STORIES OF RPP IMPACT: SIX RESEARCH VIGNETTES

The RPP

• Based in: Boulder, CO
• Founded: 2007
• Mission: Design, test, and implement tools and strategies for supporting teachers in developing ambitious and responsive instruction that can help all students achieve at high levels in mathematics and science.

The Story of Impact

In 2023, our partnership has been a major part of the Institute for Student-AI Teaming (iSAT), a National Science Foundation-funded initiative to develop innovative Artificial Intelligence applications that can support more effective and equitable collaborative learning. iSAT is one of 20 Institutes that the NSF has funded, and one of just a few that is focused squarely on education. So far, we have co-designed several units to teach students about AI and are engaged in classroom testing of an AI partner called the “Community Builder,” or CoBi, which supports students in establishing and reflecting on small groups’ adherence to a set of classroom community agreements developed as part of another one of our projects, the OpenSciEd High School Developers’ Consortium.

Our work in iSAT extends the practice of co-design to involve youth in helping not only to design the AI partners we are using, but also in more “expansive participatory dreaming” of what collaboration in classrooms could look like. To develop the idea for CoBi and other AI partners in development, we engaged youth in a series of workshops we call “Learning Futures Workshops.”

The goal of these workshops was to surface youth’s expansive hopes and dreams around collaboration in schools and identify the role AI has to play in making these a reality. By expansive, we mean expanding beyond the possibilities afforded by the “grammar of schooling” (Tyack & Cuban, 1995) that focuses on narrow ideas of achievement and collaboration as a means to promote individual, rather than collective learning. 

A recent Learning Futures Workshop took place in person at the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. Fifteen high school students from the California East Bay took part in the 5-day event, which focused on imagining possible roles of AI within collaborative spaces both in and out of school. Early in the workshop, students visited a student cooperative house, where they were introduced to the concept of “Community Agreements” and met a Coop “Community Builder” who worked with house members to construct these agreements collectively and interactively. Where in our first workshop, youth seemed to be interested in an AI partner who could discipline other youth to pay attention and stay on task, this visit helped shift the discourse from disciplining young people to thinking about accountability to mutually agreed upon norms. They wanted an AI partner that could help them in whatever ways made sense to form relationships with each other that could support their learning. Much like cooperative community agreements, they thought that the norms being supported by the AI should be customized to the needs of the students and teachers involved in the collaboration. And they thought these norms (and the data necessary to make it possible) should be continually negotiated and revisited. 

The CoBi AI partner supports exactly the kinds of community agreement building that young people asked for, using a set of instructional routines for creating and revisiting classroom-level agreements. With the help of the teacher, students work in small groups to input their examples of agreements into the CoBi interface.

As students work on collaborative tasks, CoBi analyzes student discourse for evidence, or “noticings” for each category of agreement (e.g., respectful, equitable). The results are aggregated across student groups (to protect student privacy), and then visualized at the classroom level. Teachers can see these visualizations develop in real time to provide class-level guidance about the extent to which students are realizing their agreements. Two types of visualizations are available: a more quantitative, summative design represented as a radar chart and a more qualitative, creative, and expansive representation of noticings by way of a growing tree animation. At the end of a collaborative learning task, teachers use CoBi to guide students to reflect on the extent to which their collaborative discourse was aligned with their co-negotiated community agreements.

We are just beginning to study CoBi in the classroom and are planning an experimental study of its impact on collaboration and STEM learning within a laboratory setting in spring 2024.

The RPP

• Based in: Detroit, MI
• Founded: 2017
• Mission: The Detroit Partnership for Education Equity & Research is dedicated to community-centered, equity-focused research to support improvement in the Detroit education ecosystem.

The Story of Impact

Officially launching as Detroit PEER in October of 2022, we have continued to grow our network of educational research and advocacy partnerships. Based out of the College of Education in Wayne State University, our research affiliations reach across our own campus and towards the broader academic community as a whole. Guiding our work, our advisory board consists of local education and community leaders, with wide-ranging backgrounds from grassroots organizations to city government. Our funding sources have continued to grow this year. With a new award from the Kresge Foundation, we will expand our research into the connections between neighborhood conditions, housing, and education.  

This year, in collaboration with the Poverty Center at the University of Michigan and the Detroit Public Schools Community District, we conducted a qualitative study on homeless and housing unstable families and their access to federal Mckinney-Vento services through their schools. Listening to family experiences in dealing with housing instability, we were able to find patterns that potentially explained this disconnect. From this project, we created a policy report outlining how schools and the city as a whole can better support housing unstable families and school-aged children.  

We have begun studying the patterns and potential causes of teacher mobility across Detroit public, charter, and larger suburban schools. Additionally, this year has also seen the start of a longitudinal research project on a mixed-income housing development in the Corktown neighborhood of Detroit. With our partners, we wrote an essay on this project that was recently published by the American Institutes for Research called “Community Development for Integrated Schools: The Detroit Choice Neighborhoods Initiative.” A $50,000 three-year matching grant from Kresge will help us launch this project as we seek additional partners.  

The RPP

• Based in: Wheaton, IL
• Founded: 2010
• Mission: The Illinois Civics Hub x CIRCLE Civic Learning RPP is working to improve the quality and equity of standards and mandate implementation of civics classes in schools and districts across Illinois.

The Story of Impact

Our RPP has continued to work closely together, especially focusing on two streams of work: 1. Illinois Democracy Schools (IDS)  expansion and alignment to districtwide model, and 2. Middle schools civics mandate evaluation. IDS work has advanced forward in two ways. One is to pilot youth-led participatory budgeting with Voice4Youth grant from NNERPP in three different high schools, starting with different “homes” for participatory budgeting. Second is to align and extend the existing IDS model by realigning the elements of IDS to Educating for American Democracy’s 6-principle framework for inclusive and high-quality pedagogy, teacher and leadership readiness, and community support. Educating for American Democracy is a national effort to scale and deepen student readiness for civic participation using deep and balanced inquiries about historical and civic content. The realignment process allows us to welcome K-8 schools to be part of the IDS network, and to provide cohesive resources and support to educators and leaders through the online micro-credential courses and administrator training IL Civics Hub already offers in alignment with the Educating for American Democracy framework. Our team has been gathering deep input from K-8 educators, school and district leaders, and community stakeholders so far, and look forward to taking student feedback next. 

As an RPP, we have also published what we have been doing on CIRCLE’s website and recorded a podcast episode and shared how we work as an RPP at the American Education Research Association convening in April 2023.

The RPP

• Based in: Tallahassee, FL
• Founded: 2019
• Mission: Taking a place-based, collective impact approach, The Village creates, supports, and sustains research-practice partnerships to support reading achievement, school readiness, and school success among vulnerable children and youth.

The Story of Impact

Our work in 2023 has been a continuation of last year’s efforts, including the expansion of our ReadUp Partnership –an RPP between Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR) and the local school district– through this Institutional Challenge Grant awarded to us last year by William T. Grant Foundation, Spencer Foundation, and Doris Duke Foundation. The grant is allowing us to develop a model for how other college-town universities can partner with their communities to reduce educational disparities: We are creating a toolkit and framework to help universities leverage the expertise of the university and promoting research-practice partnerships as a mechanism to address the needs of students, families, educators, and communities. Additionally, mid-career faculty fellows at Florida State University and Florida A&M University will also carry out their own research projects within the partnership, increasing their capacity to create and sustain RPPs. Focusing on reading achievement, early learning, special education, and college and career readiness, this work will directly impact the trajectory of the children growing up in our community.

Our team was also excited to continue our efforts around our Book Nook Bundles this year: In partnership with Maya’s Book Nook, we developed a box filled with a diverse children’s book, aligned Beyond the Book guide, and extension language and literacy activities last year – this year, our bundles have been delivered to each library branch of the LeRoy Collins Leon County Public Library System, libraries being one of the few places where books and media are available to all for free. Families are able to check out 25 different bundles filled with these interactive and engaging materials, helping to build strong language and literacy foundations. 

Finally, we continued to expand our partnership with our local public library through a project called Engaging Librarians in the Science of Reading. As librarians play an important role in our communities in fostering a love for reading, youth services librarians from the seven local library branches are currently participating in a series of professional development workshops to increase their knowledge of language and literacy development. Together, we are investigating barriers and facilitators to increasing librarian’s use of evidence-based practices during story time sessions and youth programming and while engaging families who attend library events.

The RPP

• Based in: New York, NY
• Founded: 2022
• Mission: Ensuring that efforts to integrate computing and digital literacies into teacher education programs are meaningful, equitable, and coherent across all lines of an institution’s work so they may be sustained in the long term.

The Story of Impact

How can colleges of education ensure that future teachers can meaningfully and equitably integrate computational and digital literacies into their classrooms? This question animates the Investigating and Scaling Computing-Integrated Teacher Education (InSCITE) research-practice partnership between City University of New York and Telos Learning, which aims to transform 15 colleges of education across the CUNY system. In 2023, we focused on supporting the launch of faculty teams that would lead strategic planning around their colleges’ comprehensive computing-integrated teacher education initiatives.

We leveraged data to build effective scaffolds for institutional change, creating a series of ‘data loops’ to help guide our designs. Our first challenge was understanding where each college was at when it came to readiness for strategic planning, and our first data loop, ‘GPS 1.0’, used university administrators’ first-hand knowledge and a ‘readiness’ rubric to locate each college team’s capacity for strategic planning. We then shared the results of this analysis back to each college team (a second data loop) to conduct a ‘member check’ to give each team a chance to locate themselves in a different readiness category. Afterwards, we designed and facilitated a series of full-day strategic planning sessions held in January 2022, that, utilizing the data loop analyses, differentiated session supports for faculty teams. For instance, teams that were much further along and had established routines of collaborating had more open-ended work time built into their agendas, whereas teams that were just forming received more specified scaffolds to help establish team roles and vision.

We analyzed data gathered during the January strategic planning sessions and from follow-on check-ins with teams a few months later to generate “GPS 2.0”, a data loop our RPP team used to gauge the progress of each college team’s strategic planning efforts mid-year. This data loop was then used to surface compelling examples of activities and goals around organizational change and to help inform differentiated funding opportunities around strategic planning that met college teams where they were at. 

This analysis was then looped back to college team leads to help them determine their next steps for strategic planning and to identify which funding tracks they were well-suited to apply for. Simultaneously, the GPS 2.0 analysis was translated into short case narratives that illustrated the problem and opportunity spaces of each college team’s strategic planning efforts. In particular, one finding from the GPS 2.0 analysis centered on the need that a number of college teams had around coordination of their strategic planning efforts. With college teams often led by overtaxed faculty, administrative challenges in “herding cats” and coordinating faculty participation were hampering momentum.  These cases were shared with potential funders, leading to funding for several coordinator positions to meet the specific strategic planning needs of multiple college teams.

As they move into 2024, 46 programs across 11 colleges have developed plans for how they’ll develop program-wide learning goals around integration of computing and digital literacies, with our RPP team ready to continue to create evidence-based opportunities to help them move forward.

The RPP

• Based in: Madison, WI; working internationally
• Founded: 2023
• Mission: Advancing outcomes for multilingual learners through socially just research.

The Story of Impact

The Multilingual Learning Research Center (MLRC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison approaches research-partnerships in different ways with a variety of partners, but always with a focus on the education of multilingual learners. 

Launched on July 1, 2023, our MLRC School Network includes over 160 international and independent schools in more than 50 countries. Currently, MLRC School Network members have opportunities to engage in dialogue and collaborative research to explore common problems of practice in teaching multilingual learners in two ways: A) the online MLRC School Network Hub or B) in-person MLRC Research Symposia. 

A. In the MLRC School Network Hub, members can engage with research summaries, recorded webinars and conference presentations, and discussions organized around guiding questions. Our 2023-2024 research topics are translanguaging, collaboration, and inclusive EAL (English as an Additional Language). Over 100 members have accessed school improvement tools to enhance their programs to serve multilingual learners. 

B. The MLRC Research Symposium is a two-day opportunity for international teachers and school leaders to engage deeply with existing research about multilingual learners, connect with global education scholars, inquire together about shared problems of practice, and discuss innovative strategies for serving multilingual learners. In 2023-24, we are hosting three research symposia in Barcelona, Singapore, and Guatemala City, expecting over 95 global attendees. 

The MLRC also engages in traditional research partnerships with other researchers and institutions. In partnership with the Secondary Science Teacher Education Program Coordinator at UW Madison,  MLRC will conduct a year-long pilot with the goal to enhance the knowledge and capacity of future science teachers in the application of core teaching practices with multilingual learners. The project utilizes mixed-reality simulation technology, which provides preservice teachers (PSTs) with the opportunity to interact with virtual avatar students manipulated by trained actors, to simulate and rehearse teaching practices. These simulations provide formative, low-stakes learning opportunities and the ability to redo practices based on feedback, which may not be feasible in the field. The team is developing an initial set of simulation tasks for eliciting student thinking with multilingual learners in mind, which integrates science and language teaching practices. Twelve University of Wisconsin-Madison’s secondary science teacher candidates are participating in the tasks, with teacher educators observing their interactions and providing support and formative feedback. The project aims to benefit both PSTs and teacher educators, with PSTs developing targeted teaching practices for multilingual learners and teacher educators learning how to design, implement, and interpret effective simulation tasks. Findings and learning from these research partnerships will also benefit School Network members as this work is shared with schools to both leverage and build on their expertise.