Are you new to research-practice partnerships (RPPs) and aren’t sure where to start? Or do you need a refresher on the most up-to-date thinking on RPPs?

These are the questions we posed when launching our RPP 101 Workshop Series this April. In this five-part online series led by NNERPP Director Paula Arce-Trigatti, we invited anyone who is new to or curious about working in an education RPP to join us in an overview of five important topics that help us understand what RPPs are all about and where we are as a field in our thinking on RPPs. 

We had an amazing crew of current and future RPPers join us, from research-side folks interested in deepening their research collaboration with community and K-12 practice-facing agencies to education leaders curious about working in partnership with external collaborators! Here, we share a brief overview of the topics we examined together and then highlight an artifact we created as a result of these conversations, which we hope may be useful to your own RPP efforts as well, particularly if you’re new to partnership work. If that’s you and you missed this series – we plan to launch another round this fall, so please keep an eye out for that! 

FIVE IMPORTANT TOPICS FOR UNDERSTANDING RPPs

Here are the five topics we pondered together throughout our workshop series and why they might be important to think about for anyone seeking to understand and engage in RPP work.

• What is an RPP? In our first session, What is an RPP?, we explored the “core DNA” that make up the current definition of research-practice partnerships, which include: (1) a long-term collaboration, (2) an aim of educational improvement or transformation, (3) engagement with research, (4) involvement of diverse forms of expertise, (5) an intentional shifting of power relations, and (6) joint work. Participants had an opportunity to consider how each of the core DNA might show up in their partnerships, now or in the future. We were thrilled to have guest speaker and “real-life RPPer” Alyn Turner join us, as she shared her experiences in her role as the research-side partner of the Research for Action + Philadelphia Education Research Consortium.

• Sustaining Your Partnership: Our second session centered around the RPP Sustainability Framework (coming soon!), which is a comprehensive framework for thinking about the long-term sustainability of RPPs, co-created by the NNERPP community. The framework addresses four dimensions: financial sustainability, relational sustainability, goal alignment, and infrastructure. Following an introduction to each dimension, we were excited to be joined by real-life RPPers Andy Rasmussen (Chicago Public Schools, Chicago Alliance For Equity in Computer Science (CAFÉCS)) and Jesse Senechal (Institute for Collaborative Research and Evaluation and the Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium at Virginia Commonwealth University), who shared their experiences with sustainability in their long-term partnerships.

• Building Strong Relationships: In the third session, we focused our time together around thinking about how to build strong relationships to support RPP work. Because relationship development in RPPs frequently involves building onto existing relationships or working together in very new ways, three key ideas framed the conversation: (1) how do you initiate a new relationship with an eye on building a strong future relationship, (2) how do you strengthen an existing relationship, and (3) how do you repair a relationship that may not be in a good spot? Participants used the guiding questions in the Collaborative Education Research Collective’s (2023) framework to think about the specific ways in which their individual and institutional ways of “showing up” to RPP work might have to change in order to build, strengthen, and repair relationships. This round, we were pumped to have real-life RPPers Rachel Ruggirello of the Institute for School Partnership at Washington University in St. Louis and Jess Bailey of REL Northeast and Islands at EDC to share how they build relationships in their RPPs through very intentional work.

• Milestones for New RPPs: The fourth RPP 101 session introduced participants to the Milestones Guide for Emerging RPPs (released in late 2023), which aims to support new RPP teams as they think together about their first year of work. In particular, the tool invites teams to reflect on early stage milestones (things to focus on) and stumbling blocks (things to watch out for), as identified by the NNERPP community given their own first year RPP experiences. After participants had an opportunity to reflect on the relevance of each milestone and stumbling block to their context, real-life RPPer Laura Wentworth of California Education Partners and the Stanford-San Francisco Unified School District Partnership shared from her own experience one of the most helpful milestones her RPP achieved in its first year: Producing an “early win,” that is, a smaller-scope early project that demonstrates the potential of the partnership to its members and possible funders.

• RPP Effectiveness: In our final session, we shared the recently released Indicators of Research-Practice Partnership Health and Effectiveness and the RPP Health and Effectiveness Toolkit that NNERPP co-developed with our colleague Erin Henrick from Vanderbilt University and the team at the National Center for Research in Policy and Practice (NCRPP). Participants had an opportunity to share their noticings and wonderings about the five dimensions of RPP health and effectiveness, which include (1) cultivating trust and relationships, (2) engaging in inclusive research or inquiry around local needs, (3) supporting practice or community partners in making towards their goals, (4) engaging with the broader field to improve educational practices, systems, and inquiry, and (5) fostering ongoing learning and developing partnership infrastructure.

RPP 101 FAQ: A SAMPLER

Throughout this series, we received tons of great questions from participants about certain aspects of the work. In response, we created a running list of FAQs by session for attendees. Because the strength of NNERPP lies in the collective wisdom of our members, most of the questions were answered with resources written or shared by our members, including articles and tools from the following sources: (1) the NNERPP Knowledge Clearinghouse, a curated collection of resources from across the RPP space, (2) Brokering in Education Research-Practice Partnerships, an open source guide with over 50 real-life cases and tools related to RPP brokering, (3) articles from NNERPP Extra, our quarterly magazine on all things RPP, (4) our members’ RPP websites, and recently released tools co-created with the NNERPP community, including the Milestones for Emerging RPPs and the RPP Health and Effectiveness Toolkit.

Here, we share a sampler “RPP 101” FAQ for you to explore, meant to be helpful for anyone, regardless of whether you joined us for the workshop series. It addresses the following questions about understanding the concept of RPPs:

• What is an RPP?
• What are some specific examples of RPP work in practice?
• Are there PhD programs or universities where PhD students can participate in RPPs?
• Who defines the roles of an RPP, especially when many people sit at the intersection of researcher and practitioner?

We invite you to explore our responses to these questions here and share the FAQ with anyone in your circles who might be interested. And, if you have other questions about RPPs and RPPing not included in this round of FAQ, please feel free to reach out to us with questions you’d like to see answered in a future FAQ!

CONCLUSION

We had a blast thinking about what it means “to RPP” with folks in various stages of dreaming about, starting up, continuing, or even resetting research-practice partnerships in education. Just like education contexts, research-practice partnerships are constantly evolving and it was a gift for our NNERPP team to hold space to wonder with current and future RPPers about partnership work. If you’d like to join in on these conversations, we hope to see you in the fall for RPP 101 2.0!

Kim Wright is Assistant Director and Nina Spitzley is Marketing Specialist at the National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships (NNERPP).

Suggested citation: Wright, K. & Spitzley, N. (2024). RPP 101: Understanding Important RPP Basics. NNERPP Extra, 6(3), 17-20. https://doi.org/10.25613/KBNT-QM03