Given the rapid growth of research–practice partnerships (RPPs), we need a framework that helps the field understand how RPPs can facilitate organizational learning in service of local educational improvement and transformation. Drawing on sociocultural and organizational learning theories, we argue that learning can happen for the organizations engaged in RPPs at the boundaries of research and practice. Such learning is evident when there are changes in collective knowledge, policies, and routines of participating organizations, with implications for longer-term outcomes of educational improvement and transformation locally and more broadly. The degree to which organizations can make use of the ideas from the RPP is dependent, in part, on the presence and design of boundary infrastructure and the preexisting organizational capacities and conditions. We conclude with implications for those engaging in RPPs and future research.

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Asking practitioners to make larger changes to their practice is often thought to lead to lower fidelity of implementation. However, salient differences between ambitious new reforms and teachers’ existing practices may also facilitate processes of conceptual change and correspondingly increase fidelity of implementation. I use survey data on the implementation of two Comprehensive School Reform programs to investigate this puzzle, presenting a series of descriptive multivariate regressions that—contrary to conventional wisdom—predominantly support a positive association between larger changes and higher fidelity. I also address alternative explanations for this finding and discuss the conceptual and empirical strengths and weaknesses, implications for future research, and potential utility for practice of each interpretation.

Context For decades, educational leaders and researchers have faced a puzzle: Too often, promising new initiatives are adopted only to be quickly discontinued, while other longstanding practices persist despite efforts to undo them. Purpose We provide a framework for analyzing both change and persistence that we argue can shed new light on what sticks and why. Our MoRe institutional approach focuses analytic attention on self-activating modes of reproduction and their observable outcomes. Doing so allows for engagement with processes of both institutionalization and de-institutionalization. Research Design We make the case for our MoRe institutional framework by synthesizing across theoretical and empirical literature from both within and outside education. We address common treatments of persistence and change, as well as briefly review scholarship on institutional theory, and identify seven modes of reproduction structuring educational outcomes. We illustrate the utility of our approach concretely using the case of high-stakes testing. Synthesizing existing research across multiple levels of analysis, we demonstrate the ways that high-stakes testing is institutionalized via multiple mechanisms at multiple levels, while also analyzing possibilities for its de-institutionalization. Recommendations We conclude with implications for using the framework, focusing on strategies for supporting transformative equity-oriented change. These include processes for analyzing existing educational structures and identifying possible avenues for change, as well as design principles for protecting new practices from churn.

If the RPP field is to bring our stated commitments to equity to life, it will require engagement with the political dimensions of RPP work, starting at the outset when a partnership is being established. In particular, prospective members must consider how the research process and products might (or might not) lead to more equitable systems. Recognizing that RPP work centering equity sits at the intersection of distinct intellectual genealogies, I argue that research and activist traditions drawing on critical and decolonial traditions—often overlooked in RPP literature—provide particularly relevant insights. Working through questions relevant to the establishment of an RPP on organizational, project-level, and relational dimensions, analyses and examples drawn from scholars, as well as journalists, organizers, educators, and young people illustrate the political considerations inherent in each. I close with implications for new and existing RPPs and directions for future research on RPPs as a methodology.