April 14, 2025
Today’s education leaders and practitioners face no shortage of challenges in and out of the classroom, from chronic absence and teacher shortages to troubling trends in student achievement and beyond. What do each of these challenges have in common? No one person or leader can possibly solve the issue alone. To tackle today’s most pressing education challenges, collaboration isn’t just important—it’s vital to creating and implementing impactful strategies that will improve teaching and learning. But how can state, district, and school leaders break through silos to meaningfully collaborate with interest holders to develop and use evidence-based solutions?
That’s where research practice partnerships come in. WestEd partners with state education agencies (SEAs), local education agencies (LEAs), school districts, teachers, and communities to conduct research and develop evidence-based strategies that target pressing issues in education. Through these collaborations, education partners shift from research participants to active collaborators in generating and making sense of data, research, and evidence-based strategies to address local needs.
In this Q&A, Lenay Dunn, Senior Research Director, and Alicia Okpareke, Senior Research Associate—both on WestEd’s Research–Practice Partnerships team—discuss WestEd’s approach to engaging interest holders in research and the importance of engaging with educators, families, and communities as partners in collaborative research. Both are active with the broader field through two national networks: the Education Knowledge Broker Network and the National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships (NNERPP).
Note: This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
A research-practice partnership (RPP) is a long-term, mutually beneficial, formalized collaboration between education researchers and practitioners. RPPs are a promising strategy for producing more relevant research, improving the use of research evidence in decision-making, and engaging researchers and practitioners to tackle problems of practice.
Definition adapted from NNERPP
Lenay Dunn (LD): Collaborative research, whether it’s a formalized RPP or a more casual partnership, starts with what partners want to learn about and understanding why they want to learn about that. How will they use what they learn to make decisions about policy or practice? A partner could be individuals or involve multiple groups at a variety of levels—including SEAs, LEAs, and school districts, but also educators, practitioners, families, and communities at large. When you bridge policy, practice, and research, each of those buckets hold equal weight. Policy, practice, and research all influence and inform each other and are dependent upon each other, so it’s important for the partnership to reflect that connection.
Our work often involves a partner who wants to tackle something specific to their context—for example, reducing chronic absence or improving graduation rates in a state or school district. But to get there, it’s not a linear path. We use the word “context” a lot, and by that, we mean the specific environment that learning takes place in, including things like physical space, history, school and community culture, and social dynamics, among other factors. All schools and communities have a distinct context, and all elements of learning are impacted by that context. So, when a partner wants to address an issue, topic, or concern, the efforts should be informed by the context of that specific school, district, community, or state. If it’s not, then those efforts might not be as effective because they don’t consider what the setting already has going on in it. That’s why solutions are usually not as simple as saying, “The research says this, and so you if you do this specific practice, exactly in this way, you will get the same results.”
Given that, a key piece is acknowledging the deep expertise that partners bring to collaborative research. They are the experts on themselves and their context. They know how things are working in their system. So, embedding opportunities to bring that expertise to the conversation throughout the process is crucial to how we do our work together. It is part of what differentiates collaborative research from a traditional research model.
Alicia Okpareke (AO): I absolutely agree, Lenay. And as the work moves forward, it remains firmly rooted in the partner’s interests and needs. That’s what guides the entire process. Within partnerships, adaptability and flexibility are essential. We recognize that new ideas or needs may arise as we engage in the work. For us, being responsive to partners’ needs is key.
AO: Our partners—again, this includes SEAs, LEAs, school and district leaders, educators and more—are directly involved in generating and using research. Their role is critical because, in a sense, they’re on the front line. They know their context. They can tell us what needs to be strengthened or improved and what is working well. Without that, the research we generate might not be as relevant, useful, or applicable to them. We rely on partners to guide the work toward what is most beneficial for them.
LD: Partners also play a crucial role as “brokers” of information, research, and evidence. That means they help connect research to practices and policies by making real-world decisions about what curriculum to use or where to invest funds for different strategies. That’s also where WestEd can come in to help partners situate those high-stakes decisions or investments and ground them in research and tailor it to the needs of their context.
AO: To make this more concrete, I’ll share a recent example that demonstrates what our partnerships can look like and how we collaborate with leaders and interest holders to address issues that they care about in their communities. Recently, we were working with a partner who had gathered information from educators that revealed an ongoing, years-long issue that was impacting educators. They wanted to engage in a collaboration to identify and test evidence-based solutions to the issue. Together, we reviewed research and evidence related to their concern and collaborated on how to apply it in their context. We then codeveloped a tool to support the use of evidence-based strategies to address the issue and helped the partner do a small pilot of the tool with a few interested schools. We gathered input from a variety of interest holders—county staff, district and school administrators, and teachers—on the tool and its use. We collaborated with the district to understand the input and use it to make revisions to the tool. With ongoing discussions and collaboration, we’ve now moved into a more formal study to evaluate whether the tool works well in practice and if it is helping them address the issue they identified.
LD: We think of partners as not just consumers of the research, but as experts at the table with us throughout the entire process. Their experiences and perspectives strengthen what we learn. When you get to the results phase, it’s crucial to ensure all partners are involved in interpreting and understanding the findings. It’s not us coming to tell them what the research says in three bullet points and then leaving—we look at the results together, make sense of them together, and ask, “Are there other things we need to learn?” Sharing findings in a way that gives everyone an opportunity to see that their role is essential.
AO: Well, collaborative, codeveloped research hasn’t been the traditional way of doing research, so there’s not necessarily one right way—it’s always about doing what’s right for the partner and context. But we want to shift the paradigm to ensure that research participants, including teachers, families, students, and larger communities, are truly valued partners in the work of improving learning. There’s a role here for everyone through every stage of the process.
At the beginning, it’s important to set aside time to build relationships with initial partners so you can have conversations about the value of community or interest holder voice. It can be time-consuming, but if that’s not there, it’s harder to bring in communities or interest holders as the work continues. Identifying and recognizing brokers who bridge those connections, as Lenay described, is vital. Education doesn’t happen in silos. It happens across the different contexts that students, teachers, and community members operate in, so engaging everyone helps the collective create better strategies that align with the values of the community. That, in turn, allows for improved buy-in and smoother implementation.
LD: Being a part of collaborative research efforts equips partners with information to provide better services and supports. For example, SEAs often convene interest holders like community organizations or service providers. And importantly, SEAs often act as brokers by sharing successful, evidence-based strategies and examples that can guide districts. WestEd often partners with SEAs to help them access and make sense of research that’s relevant to the problems of practice in their schools. For example, we recently worked with an SEA that was tasked by its state legislature with addressing teacher retention in the state. The SEA wanted to ground their efforts in research but knew that they would need to deeply understand what was happening at the local level to realize those retention goals. So, WestEd worked with the SEA to bring together LEAs from across the state. The state heard from local perspectives about why teachers were leaving and were presented with local data on retention. That helped the SEA think about the supports, information, and access to resources that are needed at the local level. From there, we moved into a research study to examine different strategies for retaining teachers and what works for different contexts across the state, such as urban or rural districts.
AO: The Education Knowledge Broker Network represents more of those informal partnerships that happen between researchers, practitioners, and various interest holders. The Network focuses specifically on the role of brokers as intermediaries. Brokering can sometimes be isolating because there’s rarely a specific role called a “broker,” right? Brokers are people who occupy a range of different positions in the education ecosystem. The Network helps address isolation among brokers and provides learning and support to brokers.
LD: The National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships (NNERPP) aims to support more formal partnerships. It teaches people “how to RPP” by offering opportunities to see different models since there’s no one way of doing RPPs, given the spectrum of contexts and local needs.
Our work is driven by the connection between research, practice, and policy and being firmly grounded in local needs. But at the same time, we need opportunities to step back collectively as a field and say, “What are we learning about these different topics with RPPs, or what are we learning about how to do this work?” By being a part of these national networks, it gives us an opportunity to both learn and contribute to that. We benefit from that sort of perspective, and so do our partners.
When silos are broken down to transform research participants into true partners in the work of improving teaching and learning, that’s when the most effective and meaningful strategies are developed. When everyone collaborates, we all learn more.
Ready to get started? WestEd is committed to helping education leaders—from state and local education agencies to school districts, teachers, and communities—embrace this approach in their local settings. If you’re looking to foster deeper collaboration and drive meaningful change in today’s most pressing challenges, consider connecting with WestEd to explore how we can work together to drive educational success.
