There
is an increasing focus on research-practice partnerships that adopt research designs
aimed at improving educational
practice while advancing research knowledge. There is now a need for books that
provide a theoretical and practical account of successful research designs that
have been tested and replicated over time and contexts. This book addresses
this need by providing the
first comprehensive account of the Learning Schools Model (LSM), a design-based
research-practice partnership that has been tested over 15 years and across contexts and countries
(n=5). This model has successfully built teacher and school capacity and
improved valued student outcomes for primarily indigenous and ethnic minority students from lower
socio-economic communities.
The
quality of research into the model has been recognised locally and
internationally. The International Literacy Association reprinted a paper on
the original model in their volume “Theoretical models and processes of Reading
(6th Ed)”. The authors won the University of Auckland’s Research Excellence
Award (2015), awarded for research of demonstrable quality and impact,
for their research into the Model.
This book addresses
several gaps in the existing literature on research-practice partnerships. Firstly, understanding applications in
contexts beyond the USA where much of the seminal work is located adds to our
collective understanding of contexts in terms of constraints and enablers. Secondly, we provide a theoretical account
of partnership development and demonstrate how these are practically developed
in situ to address the known need for stronger theoretical understandings of partnership
development and better training in developing partnerships. Finally, our book
demonstrates how research can be both responsive to context and yet have robust
and replicable research designs that improve valued student outcomes over time
and contexts. This in turn provides an alternate research approach for
countries where randomised
control trials are often the “gold standard” for interventions.
