Research-Practice Partnerships: Collaborative research for educational change

Overview

<div>The Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) Grants Program is intended to support education research projects that engage in collaborative and participatory partnerships with project budgets up to $400,000 and durations of up to three years. We accept Intent to Apply forms once a year in this program.</div> <div></div> <div>We view partnerships as an important approach to knowledge generation and the improvement of education, broadly construed. Rigorous partnership work is intentionally organized to engage diverse forms of expertise and perspectives, across practitioners as well as scholars and disciplines, in knowledge generation around pressing problems of practice. Further, RPPs can facilitate the long-term accumulation of knowledge in new ways as researchers and practitioners work together to ask practitioner-relevant questions on key topics in specific settings over time. Many key problems of practice are historically saturated and require multiple perspectives and long-term engagement if sustainable and systemic change is to occur. Over the long term, we anticipate that research conducted by RPPs will result in new insights into the processes, practices, and policies that improve education for students, educators, schools, universities, families, and communities.</div> <div></div> <div>This grant program is open to partnerships between researchers and a broad array of practitioners. We define practitioners as school districts, county offices of education, state educational organizations, universities, community-based organizations, out-of-school-time providers, informal educators, and other social sectors that significantly impact students’ lives. As such, we are open to applications from design-based research teams, networked improvement communities, placed-based research alliances, and other partnership arrangements.</div> <div></div> <div>We expect the partners in the RPPs we fund to have engaged in fruitful long-term collaborations. How this history is evidenced can vary. For example, teams might have a track record of success as demonstrated by in-process or completed research studies, solutions-in-progress, established trusting relationships, or data-sharing agreements, amongst other possibilities. This grant program is specifically intended to build the capacity of partnerships to make educational change. Effective governance is a key aspect of successful partnerships, and as such all proposals should specify their governance structures and how the work is jointly developed across all partners.</div> <div>Additionally, we expect that partnerships will foreground issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion and articulate these dimensions in the proposal.  </div> <div></div> <div>While this grant program is open to all partnership configurations across a range of learning contexts, in addition to pre k-12 school systems, we especially encourage applications from partnerships that include scholars and institutions of higher education, rural geographic locations, and partnerships that deeply engage community-based organizations and families.</div>