The paper describes a two-year research-practice collaboration between university-based researchers and three principals aimed at improving equity in student outcomes through the use of plan-do-study-act (PDSA) cycles (Langley et al., 2009). The project involved one elementary and two high schools. The principals were in their second or third year at their schools and each noted that their schools required significant shifts in outcomes for specific groups of students. In the elementary school, the focus was on students with special needs, while the two high schools had large numbers of minority students from low socio-economic areas who identified as indigenous Māori or were of Pacific Island descent. Furthermore, principals noted resistance by a large proportion of staff to the idea that improvement was necessary or achievable.

Principals were asked to bring a team of up to six members, including senior leaders, middle leaders, and teachers to the project. Research indicates that a cohesive team effort from senior and middle leaders is required to progress improvement (Bryk et al., 2015; Hofman et al., 2001). The project extended this idea to teachers. The same three school teams participated in the project over two years and attended seven half-day workshops facilitated by the researchers that focused on schools’ own PDSA plans. Workshops were used to review evidence from outcome and process measures of improvement, problem-solve, and plan next steps. Workshops enabled within- and across-school discussion, support, and feedback. The researchers further supported schools through in-school problem-solving sessions and observations of and feedback on meetings.

All three schools reported improvement in equity in outcomes after the project and in their evaluation of their own implementation of leadership aspects related to improvement science processes. Research-practice partnerships have become an important enabler for school improvement, however we need to further our understanding on what the enablers and challenges for such partnerships are in different contexts and in regard to different purposes (Baumfield, & Butterworth, 2007; Coburn, & Penuel, 2016). In this paper, we examine how this research-practice collaboration enabled schools to implement improvement science in their contexts. We discuss enablers and challenges in relation to the different dimensions of this collaborative work, which may provide guidance for others when planning and engaging in such work. We discuss the benefits of involving diverse school teams from different layers of the system, bringing together schools with similar challenges, creating accountability through collaboration, and providing an external lens and support from researchers. We note challenges in collaborating across different contexts and embedding the work alongside other initiatives. 

The research highlights the need for research-practice improvement partnerships. We also note the importance of this work being embedded in the school contexts to support the understanding of different aspects of profound knowledge (Deming, 1993) - the system and processes in the school, the variation in outcomes, knowledge and beliefs of staff, and their behaviour. Further, school teams acknowledged the benefits of the external facilitation of the collaboration and of the outside perspective on their work. It gave school teams, and especially principals, greater confidence in their next steps and in their ability to justify those steps to staff, created internal accountability for maintaining progress, highlighted the momentum in their improvement efforts, and provided them with critical friends who could respectfully challenge their thinking.

We used various ways to collect data. First, we interviewed the principals for an hour at the beginning (BOP), middle (MOP) and end of the project (EOP). We also interviewed five staff, including senior and middle leaders, and teachers, at each school at the beginning and end of the project for half an hour. Thus, we conducted a total of 30 staff interviews. We aimed to interview the same staff both times, however at two schools one of these staff members had left. While BOP interviews were aimed to identify areas for school improvement and leadership challenges, later interviews included a focus on the partnership with reflections on the collaborative work as well as feedback for improvement. We further collected notes from school meeting observations; workshop artefacts including self-evaluation rubrics measuring progress towards improvement goals, action plans; and audio-recorded workshop discussions. Especially, workshop data included reflection on the collaborative work on the partnership. Finally, we collected school achievement data for the two years the schools were in the project and the year prior to the project. Audio-recordings of interviews and workshop discussions were transcribed for analysis. All qualitative data was uploaded into NVIVO for coding purposes. In previous analyses of the data, we examined the ‘success’ of the project, i.e. whether schools improved over the course of the projects and identified potential enablers and barriers to improvement. The partnership was identified as an enabler for improvement by participants and the current analysis thus aimed to identify the characteristics of the research partnership deemed as important for its success, as well the challenges of the research-practice partnership. After previous case analysis by school, the two researchers coded the evidence for reflections on the collaborative work in the partnership using an inductive thematic approach (Braun & Clark, 2006, 2020). All coding was discussed in-depth by both researchers and accuracy of the initial themes was checked by the researchers with leaders from the three schools. Key themes that emerged were the importance of involving different layers of the system in partnerships for improvement, bringing together schools with similar challenges, creating accountability through collaboration, and providing an external lens and support from researchers. Challenges included the building trust across different layers of the school system, maintaining focus alongside other initiatives and challenges.

While improvement science and the use of improvement cycles is increasingly lauded as a tool for educators, schools, districts, universities, and communities to work towards sustained and systematic change for improvement, such efforts often benefit or build on partnerships, networked communities, or collaborations with researchers or external facilitators to embed this work (Bryk et al., 2015; Baumfield, & Butterworth, 2007; Coburn, & Penuel, 2016; Crow et al., 2019, Penuel et al. 2015). Our research highlights important characteristics of partnerships for such improvement. Such partnerships become more and more important to break down the barriers between educational research and researchers and practitioners. Such partnerships can create new knowledge, but equally importantly distribute and apply knowledge to bring about improvement. We note that the contextualised nature of this work is critically important, but that we can learn from such work across boundaries. As highlighted in the conference call, learning across boundaries is important to create global solutions, however the immediate context of the work needs to be considered when implementing and adapting such solutions, here research-practice partnerships, we argue, have a great role to play.

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