But we also hold the definition lightly, recognizing that RPPs–and our understanding of them–will continue to evolve.
3. We do not use the phrase “all RPPs”...unless it precedes the phrase “are different” (circa 2019).
I see this phrase regularly used in the academic literature on RPPs, where authors make claims that “All RPPs [do a thing]” without hesitation (see this NNERPP Extra article, written with my colleague Alison Fox Resnick, where we say more about this observation).
If there is one thing I wish everyone would get better at, it is appreciating that every RPP is a unique reflection of the priorities, voices, needs, cultures, and histories of the people and contexts that shape it. Treating RPPs as a single, monolithic entity erases that variation – and does a disservice to the approach as a whole. This is because not all RPPs were built to do the same thing; indeed, there has never been a single “right” way to do RPPs, nor do we think they follow a single developmental pathway as they emerge.
A better way to talk about RPPs is to start with “Some RPPs do…” One way to apply this thinking is to the 2021 definition itself. What is described there is really the “core DNA” of an RPP: a set of characteristics that define the approach, but that may be more or less developed in any given partnership at any given point in time. This could be because not enough time has elapsed for the partnership to fully develop one of these characteristics; it could also be because the partnership does not yet know how to develop these.
Take “shifting power,” (one of the core characteristics from the 2021 definition), for example. Power between partners does not magically shift just because a partnership “exists.” Each core DNA must be intentionally designed for, attended to, and regularly checked on against reality. Some partnerships may aspire to shift power but are not there yet. I have seen examples in the academic literature, however, that assume this characteristic is present simply because “that’s how RPPs work.”
Thus, the lesson here is: let’s be careful about understanding where an RPP is in its journey, where it is thriving, and where it may need further support. This kind of attention to variation–not assumptions about what “all RPPs” do–is what allows us to learn more meaningfully from the model.
4. We prefer to situate RPPs under the “collaborative education research” umbrella, which includes a number of different collaborative approaches (circa 2021).
Connected to how we define RPPs, it also matters how we situate them within the larger landscape of education research. Our thinking about this has changed over the years. In NNERPP’s early years, we wondered whether “RPPs” might be the umbrella term, especially given the 2013 Coburn, Penuel, Geil paper, which described three “types” of RPPs at the time: research alliances, design-based partnerships, and networked improvement communities. This framing made it seem like “RPPs” might be one way to organize the family of collaborative research approaches.
After many (MANY!) conversations over the years with NNERPP members and friends, we’ve come to see RPPs as one of several collaborative approaches to education research. These include, for example, community-engaged scholarship, participatory action research, lesson study, design based implementation research, school-university partnerships, and more. These approaches are distinct, with their own histories, traditions, and purposes, but they share an important underlying orientation: the research is, first and foremost, collaborative.
Sometimes people think of their work within these spaces as belonging to more than one of these approaches – for example, participatory action research conducted within the context of an RPP. Other times, the work clearly belongs to one approach and not the other. We see this not as a problem to be resolved, but as a reason to celebrate the richness of the border landscape. We thus consider these approaches family members under the banner of “collaborative education research,” while honoring the distinct traditions and contributions that each brings to the family. We think there is much to be learned and shared across all of these models and are particularly excited about the next phase of learning in this space.
5. “Joint work” may be the most important–and least defined–part of an RPP (circa 2021).
Generally speaking, there are five pieces of “core DNA” that tend to get named from the 2021 definition: long-term, diversity of expertise, shifts in power, engagement with research, and aims toward education improvement or action. The additional DNA that we always include–and that is typically omitted from this list–is “joint work.” As it turns out, I think “joint work” may be the key to understanding both how RPPs are similar to and different from one another, and how they relate to other forms of collaborative education research (see also this article which was definitely an inspiration for this idea).
Also related to the lesson that we can’t say “all RPPs do XXX,” the “joint work” dimension of RPPs is the most ambiguous DNA of them all. For example, we might disagree on what exactly “long-term” really means, how “diverse” is diverse, when has power really been shifted, what constitutes “engagement” in research engagement, and whether RPP-produced knowledge is really aimed towards action…but I’d argue that we would still find considerable overlap in our answers to those questions.
Joint work is different. There is very little about it that is predetermined for an RPP. Everyone in an RPP should–and does–have a LOT to say about what joint work actually looks like. It is the dimension where partnership culture, norms, values, and shared language lives. It is the dimension where RPPs can talk about how and why the other 5 core DNA look like they do. This right here, then, helps explain why there can be SO much variation across RPPs – and ultimately, the reason we can’t say “all RPPs do…”
In contrast, other collaborative education research approaches sometimes have more explicit norms and practices that guide what joint work looks like. Participatory action research (PAR), for example, has a well-developed set of principles and practices that describe how the collaboration should be carried out across contexts (see for example here and here). Community-engaged scholarship offers another example of an approach with an established body of literature and guidance around the nature of the collaboration (see for example here, here, and here).
For RPPs, the norms and values underlying the “joint work” must be defined, negotiated, and continually shaped by the people in the partnership. There is no single right way to do this, and no predetermined set of practices that every RPP must follow. This has both benefits and potential consequences: On the one hand, RPPs can be highly responsive in attending to the conditions of their context and collaboratively deciding what working together should and could look like; on the other hand, without the intentional attention to how that joint work is defined, they are also at risk for reproducing the very inequities or harms they are trying to address, such as asymmetric power across partners.
There is still much to learn about what “joint work” means in RPPs – I am excited to see where our thinking on this dimension might go, as I suspect that as we get better at understanding this core DNA, we’ll get better at understanding RPPs themselves.
6. We informally banned the word “dissemination” back in 2017 in favor of “engagement.”
Another development in how we talk and think about RPPs has been distinguishing "dissemination” from “engagement” – and effectively banning the first term when describing how RPPs share their work with various constituent groups. This first came about because of a push from Laura Wentworth at the 2017 NNERPP Annual Forum. Laura, who has been part of NNERPP since before NNERPP launched, challenged us to rethink what we mean by “dissemination.” She noted that the word “dissemination” generally implies “I distributed my knowledge to as many people as possible,” regardless of whether anyone asked for it, and with little regard to supporting the intended users’ actual uptake of that knowledge.
This framing suggests a “one way” street of knowledge flow, from creator to user. This, as you may have already guessed, is not at all how we would characterize RPPs. Some, for example, have instead used a “two way street” metaphor instead. In our present understanding of RPPs, I’d argue that “multi-way” is more accurate. RPPs can involve any number of partnering organizations, each with a role to play in the co-generation and use of knowledge. For partners deeply involved in the work, then, dissemination (as described above) is a very unlikely activity: they are generally very aware of what is happening with the work and are likely engaged all throughout the research process.
We decided to explore these ideas more explicitly with our community back in 2022 and wrote up what we heard in this NNERPP Extra article. One useful distinction that emerged was that dissemination tends to be more appropriate for audiences outside the partnership, where the goal may simply be to make people aware of the work. This gives dissemination a limited but legitimate place in RPPs: we may dedicate some resources to spreading the word about our work, but for those deeply involved in the partnership, engagement should be the norm.
In our experience, once someone rethinks what “dissemination” really means, and in particular, the ways in which it doesn’t align with RPP values, they shift their language towards engagement instead.
7. Research-practice partnerships and research-practice projects are not the same thing. They exist at different levels of the work, and it is helpful to think about them differently (circa 2018-ish).
We struggled as a community with this distinction during NNERPP’s first couple of years. It wasn’t until the 2018 NNERPP Annual Forum that we finally landed on language that helped us make sense of it. We kept bumping into tensions when people described collaborative work as an RPP effort, even though the work itself was time-delimited, such as work that ended when a grant ended. Some argued this was still a partnership; others disagreed. Time is subjective, so we were never going to resolve the question by debating what counts as “long-term.” Instead, we came up with two different ways of thinking about the work.
First, any research-practice collaboration that seeks to be called a “partnership” generally has, at minimum, the intention of being around for a while, i.e., with no explicit end in sight. Partnerships also tend to develop a lot of invisible and visible infrastructure to support the ongoing work, which might include things like shared norms, roles, governance structures, or more formalized artifacts, such as a mission and vision statement.
“Projects,” on the other hand, are usually time-delimited, either because they are directly tied to a grant or because the work was never meant to go beyond a single effort. They typically require less infrastructure to support the collaboration and may not need the same kind of formalized agreements, like a mission and/or vision statement.
In practice, this distinction has helped us better describe the work of our members, which has then helped them learn from each other. A research-practice collaboration in its early stages, for example, may be better understood as a project rather than a partnership. We’ve talked with several RPP-ers who have agreed that early on in the collaboration, there is hesitation to call something a “partnership” because it feels so official, formal, “full-blown” – and doesn’t match the “we are still exploring what this is”, “we need this to be low stakes,” and “not sure there will be more of these” sentiments that frequently characterize those early phases of the work.
The lesson here is that not everything needs to become a research-practice partnership – sometimes, a research-practice project is exactly what the situation calls for.
8. Youth and community members aren’t automatically partners in RPPs–and getting them there requires more than just inviting them to the table (circa 2018).
The most common organizational form of RPP within NNERPP features a university on the research side and a school district on the practice side. Both institutions tend to have well-established ways of working with adults: researchers, district leaders, teachers, and other professionals. Youth, meanwhile, have often been positioned as the subjects of research rather than as partners in shaping, conducting, or making sense of it. Community members can face similar structural barriers.
Of course, there are RPPs that have long centered youth and community voices. But more often than not, this hasn't been the default. And when we started asking what it would actually mean to center these perspectives—not just in research findings, but in the research process and the functioning of the partnership itself—we realized that this isn't simply a matter of adding another voice to the table.
Through NNERPP initiatives, including the Youth Voice 4 RPPs Awards program and the Youth Voice Subnetwork, we’ve learned from our youth-engaged members and friends that centering youth requires both structural and relational shifts. In fact, this fall, the Youth Voice Subnetwork will undertake a reimagining of the RPP Core DNA as it relates to youth-centered RPP work, exploring such questions as, “What does long-term engagement look like with youth, who are, as a function of being on a journey of growing up, likely to be in different spots with different priorities year over year?” and “How can we support adults and adult-focused institutions to make the necessary relational and dispositional shifts required to meaningfully center youth as agents of change rather than simply as producers of knowledge that eventually gets shelved?”
The lesson here is that we don’t yet have all the answers. But, we do know that expanding who gets to be a partner doesn’t just expand who is at the table, it can change our understanding of what partnership itself requires.
9. The identification and emergence of the role of “brokers” in RPPs has helped articulate a number of important activities that are critical to shaping RPP work – and shows the importance of having a community of practice in which to reflect together on the work (circa 2017).
As we pondered and explored different roles and activities in RPPs over the years, the role of “brokers” has emerged as one of our most studied roles and related sets of activities, leading to the creation of a wealth of insights about RPP work. In short, brokers in RPPs are those who serve as key connectors between research and practice in order to cultivate and maintain the relationships needed to effectively support RPP activities. What started out as a single session at the 2017 NNERPP Annual Forum exploring the idea of “brokering” between the research and practice sides of the RPP (and not even calling it that on the agenda, as you’ll see!), has led to multiple Annual Forum sessions over the years, a professional development workshop, a Google sheet containing a treasure trove of cases of NNERPP members and friends sharing their practices and tools, and an open-source book published by Routledge that also introduced a framework on brokering in RPPs.
This series of conversations and activities best exemplifies the magic of the NNERPP community – driven by a desire to collaboratively reflect on their RPPs, NNERPP members and friends have been the primary drivers of this set of ideas and resources. We have been told many times over how helpful these have been, with many RPP-ers saying they finally had a name for the set of activities they frequently engage in, and are now able to improve these practices with others. This lesson hits close to home for me, as I have never met a more welcoming and friendly set of folks than those in NNERPP. Collaboratively developed knowledge with a hundred of your closest friends who care deeply about the work is invaluable.
10. What interesting questions, insights, and lessons around RPPs might the next 10 years hold?
I end on a question that helps springboard this set of reflections into the next decade, while also capturing a lesson: what I thought I knew about RPPs in 2016 was nothing compared to what I know now (I have joked around previously that I feel as though I’ve done another PhD in RPPs at this point!). RPPs are constantly evolving and the knowledge we have on how they work is being continuously extended, tested, and refined by the members and friends of our community. In this last lesson, I share three forward-looking thoughts on my hunches for what might come next.
Documenting RPP impact is still a hot topic, but the call is not necessarily coming from inside the RPP. We’ve noticed over time that those who are directly connected to the day-to-day work of the RPP can usually very easily cite why they continue to engage in the partnership and how the work matters, though perhaps not in ways that are easily quantifiable. In contrast, the people that are slightly removed from the core work of the RPP but with outsized decision making power on the fate of the RPP often ask for “hard evidence” on impact. Both of these pathways into RPP impact hold important lessons and future work: first, it should indeed be a goal of anyone participating in the RPP to be able to articulate the potential benefits of engaging in RPP work relative to other options. Second, tracking demonstrable changes resulting from the RPP is both a worthwhile endeavor and at the same time, hard to do, for a number of reasons, perhaps necessitating new ways of thinking about impact. We are currently working on these ideas as a community; for example, we just had a very generative conversation about RPP “return on investment” at the most recent Annual Forum in July, with more work to follow.
Funding for RPPs continues to be challenging. This is a constant and it has only gotten harder in the last year. If we truly believe this and other forms of collaboration are *the* way forward for education research, then we need to start putting more resources towards operational costs associated with running these partnerships. I have said countless times, “coffee with my partners on Fridays” will (unfortunately) never be a line item we’ll see in an RPP budget…and yet, it’s very likely the place where the necessary relational development that will fuel the RPP happens. One wondering I have is whether the conversations around impact will help here, which could help support improved articulation of the value proposition of RPPs.
Finally, while we have made great strides at NNERPP for facilitating opportunities for learning about how to get started with RPPs (see here, here, and here, for example), much work remains to be done. We are currently developing additional opportunities to support individuals in their RPP learning journeys, in addition to launching an RPP Coaching Institute for emergent RPP teams soon. Another underexplored space here is the types of learning opportunities and supports that could be available to graduate students and early career scholars as they move through their programs and initiate their own collaborative research endeavors. We currently have a Teaching RPPs Subnetwork that brings together members and friends to ponder these ideas further, in addition to a recent “book club” style collaboration with our friends at the RESHAPE Network examining the Spencer Foundation report related to this idea as well. There is much discussion taking place on this topic, and I am excited to see where these chats take us in the next five years.
CONCLUSION
The last 10 years have brought important lessons that have both reflected and advanced the development of the RPP approach. I know that much more learning will be ahead for us (see lesson 10 above!), and I could not be more excited to continue that learning together, as a community that cares deeply about doing RPP work well. Our next big push at NNERPP is linking together ALL of the knowledge that gets produced and co-generated across the NNERPP community (via our Annual Forums, virtual brown bags, subnetworks, in-person design meetings, informal conversations, conference sessions, and more), thus becoming better stewards of practice-based knowledge of RPPs. We think everyone doing RPPs who wants to share what they are learning and who wants to learn from and with others must have the opportunity to do so. Only by creating ways to connect and learn through diverse forms of knowledge can we truly advance what we know –and what we still don’t– about RPPs. And we’ll do this in the only way we know how: together, connected, and learning collaboratively along the way.
Paula Arce-Trigatti is Director of the National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships (NNERPP).
Suggested citation: Arce-Trigatti, P. (2026). 10 Lessons From 10 Years of NNERPP. NNERPP Extra 8(3), 18-30. https://doi.org/10.25613/NNPT-8710
