Research-Practice Partnerships at DIPF

In the BETTER research unit, we have spent several years researching dialogue and collaboration between educational research and school practice. Visit BETTER for an overview of our projects.

In our predecessor project, Peers4Practice, teachers and educational researchers (doctoral candidates and postdocs) worked together in tandems over 18 months and learned boundary crossing through their own co-constructive projects. The aim was to motivate participants to engage in boundary crossing at an early stage of their careers and to help them gain initial brokering experience. The findings from the comprehensive evaluation of the programme have informed the design of TransferForce.

Building Research-Practice Partnerships

As part of the PaTH project, we examined the current state of Research-Practice Partnerships in Germany from 2022 to 2026 and placed it in the context of international developments. As a first milestone, we conducted a systematic literature review to identify the mechanisms of Research-Practice Partnerships and developed a model that can serve both as a basis for empirical, hypothesis-driven research on partnerships and as guidance for building and evaluating them. In TransferForce, this model will also form the basis for teaching essential knowledge about the structures and processes within partnerships.

According to the model, the following aspects are particularly important for Research-Practice Partnerships to function well:

• strategic planning (involvement of relevant stakeholders, broker roles, shared goals, formal agreements and a clear division of responsibilities)
• the partnership's ways of working and activities
• partnership culture
• the partnership's resources (funding, time, facilities, staff)
• the research approach (participatory and co-constructive, with practice-oriented dissemination)

Beyond these structural aspects, the relationships between the actors and institutions involved, as well as contextual factors in the partnerships' environment, are also relevant to how well they function and achieve their goals. Our model also shows that Research-Practice Partnerships are often unable to demonstrate sufficiently the extent to which they actually contribute to improving education (impact). This is another focus we aim to strengthen through the TransferForce programme.

Co-Constructive Research

So far, there is little concrete evidence on how co-construction can work at different stages of the educational research cycle. Many approaches are based on design-based research. This is also the approach that we teach, test and evaluate in TransferForce.

Bi-Directional Knowledge Transfer

At the DIPF, we promote continuous exchange between educational research and school practice – not just at the stage when research findings are disseminated. We believe both sides, research and schools, have a responsibility to feed their specific knowledge back into the other's domain. Feedback from practice allows research to respond much more quickly and flexibly to developments and challenges in schools. At the same time, schools need input from research to align their practices with empirical findings and, not least, to engage in continuous reflection. We therefore consider a systematically embedded, routine exchange to be essential. We promote and continuously evaluate this exchange in a range of projects. In the Campus Schools project, the exchange takes place mainly between school leaders and researchers. In KONTEXT Grundschule, teachers, educational researchers and science communicators jointly develop texts that present research findings in a practice-oriented way. In Peers4Practice, we brought early-career teachers and early-career researchers into dialogue over 18 months and had them develop joint projects.