WHAT ARE PATHWAYS TO WORKING IN RPPs?

Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) can unite and empower education researchers and practitioners to achieve their distinct, yet often convergent, goals. Given the promise of RPPs, it is important to consider the day-to-day work RPP-ers do and the preparation they need to be effective in this work. Working in an RPP is not a “traditional” job, as it requires navigating shifting political dynamics  and involves working at boundaries of roles or even switching roles, such as researchers stepping in to play the role(s) traditionally held by practitioners and vice-versa. Relatedly, RPP participants often engage in brokering as a means of negotiating the relationships and structures needed to operationalize their aims. Given this complexity, perhaps it’s not surprising that role negotiation is an important feature of the work that individuals do within RPPs. 

Building on this literature, our aim is to understand how individuals end up working in RPPs and what prepares them for this work. To support the growing RPP field and support RPP-ers in being effective and impactful, we hope to document the facilitators and barriers to engaging in and staying in RPP work. In line with recent frameworks and guidance (for example, the 2023 framework for preparing for and participating in collaborative education research by the Collaborative Education Research Collective and the 2025 recommendations for enhancing the preparation of education researchers to participate in transformative research by the Spencer Foundation), we argue that understanding these pathways for engaging in RPPs could also help higher education institutions build new programs for learning about RPP work and enhance their impact.

As a first exploratory foray into these questions, we organized a Virtual Brown Bag session in September 2025 –Virtual Brown Bags are informal hour-long gatherings for NNERPP members to share resources, strategies, and advice– where we shared some of our own personal stories of getting into RPP work and then gathered written responses to reflection prompts from 13 participating RPPers. Our respondents include current faculty, district staff, as well as individuals who work in non-profit (research) groups. Perhaps unsurprisingly, everyone in this group currently or recently worked in an RPP. In this article, we share a few brief stories of our own pathways into RPPs and highlight the key themes that emerged from our reflection prompts as a starting point to explore questions of what pathways into RPPs might look like. 

PATHWAYS INTO RPPs: PERSONAL ANECDOTES

In many ways, this piece began with informal conversations the six of us kept having with each other about how each of us got into RPP work. For some of us (Caitlin and Laura), our experiences as K-12 teachers inspired us to consider the intersection of research and practice. Caitlin’s experiences in a “Reading First” school (designated as such during the No Child Left Behind era) motivated her interest in research. For her part, Laura wondered why the content she was learning related to multilingual students in her graduate courses was not embedded in her classroom practices. Those early experiences led both of them to make future career choices that placed them at the intersection of research, practice, and policy. 

For others, like Hayley, experiences in graduate school served as an introduction to RPP work. Hayley’s graduate assistantship involved working within an RPP–and she has thought of herself as an RPP-er ever since! For the rest of us (Paula, Steve, and Zitsi), our pathways to RPP work began when we were hired to work in one. Both Paula and Zitsi began their RPP experiences by working at research alliances (Paula at the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans and Zitsi at the Research Alliance for New York City Schools). Similarly, Steve joined his district office to work on an RPP that was funded by a grant from the Institute for Education Sciences. 

UNDERSTANDING PATHWAYS INTO RPP WORK: EMERGING THEMES

Given our varied experiences, we invited our Brown Bag participants to respond to the following prompts:

• Tell us the story of your journey to working in RPPs.
• What kinds of support have been most influential in your RPP journey? 
• What challenges or obstacles made your RPP journey more difficult?
• What are some prior experiences that inform how you currently engage in RPPs?

We acknowledge the limitations that come with gathering data from individuals who are likely interested and/or invested in improving RPP work. With that in mind, here are three themes that emerged from the answers to our questions.

(I) RPP-ERS TAKE VARIED PATHWAYS TO THEIR ROLES

Like our own journeys, we found that RPP-ers take a variety of pathways to their work in RPPs. While some told us they learned about RPPs in graduate school, the vast majority (like Paula, Steve, and Zitsi) learned about RPPs when they were hired to work in one and/or decided to start one! We were struck by the fact that none of our 13 respondents said they knew they wanted to work in RPPs as they started out in their professional journey or were aiming for jobs in RPPs. In this vein, we found that the individuals at this Brown Bag session draw on a variety of personal and professional experiences to engage in their RPP work. While a few cited their experience working in K-12 schools, others mentioned professional experiences in higher education, at the district level, as well as in other educational contexts (e.g., group fitness instruction). One participant highlighted the relational aspect of their past professional experiences, and how that comes into their RPP work: “Much of my professional life has been about building relationships with folks across a wide range of organizations and roles–something that I continue to do now as I build trusting relationships with researchers and practitioners all over the place!” 

(II) PEER-BASED LEARNING IS IMPORTANT TO RPP-ERS

As we pored through the Brown Bag reflections, we were struck by the similarities participants described in the kinds of systems or processes that support their work in RPPs. Given the variety of tasks that need to be completed in RPPs (e.g., literature reviews, data collection, analysis and interpretation, building relationships with partners, etc.), RPP-ers leaned on peers, colleagues, and mentors within their RPPs to learn the skills they needed to make their RPPs work. Notably, there was also collaboration across RPPs as multiple respondents emphasized the importance of shared learning among peers engaged in or studying RPPs to understand how to effectively work in RPPs. The willingness of RPP-ers to come together and share lessons seems to be an important factor in keeping individuals engaged in RPP work. One participant noted that “strategies of those doing partnership work” and “insights from those studying partnership work” helped to facilitate their own RPP approaches. The sentiment expressed here is very much one of RPP practice-based learning and development.

(III) POLITICAL DYNAMICS, COMMUNICATION, AND COMPETING PRIORITIES CAN BE BARRIERS

Three key challenges emerged in this data as barriers to successful RPP work in our participants' RPP journeys. In line with the literature, our participants highlighted shifting political dynamics and changes to administrative priorities as disruptive, particularly for RPP tasks that have medium- or longer-term horizons. We also heard that communication patterns and task delegation were issues. In fact, one participant wrote: “Communication style can be a challenge. Sometimes, our partners would like to be told what to do [rather than engaging in] a collaborative process with each party having input on what they want.” We suspect that this challenge is linked to the third factor that emerged in our work: Competing priorities. Those participants who identified as researchers described toggling between their “traditional” research work and RPP research, and multiple participants in this Brown Bag session described feeling pulled between securing funding, balancing the needs of multiple stakeholders, and planning for the longer term.

WHAT'S NEXT?

So, where does this small data collection exercise leave us? We are interested in exploring the experiences outlined here across a broader group. Does the finding that individuals take a variety of paths to RPPs apply generally? Do these pathways vary for researchers relative to practitioners? And do individuals in each of these roles encounter similar supports and obstacles as they find their way to work in RPPs? If not, how do barriers and facilitators vary across institutional setting, size or focus of RPP, or political contexts? We believe that we can and should learn more about the paths individuals take to RPP work–and what sustains them in these types of roles. We hope to continue studying individuals who work in RPPs to build a research base for an effective and impactful RPP community workforce. If you’re interested in joining us to develop and administer a survey for a nationwide sample of RPP-ers, please contact Zitsi via email (zitsi.mirakhur@uky.edu).

Zitsi Mirakhur is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation at the University of Kentucky, Laura Wentworth is Director of the Research-Practice Partnership Program and Director of the Stanford-SFUSD Partnership at California Education Partners, Paula Arce-Trigatti is Director of the National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships (NNERPP); Caitlin Farrell is director of the National Center of Research in Policy and Practice (NCRPP) at the University of Colorado Boulder, Hayley Weddle is Co-Director of the State Leadership for Multilingual Learner (ML) Equity RPP and Assistant Professor of Education Policy at the University of Pittsburgh, and Stephen Leach is Grant Developer at Jefferson County Public Schools.

Suggested citation: Mirakhur, Z., Wentworth, L.,  Arce-Trigatti, P., Farrell, C., Weddle, H., and Leach, S. (2026). What Are Pathways to Working in RPPs? NNERPP Extra 8(2), 8-11.