INTRODUCING THE MILESTONES GUIDE FOR EMERGING RPPs
If you Google the simple phrase “things I wish I knew before”, you’ll get back around 272,000,000 results (!). Advice from others on just about anything you could imagine is without end, from “15 Things I Wish I Knew Before Getting into Teaching” to “20 Things This TikTok User Didn’t Know Until He Was In His 30s.” If you are in the research-practice partnership (RPP) space, you may very well have been tempted to do a Google search on “RPP things I wish I knew before I got started”, or some variation of that phrase. Luckily, the NNERPP community, which consists of RPPers with all kinds of diverse experiences, skill sets, roles, and backgrounds, is never short on helpful advice and always enthusiastic to share lessons learned. In this issue of NNERPP Extra, we are thrilled to introduce one such artifact sourced from community advice: the new NNERPP Milestones Guide for Emerging RPPs.
BACKGROUND
The Milestones Guide is the culmination of a series of conversations our members held over the past several years to sort through the ups and downs of their own RPP experiences and distill them into a set of things they wish they knew in the early stages of their RPP. Guided by Beth Vaade of the Madison Metropolitan School District and Madison Education Partnership and Sara Slaughter of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans at Tulane University, a group of research- and practice-side RPPers collaborated to develop a short list of milestones and stumbling blocks first year RPPers might anticipate and plan for as they embark on their RPP journey. NNERPP members participating in these discussions represented both early-phase and more mature RPPs, spanning a variety of partnership types, structures, and research foci. With this guide, we aim to support emerging RPP teams as they collaboratively plan their work during their first year together.
ROUND 1: COLLECTING AND PRIORITIZING MILESTONES AND STUMBLING BLOCKS
We began our discussions about early RPP milestones with a session at the 2019 NNERPP Annual Forum, which is our yearly gathering of NNERPP members and friends in the RPP space to come together and learn about all-things-RPP. A group of about 15 NNERPP members joined Beth and Sara to sort through a collection of key accomplishments and stumbling blocks an RPP might expect in their first year, shared by NNERPP members prior to the session at the Forum. The group’s task was to sort the submitted advice into common themes and create an initial draft of a checklist of accomplishments and stumbling blocks that seemed to be common across RPPs in year one, years two and three, and year four and beyond. The accomplishments were further divided into things that seemed attainable (common across most RPPs), optimistic (common across a few RPPs), and things that seemed like more of a reach (not commonly mentioned, but important). The approach to grouping the stumbling blocks focused both on how frequently something was mentioned, as well as how impactful it was likely to be, rated on a scale from “small bump” to “giant sinkhole.”
ROUND 2: REVISITING AND ITERATING THE MILESTONES AND STUMBLING BLOCKS
Like most of the best laid plans and initial drafts made in 2019, plans for further iteration of the Milestones Guide were put on hold during 2020 and 2021 as we held space for RPPs to think collectively about shifting to a new normal (2020) and thriving in times of continuous change (2021) throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. We re-launched our Milestones discussions at last year’s Annual Forum where the theme was “What Really Matters? An RPP Learning Journey for Now and the Future.” With a focus on cutting through the noise of the last couple of chaotic years to refocus on what mattered most in folks’ RPP journeys, it made sense to revisit the initial milestones and stumbling blocks draft in light of a world that was both vastly different and utterly the same from the world in which the original set emerged.
Once again led by Beth and Sara, the 2022 Annual Forum session invited participants to use the 2019 milestones and stumbling blocks draft as a starting point and refine its advice, using the lens of balancing the pursuit of numerous partnership activities with the limited capacity felt by all, perhaps more acutely now than prior to COVID. The group’s task was to decide whether to keep, cut, or add to each milestone or stumbling block from the 2019 lists. As the group reflected on the initial draft, two major themes emerged in how folks were framing their thinking about how to revise the milestones and stumbling blocks: (1) There are some things that must be perpetually attended to; and (2) The only constant is change. For example, one participant suggested uncoupling the lists from any specific time frame, noting that, “we are doing the same stuff now, and it’s year 7,” while another participant expressed that, “even if you have something ‘figured out’ you might still have similar problems and challenges [later on].” Additionally, the group suggested language clarifications to allow for expanded understanding of the various ways in which a milestone or stumbling block might manifest across various RPP contexts.
FINAL ROUND (FOR NOW!): CREATING THE TOOL
Building on these efforts, the NNERPP team set out in the fall of 2022 to combine the 2019 and 2022 documents into a final version to share with the NNERPP community. Around the same time, we were hearing a need for the creation of more tools to facilitate transfer of new thinking about RPP work more directly into practice. Based on this feedback and the feedback from the 2022 Annual Forum session, we decided to expand what we had taken to referring to as the “milestones document” into a three-part guide focusing on the key year one milestones:
–Part 1 shares key milestones an RPP may wish to prioritize, organized across three levels of suggested attention (strongly consider doing, nice to do, and leave for later).
–Part 2 shares potential challenges the RPP may encounter during its beginning phase; we divide these in terms of those likely needing immediate attention and those that could probably wait. Each milestone or potential stumbling block is linked to a relevant reading, resource, or tool from the NNERPP RPP Knowledge Clearinghouse.
–Part 3 shares a discussion protocol and self-reflection activity for RPP teams who may be interested in hosting a collaborative discussion about the milestones and challenges in order to support RPP planning and learning.
The completed guide was then further revised with input from Beth and Sara and audited for uneven or non-liberatory power dynamics in the milestones and language used to describe them (Suarez, 2018).
HOW TO USE THE MILESTONES GUIDE
The primary goal of this guide is to support emerging RPP teams in their first year to navigate and prioritize suggested activities and goals, including bringing awareness to potential challenges that might occur. The milestones and stumbling blocks checklists are designed to encourage RPP teams to consider each list in light of their unique contexts and prioritize each milestone or stumbling block according to their specific needs. Newer RPP teams who feel they have made good progress on several of the year one “Strongly Consider Doing” milestones, might choose to expand their discussion to include examination of the “Nice To Do” and “Leave for Later” milestones, for example. Similarly, if the “Watch Out” stumbling blocks are not of greatest concern to an RPP, teams can expand their discussions beyond the Watch Out list to include the “Be Aware” and “Relax” lists.
More experienced RPP teams might consider using the milestones guide as part of the onboarding process for new RPP members or apply the milestones to a newer project instead of to the partnership itself. Particularly in larger RPP teams that might be onboarding new members or in multi-year partnerships initiating new projects, we hope the checklists can add to the institutional muscle memory that can help integrate new activities in light of all of the hard work and lessons learned by the RPP team previously. Additionally, based on feedback from participants in the 2022 Annual Forum milestones discussion that there are some things that just always need to be kept top of mind, we created the supplemental one-page summary of all of the milestones and pitfalls to be a helpful touchstone that can be printed out and referenced as needed.
IN CONCLUSION
We hope you will find the Milestones Guide as a worthy stand-in for a Google search of “RPP things I wish I knew before I got started.” As always, we welcome your feedback, both about how you are using the tool and any secret ingredients that your RPP would like to share with our community, particularly for emerging RPPs.
Kim Wright is Assistant Director of the National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships (NNERPP).
Suggested citation: Wright, K. (2023). Introducing the Milestones Guide for Emerging RPPs. NNERPP Extra, 5(1), 34-37. https://doi.org/10.25613/AYDJ-1S46
