Between Transaction and Collaboration: Struggles for Coherence, Responsiveness, and Mutuality in a Fizzled-Out Research-Practice Partnership

Through interviews of research-practice partnership (RPP) participants, transcripts of RPP meetings, and artifacts from the partnership, this analysis sought to understand: In a university-district partnership in its first year and aspiring to become an RPP, what kinds of interactions enabled and hindered collaborative partnering? Primary data derive from 60–90-minute semi-structured interviews conducted with 12 RPP participants, inquiring into participants’ views of the strengths and challenges in how we organized ourselves for collaboration, changes over time, and RPP dynamics identified in our conceptual framework (e.g., trust, mutuality, equity). To triangulate interview data with observed dynamics, video recordings and transcripts of 18 co-design meetings were collected and analyzed, as well as about 40 relevant artifacts including the partnership agreement, agendas from meetings, and feedback forms completed by school leaders after each professional development event. Feedback forms asked school leaders to rate the usefulness of the session on a scale of one to four, with four being highest, and to write comments to explain their ratings and make suggestions for improvement.