By: Nicholas Hillman
When people ask me what the SSTAR Lab does, I often start by explaining we are a “research-practice partnership.” That phrase seems to click with folks, at least most of the time. People nod along, connecting the dots on how those three words might fit together.
Research, practice, and partnership. They go together nicely! Afterall, the Wisconsin Idea is to have research affect people’s lives far beyond the university, so these three words can help make that happen. These three words also let people know we want our work to be informed by people “on the ground”—we value expertise in all its forms.
But as nice as these three words sound together, their meaning is empty when used simply as a catchphrase.
To help make meaningful connections, researchers and philanthropic organizations have developed definitions and examples of research-practice partnerships (or simply RPPs) in education. The W.T. Grant Foundation has excellent resources here.
Guided by these definitions, SSTAR Lab adapted our own approach to an RPP in a higher education setting. We have determined four key conditions—or “ingredients”—must be in place for an RPP to be on strong footing as researchers and practitioners imagine, develop, and carry out a research agenda:
- A shared understanding of mutuality
- Clear expectation setting
- Trusted relationship building
- Diffused power dynamics
In K-12 education, most RPPs are between university-based faculty and practitioners in K-12 education settings and formalized through a research center or other arrangement. An education psychology professor may partner with a school district to help develop useful assessment tools. A special education professor may partner with teachers to find effective ways to support students with disabilities. The list goes on, where the faculty member formalizes a relationship with K-12 partners and, through that arrangement, develops a long-term and collaborative research agenda.
In higher education, faculty certainly collaborate with financial aid administrators, admissions counselors, or registrar offices to address problems of practice. Successful partnerships require the researcher to develop working knowledge of professional practices. When researchers take the time to understand those practices, their research will be better.
Successful partnerships also require a degree of trust and shared understanding between researchers and practitioners; they also need clear feedback loops that allow two-way communication between researchers and practitioners. In K-12 education RPPs, researchers with grant funding are likely perceived as holding power, and these power dynamics impact the process of establishing partnerships. Power dynamics are more diffused in higher education RPPs, where campus leaders hold power. Still, an intentional confrontation of power dynamics within partnerships is key to successful collaboration.
The SSTAR Lab has developed a long-term and formalized commitment with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Enrollment Management (DEM), which has opened the door to many new areas of research that would have been unimaginable without our partnership approach. Through these commitments, we have been able to build trust with one another while also learning more in-depth details about various sensitivities, priorities, challenges, and opportunities facing practitioners across the division. These commitments also give our research team ample time to collect data, develop analysis plans, interpret results, and share findings—activities that are very time-consuming. The long-term nature of RPPs allows for these time-consuming activities to transpire.
When asked about what we do in the SSTAR Lab, I still start my answer with the “research-practice partnership” phrase. And my goal is to have this short and sweet phrase take on new meaning for myself and whoever I am talking with. Partnership—and the trust, commitment, mutual-benefits, and open communication that comes with it—is what allows the SSTAR Lab to connect research with practice. And when we do, we are in stronger positions to make positive impacts for educational improvement here at UW-Madison and elsewhere.