In the corona pandemic, it became clear that educational institutions have limited contemporary digital ecosystems. There is a need to support the development of competencies for a digital world (EU 2020). Especially in Germany, it became apparent that some schools are “digitally advanced” while others “were far less digitally prepared” (Eickelmann et al., 2021, S. 39). The further development of educational institutions in digital transformation processes is a central task in education policy both nationally and throughout Europe. Accordingly, the EU introduces two key objectives: (1.) "to foster a high-performing digital education ecosystem" and (2.) "to enhance digital skills and competencies for the digital age" (EU 2020). In Germany, science is assigned the task of accompanying the development of schools in this context (KMK 2017).

Cooperation between science and practice in school development projects faces many challenges. Science, research and practice follow different conventions, rules and strategies. Development-oriented research tries to overcome that gap. But a fundamental question for researchers in development-oriented educational research is how they can become involved in a school as a development community or be involved in school actors' design practice.The specific cooperation structures in design and development-oriented projects have so far only been examined to a limited extent on an empirical level (Grunau & Gössling 2020, Getenet 2019).

We analyse the design of cooperation structures and communication channels in development-oriented research projects on school development using the example of the Darmstadt Model School Project. In the design-oriented research project, three schools - an integrated, comprehensive school, a vocational school and a school with a special focus on language support - were accompanied by research on their way to becoming digitally confident schools that teach "digital literacy" in everyday school life. The cooperation took place over two years.

The Darmstadt Model School Project is a design-based research project with three schools in Germany over two years. We utilised the models of Rolff (2016), Schulz-Zander (2001) and Eickelmann and Gerick (2017) to describe the fields of school development. In the project's first year, we focused on the following elements: personnel, teaching, organisation, and technology development. During the second project year, the cooperation development became more critical to analyse the results and design the development processes. Following Sesink and Reinmann (2015), we choose an iterative approach to combine school development processes' design and scientific analysis in one research approach. This approach involves cycles of problematisation of practice, a theory-based design, practical testing, analysis and interpretation of the results. Practitioners and researchers identified school-specific tasks at the beginning of the project. These tasks encompassed various development dimensions and were addressed at the respective schools in individual subprojects. In each phase, the school stakeholders received support from researchers. The article focuses on the cooperation formats and communication channels developed between the school-based actors and the researchers. Looking closer at the different school sub-projects, we describe cooperation formats between practitioners and researchers, enabling development processes for all participants. The description is based on systematic process documentation from January 2020 to November 2021, consisting of meeting minutes and individual memos in research diaries and audio recordings of the academic staff.

We identified three modes of cooperation in the Darmstadt Model School Project: cooperation as a form of "assistance", cooperation as a form of "consultation", and "development partnership". Each form of cooperation leads to various challenges and conflicts become from a scientific and practical perspective. The term "assistance" describes one-sided cooperation formats usually limited to a relatively short period of one to two months. Based on school concerns or problems identified by teachers and school administrators, different tasks for shaping practice are presented to the scientific support. The academic support processed requests, and presented results to teachers. A challenge of this form of cooperation is that the researched results and developed concepts remain abstract and are perceived as (too) little concrete for school practice. In the mode "consultation", the perspective of scientific actors is integrated with different phases of school development processes and is not limited to the fulfilment of tasks. In the stages of problematisation of practice, practical testing and interpretation of the results, the scientific perspective can contribute to opening up scientifically justified alternatives for action to practitioners. The decision-making authority for designing the respective school activities remains with the practitioners in advisory cooperation formats. The consulting practice can lead to shared responsibility in realising new processes. But the limited commitment of continuous joint work remains fragile. In a development partnership, it is possible to achieve relevant contributions to individual schools' development and gain relevant findings for regional school development. The development process in this mode is characterised by a constant balancing of practical and scientific perspectives. However, practical resource problems were marked in this mode primarily when teachers collaborated on developing and implementing concepts that (a) did not seem immediately usable or (b) called their own practice into question.

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