Abstract
A movement for research-practice partnerships (RPPs) in education has gained momentum, defined as long-term collaborations between researchers and practitioners involving mutually beneficial joint work. Given the history of transactional relationships, establishing a long-term collaboration poses challenges. While scholars have warned that many RPP efforts may not succeed, few studies have examined unsuccessful partnerships. Through analysis of interviews and meeting recordings, this paper traces interactions that enabled and hindered collaboration in an aspiring district-university RPP that fizzled out after one year. The study revealed three core struggles: (a) coherence struggles when working across a siloed district invited fragmented goals; (b) responsiveness struggles when reactive adaptations to emergent needs competed with a longer-term vision; and (c) mutuality struggles when funding arrangements positioned university partners as service providers rather than collaborative researchers. These struggles pulled the partnership into transactional interactions and contributed to the partnership’s dissolution, posing implications about collaborative partnership development.
Keywords
Amid critiques of educational research as traditionally one-sided and short-term, a movement for research-practice partnerships (RPPs) in education has gained momentum. Scholars define RPPs as a long-term collaboration between researchers and practitioners who pursue mutually beneficial joint work to bring about improvement through research (Coburn et al., 2013; Farrell et al., 2021). Because relationships between researchers and practitioners have tended toward the extractive and transactional (Gomez et al., 2023; Tseng, 2024), establishing a collaborative relationship focused on district improvement can pose challenges, especially in the early stages (Coburn & Penuel, 2016; Farrell et al., 2019b).
While the field has offered insights about how researchers and practitioners might embark upon such collaborative work (Nelson et al., 2015; NNERPP, 2023; Russell et al., 2017), a limitation of existing RPP literature is a tendency to rely upon sustained and successful partnerships. While scholars have cautioned that many RPP efforts may not succeed (Booker et al., 2019; Coburn & Penuel, 2016), few empirical studies have focused on challenges in partnerships aspiring to become RPPs that do not sustain.
Responding to Coburn and Penuel’s (2016) call for more studies of “failed” partnerships, this paper arises out of our efforts to establish an RPP between a diverse urban school district and a public research university in New England. At the outset, we believed conditions were conducive for an RPP, but our partnership ultimately fizzled out after one year. We believe that systematic analysis of our efforts contributes to an emerging research base about RPP dynamics and may help others organize more successful endeavors. Through interviews of RPP participants and transcripts of RPP meetings, this paper asks: In a university-district partnership in its first year and aspiring to become an RPP, what kinds of interactions enabled and hindered collaborative partnering?
Relevant Literature
Over many years, funders and scholars have increasingly turned to the potential of mutually beneficial educational partnerships for bridging the research-practice gap (Barnett et al., 2010; National Research Council, 2003; Sirotnik & Goodlad, 1988). Many educational partnerships offer mutual benefit through an exchange relationship—for example, universities providing districts professional development in return for districts providing universities with access to research sites for their research (Gomez & Biag, 2023; Walsh & Backe, 2013). Even when striving for collaboration, many partnerships aiming to provide mutual benefit have found it hard to overcome a tendency toward university-dominated relationships (Causton-Theoharis et al., 2011; Sirotnik & Goodlad, 1988; Wesson et al., 1994) in which university members’ needs and expertise tend to be given higher priority (Burton & Greher, 2007; Snow-Gerono, 2009).
For this reason, some scholars have critiqued some partnerships’ tendencies to be rooted in a transactional relationship (Barnett et al., 2010; Burton & Greher, 2007; Gomez & Biag, 2023; Whipple et al., 2010). In transactional relationships, partners align their work to accomplish their respective, often short-term, goals (Barnett et al., 2010). Such relationships fit a “vendor model,” whereby one organization serves as a “client” receiving services, and the other provides services in exchange for remuneration (Barnett et al., 2010, p. 24).
While transactional relationships can be useful to serve partners’ immediate needs, a focus on short-term exchange usually does not bring research close enough to practice to address pressing educational challenges. To move past these limitations, scholars and funders have increasingly called for research-practice partnerships (RPPs) organized around a more explicit long-term collaborative relationship (Gomez & Biag, 2023; Penuel & Gallagher, 2017; Penuel et al., 2020; Tseng et al., 2017). A fully developed collaborative relationship pursues mutually conceived and interdependent goals that cohere around a longer-term vision involving joint work and open-ended commitments beyond one project (Barnett et al., 2010; Little, 1990; Penuel et al., 2015).
Criteria for Effective RPPs
Coburn et al. (2013) first posed the term “RPP” to distinguish this form of organizing between researchers and practitioners from other forms of partnering. The successful efforts of early pioneers—including the UChicago Consortium and the Strategic Education Research Partnership—revealed potential for researchers and educators to engage in long-term collaborations that could result in high quality research and improvement in educational quality (Bryk et al., 2023; Coburn et al., 2013; Donovan et al., 2013).
As the number of partnerships labeling themselves as RPPs has rapidly expanded (Farrell et al., 2021), scholars have proposed criteria for RPP effectiveness intended to guide partnership development around specific domains important for the success of collaborative long-term relationships (Henrick et al., 2017, 2023; Penuel et al., 2020; Tseng et al., 2017). Below, we outline a few key criteria which might be used to examine an early RPP effort.
Establishing Mutuality
Mutuality means that the partnership is bidirectional, meeting the needs of both research and practice (Farrell et al., 2021; Penuel & Gallagher, 2017; Tseng et al., 2017). In transactional partnerships, mutuality involves exchange to meet partners’ independent goals—as when university partners provide services in exchange for access to conduct their research. A collaborative RPP integrates the needs of both partners, supporting the practice organization to progress on their goals through research that also contributes to “the cutting-edge knowledge base on educational change” (Henrick et al., 2023, p. 13). Hence, to be successful, an RPP aims for mutuality that extends beyond an exchange and involves mutual learning through joint work: the pursuit of jointly negotiated goals in which improvement and engagement with research are interconnected (Farrell et al., 2021; Penuel & Gallagher, 2017; Penuel et al., 2015).
Forging Trust
As in literature about trust in educational organizations (Hoy & Tschannen-Moran, 1999), trust in RPPs has been defined as interactions in which partners demonstrate reliability and competence, show benevolence as they invest in each other’s welfare, and foster honesty and openness to raise concerns (Henrick et al., 2023; Tseng et al., 2017). Collaborative relationships tend to rest upon deeper and more lasting trust than transactional ones (Barnett et al., 2010), requiring not only follow-through on commitments but also the ability to navigate conflict productively, disrupt problematic power imbalances, and understand each other’s contexts and needs (Henrick et al., 2023).
Fostering Equity
Equity has been conceived in two dimensions: equity as a focus and equity of voice (Arce-Trigatti et al., 2024; Oyewole et al., 2022; Penuel & Gallagher, 2017; Yamashiro et al., 2023). Equity as a focus describes the extent to which the RPP explicitly prioritizes educational justice (Ishimaru et al., 2022; Oyewole et al., 2022; Tseng, 2024; Villavicencio et al., 2023). Equity of voice describes the extent to which participants from lower status or marginalized groups contribute to defining the partnership’s work (Henrick et al., 2023; Oyewole et al., 2022; Penuel et al., 2020). Moving beyond transaction requires elevating practitioners’ voices to ensure that research becomes inclusive (Henrick et al., 2023) and to overcome status differences between researchers and practitioners (Oyewole et al., 2022; Penuel et al., 2020; Tseng, 2024).
Building Organizational Capacity
While transactional partnerships seek an external organization’s expertise and time to provide services that a client organization is unable to provide themselves, successful RPPs often require both organizations to develop new capabilities. Successful RPPs require an infrastructure of aligned resources, norms, and routines to support long-term collaboration. Building such an infrastructure may require partnering organizations to undertake changes to provide the incentives and resources to support collaboration (Henrick et al., 2023). RPPs, then, must enable members to assume new kinds of roles and identities and contribute to “change in the organization’s norms, culture, and routines around the use of research and other evidence” (Henrick et al., 2017, p. 18).
Dynamics of District-University RPPs in Education
Criteria for effective RPPs offer a useful horizon for partnership development, but they tend to be static and decontextualized. An emerging body of research about RPP dynamics has started to shed light on how such criteria are not stable factors but contingent capabilities that arise through partners’ ongoing interactions as they navigate dynamic tensions within particular contexts (Coburn et al., 2008; Farrell et al., 2019b; Klar et al., 2018; Penuel et al., 2015; Weddle et al., 2021). Some scholars have explored how researchers and practitioners strive—and can struggle—to communicate across boundaries of research and practice to negotiate roles and joint work (Denner et al., 2019; Farrell et al., 2022; Hadar et al., 2024; Nelson et al., 2015; Penuel et al., 2013a).
However, while acknowledging potential for struggles, most existing literature focuses on partnerships that succeeded long-term (Denner et al., 2019; Farrell et al., 2022; Hadar et al., 2024; Ishimaru et al., 2022; López Turley & Stevens, 2015; Penuel et al., 2015). Dynamics in partnerships that do not sustain are less clear. Because of this, existing research risks obscuring the nature and range of challenges that may inhibit successful and sustained collaborations.
A few exceptions in existing research identify possibilities for how partnerships may fizzle out or fail. One possibility is that the extent to which partnerships become successful and collaborative—or fall apart—may depend upon the extent to which partnering organizations’ have sufficient conditions and capacities to support long-term collaboration (Farrell et al., 2019a, 2022). For example, Cunningham et al. (2023) found that multiple and evolving goals, logistical challenges, and leadership transitions in the district organization contributed to the end of their RPP after four years. Likewise, in their study of two networked improvement communities (NICs), Karnopp and Lochmiller (2023) found that the NICs dissolved within the first two years when top-level administrators struggled to navigate competing priorities and crises and redirected resources away from the NICs.
Literature about RPP dynamics suggests that transactional and collaborative interactions may productively coexist in partnerships. For example, analyzing initial years of a long-term partnership, Nelson et al. (2015) found that fostering trust required the research team to first conduct small favors requested by their practice partners—such as short-term data analysis—to demonstrate commitment to partners’ needs. In an ethnographic study of a multi-year RPP, Farrell et al. (2019b) found that, even though research partners sought to act as collaborative problem solvers, they initially acted as PD providers to build good will. However, these studies examined cases of partnerships that ultimately sustained and succeeded. Considering the norm of transactional interactions in educational partnerships, we posit an additional possibility: During vulnerable early stages of a new partnership, transactional interactions—in emphasizing short-term exchanges around service delivery—might contribute to dissolution if they interfere with trust, joint work, equity, and capacity building needed for long-term collaboration.
District Organizational Challenges for RPP Dynamics
As noted above, the extent to which aspiring RPPs are sustained long-term and become collaborative appears partially contingent on how partnerships navigate the norms and structures of partnering organizations. Existing research has pointed to the potential for prevailing characteristics of district organizations to pose challenges for long-term collaborations with external partners (Coburn et al., 2008; Klein, 2023; López Turley & Stevens, 2015; Roderick et al., 2009; Weddle et al., 2021). District organizational conditions may be especially influential for district-focused RPPs, compared to other RPPs like NICs that may be situated in a third space, such as a hub (Russell et al., 2017).
First, becoming a long-term RPP imagines that districts establish coherent shared goals for joint work. Yet, districts tend to be open systems operating in a turbulent environment, beholden to conflicting and shifting demands of multiple stakeholders amid an incoherent governance system (Cohen, 1995; Daly & Finnigan, 2016; Rowan, 2006). In this environment, establishing longer-term shared goals with partners depends upon leaders who can “craft coherence” within the organization (Honig & Hatch, 2004). Yet, in most districts, coherence remains an aspiration (Cobb et al., 2018; Spillane et al., 2022), particularly during the current era of increasing turbulence (Acton, 2025). Thus, many district partnerships may begin in a context of unclear, contested, or shifting goals and bureaucratic siloing (Coburn & Penuel, 2016; Farrell, 2015; Hatch, 2001).
Second, while RPP literature emphasizes equitably co-constructing a research agenda with multiple stakeholders, districts traditionally have been organized around at least a partial hierarchical authority structure (Boyd & Crowson, 2002; Coburn et al., 2008; Farrell, 2015; Hannaway, 1993). Hierarchical authority structures may introduce status and power dynamics not only between researchers and practitioners, but also between actors situated in different positions in the district organization. In their longitudinal case study of a design-based RPP between a research center and district, for example, Coburn et al. (2008) found that the partnership’s work was heavily defined by executive district leaders who had both status and authority, even though they were not the people most closely involved in the partnership work.
Third, many district and school leaders face role overload, and their most limited resource is time (DeMatthews et al., 2021; Mahfouz, 2020). While “successful partnerships foster vibrant back-and-forth engagement” (Tseng et al., 2017, p. 5), it is not clear how, when considering that leaders facing multiple demands with little time tend to be accustomed toward rapid-fire and reactive decision-making (Honig, 2012; Lunenburg, 2010).
University Organizational Challenges for RPP Dynamics
Prevailing characteristics of university organizations also pose challenges for developing long-term and collaborative relationships with districts. A collaborative RPP assumes engaged forms of scholarship that require heavy investment in building trusting relationships (Coburn et al., 2008; Farrell et al., 2019b; Nelson et al., 2015). Given the history of extractive relationships, developing trust often requires university-based researchers to intentionally prioritize practitioners’ needs and respond to their voices (Arce-Trigatti et al., 2023; Denner et al., 2019; Penuel et al., 2020).
However, university reward structures tend to be misaligned with engaged scholarship (Cunningham et al., 2023; Gamoran, 2023; Ozer et al., 2021). Universities often favor scholars whose research agenda yields breakthroughs and publications in prestigious venues. Relationship-building and practitioner-relevant artifacts may not “count” for much in faculty evaluations (Gamoran, 2023; Ozer et al., 2021; Yamashiro et al., 2023). This context may invite a transactional orientation, encouraging researchers to treat partnerships as a means to an end. Even when researchers embark upon a collaborative partnership, misalignment of institutional norms and incentives may lead researchers to prioritize their research agendas over partners’ needs. For example, Denner et al. (2019) described how research partners initially undermined trust when they inadvertently imposed their agenda onto partners. In this case, the research team managed to restore trust by listening to partners’ goals and revising research plans accordingly.
District organizational conditions described above—incoherence, hierarchy, and overload—may also have implications for how university partners respond to partners’ needs. Arce-Trigatti et al. (2023) define RPP “responsivity” as “the partnership’s ability to align research priorities with practice-side partner’ needs” (p. 173). Unlike general responsiveness, responsivity “implies a systematic and concerted effort to be responsive rather than a way to characterize discrete or one-off encounters, interactions, and/or projects” (Arce-Trigatti et al., 2023, pp. 173–174). Yet, it is not clear how to be responsive in a “systematic and concerted” way if working with districts tending toward fragmented goals, hierarchical relationships, and reactive decision-making in the face of overloading demands. Arce-Trigatti et al. (2023) also warn that “exercising responsivity is a political process” (p. 174). Vakil et al. (2016) caution that university partners’ efforts to be responsive to a practice organization’s needs may inadvertently undermine trust if those efforts initially center around the needs of people at higher rungs of the hierarchy.
RPP dynamics may also be shaped by universities’ increasing reliance on extramural funding (Gamoran, 2023). External funding may align with and support a partnership’s collaborative aims—or introduce competing priorities that displace partners’ needs (Gamoran, 2023). This may pull a partnership into transaction if the work shifts to completing tasks for a funder (Klein, 2023). Existing literature about RPPs has not been clear about how to handle funding for partnership launch. For example, according to a practice guide of first year milestones created by the National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships (NNERPP, 2023), the first year is a good time to start having funding discussions—implying that an initial phase may be unfunded. Yet, the guide also warns of a potential existential threat if the partnership starts with insufficient money and time to support and motivate partnering.
Conceptual Framework
This study seeks to understand situated group dynamics that enabled and hindered collaboration in an aspiring RPP that ultimately did not sustain. To guide our analysis, we integrate the literatures above with a group development perspective, assuming that groups “learn” how to self-organize through a non-linear process as they navigate developmental challenges within a particular context (Arrow et al., 2000; Gersick, 1988; Grossman et al., 2001; Wheelan, 2005). From the literature reviewed above, we assume that groups in RPPs strive to develop capabilities in at least four domains of RPP effectiveness: establishing mutuality, forging trust, fostering equity, and building organizational capacity (Henrick et al., 2023; Oyewole et al., 2022; Penuel & Gallagher, 2017; Penuel et al., 2013b).
We further assume that self-organizing into a collaborative partnership is a highly contingent process (Gersick, 1988; Hadar et al., 2024; Yamashiro et al., 2023). Following Barnett et al.’s (2010) typology, groups in educational partnerships may self-organize for two types of interactions along a continuum. On one end of the continuum, transactional interactions are evident when partnership groups strive for mutuality through an exchange of benefits centered around accomplishing each partner’s independent, short-term, and closed-ended goals (Barnett et al., 2010; Burton & Greher, 2007; Gomez & Biag, 2023; Whipple et al., 2010). On the other end of the continuum, collaborative interactions are evident when groups strive to co-construct and pursue joint work around interdependent goals tied to an open-ended and longer-term vision (Barnett et al., 2010; Gomez & Biag, 2023; Penuel & Gallagher, 2017). We assume that transactional and collaborative interactions are not fixed partnership types but dynamic modes of interaction that can co-occur or shift over time as partnerships respond to emerging situations.
RPP group dynamics—and the extent to which members engage in transactional or collaborative interactions—are situated within, and shaped by, the organizational conditions and capacities of each partnering organization. Collaborative interactions tend to pose “much more complex” demands on organizations than transactional ones, requiring “a greater commitment of human and financial resources” as well as time (Barnett et al., 2010, p. 21). District organizational conditions that may shape RPP dynamics include (a) leaders’ ability to craft coherence (Honig & Hatch, 2004; Spillane et al., 2022); (b) the salience of hierarchical decision-making (Boyd & Crowson, 2002; Coburn et al., 2008); and (c) potential for turbulence and overload (Coburn & Penuel, 2016; Lunenburg, 2010; Mahfouz, 2020). University organizational conditions that can shape RPP dynamics include (a) availability of incentives for engaged scholarship; (b) university partners’ ability to be responsive to practitioners; and (c) reliance on external funding (Arce-Trigatti et al., 2023; Gamoran, 2023; Ozer et al., 2021).
We view the transactional-collaborative continuum of interactions and interorganizational conditions as intersecting lenses for understanding how partnership dynamics shape partnership success and sustainability. We infer at least two possibilities from prior literature. Transactional interactions may enable partnership success and sustainability if effective transactions allow partnerships to navigate interorganizational conditions in ways that establish deeper trust and move toward joint work (Barnett et al., 2010; Farrell et al., 2019b; Nelson et al., 2015). Alternatively, transactional interactions may undermine partnership success and sustainability if a focus on short-term exchanges around independent goals limits trust or displaces joint work.
Through this framework, we examine dynamics in our fizzled-out partnership that showed promise but ran into tensions between partners’ collaborative intentions and interorganizational conditions that pulled us into transactional interactions.
Research Methods and Data
Research Context
This paper focuses on an aspiring design-based RPP between faculty at a public research university and leaders at a diverse urban New England school district. The district has about 30 schools and serves around 15,000 students, about 80% of whom are classified as high need and collectively speak over 70 languages (NCES, 2024). The university is classified as an R2. University administrators had long aspired to establish a sustained partnership with the local school district. Prior to the RPP, district leaders, school leaders, and university faculty had developed trusting relationships through informal collaborations.
Plans for an RPP began when an assistant superintendent reached out to a faculty member who had developed a school quality data dashboard about the possibility of customizing that dashboard for their district. Two faculty soon recognized an alignment between their research agendas and the district’s strategic plan: establishing a district-wide culture of data-informed continuous improvement. Believing this to be fertile ground for a partnership, the two faculty members and the assistant superintendent worked with university administrators and the superintendent to gain formal approval for a multi-year partnership agreement. They also gained approval for a budget to fund the first year, with most of the funding provided by the district and some cost-sharing from the university. The university celebrated the partnership launch with media coverage, and partnering faculty planned to seek external funding to support subsequent years.
The first year would focus on co-designing a data dashboard and professional learning series for school leaders—in a monthly structure called “leadership academy”—to use data with methods of data-informed continuous quality improvement. To enable co-design, the partnership was organized around cross-functional teams of university partners, district-level leaders, and school-level leaders. This included a steering committee that met monthly and a leadership learning co-design team that met bimonthly to iteratively develop and implement the yearlong leadership academy series. Before knowing that the RPP would fizzle out, partners agreed to study our internal dynamics, to improve our work together and contribute to the field.
Positionality
Guided by traditions of participant observation (Schensul & LeCompte, 2013; Spradley, 1980) and action research (Coghlan & Brannick, 2007), this research combined “insider” experiential knowledge gained through the authors’ participation in the RPP with dispassionate analysis “from a distance.” The author team includes two RPP insiders and one outsider. The paper’s lead author is a white woman who was a visiting professor in the university’s Ed.D. program, where she taught courses about data-informed continuous improvement. Previously, she taught in urban districts and led research in a university-district RPP in another state. In the New England RPP in this paper, she served as co-PI and led the design and implementation of the leadership academy series. The second author is a white man who was an adjunct professor at the university and worked for the organization that designed the data dashboard. His role in the RPP focused on refining the dashboard based upon practitioner input and coaching school leaders to use dashboard data. The paper’s third author is a PhD student at another university in another state, who was not involved in the RPP.
Data and Participants
Our portfolio of data includes interviews with RPP participants, video recordings of RPP meetings, and partnership artifacts. Primary data derive from 60–90-minute semi-structured interviews conducted by the two lead authors between April and May 2023 with 12 RPP participants, including four university partners, three district leaders, three school principals, one assistant principal, and one teacher leader. As shown in Appendix A, interviews inquired into participants’ views of the strengths and challenges in how we organized ourselves for collaboration, changes over time, and RPP dynamics identified in our conceptual framework (e.g., trust, mutuality, equity). The lead authors first interviewed each other to understand our experiences as participants in the RPP and to refine the interview protocol. We then each conducted half of the remaining interviews.
To triangulate interview data with observed dynamics, we also collected video recordings and transcripts of 18 co-design meetings that occurred between June 2022 and May 2023. This includes one full-day kick-off meeting of the RPP and regular meetings of the leadership learning co-design team, which met approximately twice monthly for 60-90 minutes on Zoom to plan and reflect on a monthly professional development series for school leaders.
Finally, we collected relevant artifacts including the partnership agreement, agendas from meetings, and feedback forms completed by approximately 70–90 principals and assistant principals after each professional development event. Feedback forms asked school leaders to rate the usefulness of the session on a scale of one to four, with four being highest, and to write comments to explain their ratings and make suggestions for improvement.
To protect confidentiality, we do not identify individual participants’ organizational roles, race, or gender. We refer to University Partners #1–5 for faculty (#1–2 are the lead authors here) and research assistants on the university team, District Partners #1–3 for district central office leaders, and School Partners #1–6 for principals, assistant principals, and teacher leaders. In total, eight of the 12 interview participants identified as female, four as male, and nine as white, and four as immigrants. The leadership academy co-design team consisted of four university partners, three district leaders, and up to seven school leaders. All but one university partner and two school leaders on the co-design team also participated in the interviews.
Data Analysis
Data analysis began with thematic analysis of the interviews. Using NVivo 14 (Lumivero, 2023), we used a hybrid coding approach (Miles et al., 2014; Saldaña, 2021) to apply deductive codes based upon domains of RPP effectiveness identified in the conceptual framework and adding inductive codes about participants’ perceptions of RPP strengths, challenges, changes over time, and future recommendations. We developed a codebook and collaboratively coded three interviews across RPP roles (one university member, one district leader, and one school leader), resolving discrepancies and revising the codebook. After establishing intersubjective understanding, we divided up remaining interviews to code separately.
We also took steps to strengthen trustworthiness and reduce bias, consistent with quality criteria for qualitative research (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Maxwell, 2013) and action research (Coghlan & Brannick, 2007; Herr & Anderson, 2014). We developed intersubjective understanding of our codes and emergent themes through regular biweekly team meetings. As an RPP outsider, the paper’s third author served as a critical friend, offering alternative interpretations. We also conducted member-checking with RPP partners. After each interview, we provided participants with their transcript, accepting suggested edits or omissions requested. During analysis, we also shared preliminary findings with RPP participants for feedback.
Throughout coding, we constructed matrices and analytic memos (Miles et al., 2014) to identify and compare patterns in RPP dynamics by participant role (e.g., university, district, or school partner) and cross-coded patterns. During team discussions, we began to recognize how key domains of RPP effectiveness (e.g., trust) seemed to involve both strengths and challenges in tension. Recognizing these as struggles, we drafted and refined memos to identify core struggles around which enabling and hindering interactions appeared to most strongly converge in the striving to become a collaborative RPP. Drawing on our conceptual framework, we theorized how these struggles might relate to district and university organizational conditions and transactional and collaborative modes of interaction.
To analyze the observational data, we first reviewed each transcript for accuracy and created a narrative summary of key events. We then triangulated emergent themes from the interview data with the observational and artifact data and identified critical incidents in each meeting that illustrated or challenged those themes. For example, as discussed below, the leadership academy co-design team decided on a major shift in focus halfway through the school year. When interview data revealed this shift to be an important event contributing to both strengths and challenges in the partnership, we indexed and closely examined meeting episodes where this shift had been initially proposed, agreed upon, and carried out, seeking confirming and disconfirming evidence. We refined our themes accordingly and constructed analytic memos to link the interview data with relevant observational and artifact data. Analysis continued until reaching sufficient saturation of our themes with our data (Fusch & Ness, 2015).
In final stages, we shared a complete manuscript with district and school partners with requests for feedback about how university partners may have contributed to our struggles that we may have overlooked due to our assumptions or biases. While participants largely agreed with our analysis, their feedback helped us to refine the themes and explanations of patterns.
Findings
Analysis of our aspiring RPP revealed ongoing tensions between a striving to become collaborative and a countervailing pull of transactional interactions. Three core struggles appeared particularly consequential for our early-stage partnership: (a) coherence; (b) responsiveness; and (c) mutuality. We describe them as “struggles” to capture a dynamic push and pull between positive striving and hindering forces in key domains of RPP effectiveness that seem pivotal for developing collaborative capacity between researchers and practitioners. As illustrated in the overlapping lines in Figure 1 and explained in the findings below, the struggles connected to each other.
Core Struggles: Striving to Become Collaborative, Pulled into Transaction.
We present the findings for each struggle in a narrative flow to demonstrate how initial partnership strategies showed promise, challenges emerged, and responses to those challenges revealed a persistent struggle to become collaborative and pulled the partnership in a more transactional mode of interaction.
Struggle #1: Coherence
Researchers and practitioners in this partnership began with a shared focus around what the district perceived to be a core problem of practice: fostering effective data-informed decision-making for school improvement. However, as the year unfolded, this goal, and how it was initially conceived, brought the partnership into an unforeseen struggle for coherence.
Initial Promise: Shared and Relevant Focus
Data-informed decision-making seemed a promising focus for collaboration, identified as a key strategy in the district’s strategic plan. Yet, the district’s theory of action also favored school autonomy. Because of this, the partnership did not begin with a needs assessment to formulate a district-wide improvement goal. Rather, it was decided that the partnership would support school leaders to use newly introduced data dashboards to practice school-based continuous improvement. School leaders would identify site-specific problems of practice and organize six-to-eight-week cycles of inquiry at their school. During initial co-design meetings, a year-long plan was drafted to guide leaders through each phase of the inquiry process—to identify school priorities, diagnose a problem of practice, set short-term goals, create an intervention plan, and test their plan through cycles of inquiry. Professional learning sessions focused on introducing the theory behind this practice, time for initial application of tools and protocols, and time for leaders working on similar problems of practice to meet.
Interview data suggested that school and district partners generally saw data-informed inquiry cycles as an important focus: We were working on having people using their data in a more systematic way . . . That was really important because we just always kept coming back to the solution-itis thing. That’s all we’re doing all day long, putting out fires. (School Partner #2) That became the problem of practice. . . Considering a root cause . . . short term goals . . . and cycles of inquiry—that’s been really, really very positive in some places. (District Partner #1)
Emergent Challenges: Confronting Fragmentation and Siloing
As school leaders identified site-specific problems of practice, however, the co-design team soon became confronted by an array of disparate needs and improvement foci across 30 schools. The co-design team wrestled with how to support so many needs through one district-wide professional learning series. School leaders on the co-design team believed that the district’s emphasis on school autonomy and the absence of a needs assessment left the partnership without a clear enough focus to anchor our collaboration: It was so open that we focused on the process. But too much variability . . . over so many different schools . . . If the district doesn’t come to the partnership with a particular area of focus, the first thing [a partnership should do] is the needs assessment conducted at the district level . . . That then defines that common goal . . . When you go too far in the direction of autonomous schools, then you don’t even have a district focus. (School Partner #1)
Reflecting on lackluster feedback ratings from school leaders across the district, school leaders on the co-design-team pushed for a shift toward a district-wide improvement focus. District leaders and university partners saw promise in such a shift, but it posed another challenge: what district and school leaders described as “siloed” decision-making in the central office. The partnership had been launched by one assistant superintendent tasked by the superintendent to advance an initiative around data-informed decision-making. However, the district central office had also launched several other initiatives, overseen by different departments that did not ordinarily collaborate. A separate district office focused on advancing culturally and linguistically sustaining practices (CLSP) had been allocated half of each leadership academy day. Because departments were accustomed to operating independently, the co-design team and CLSP director planned their respective halves separately, creating a disconnect that many leaders found frustrating. As one district leader explained, “It seems like all of that could have been woven together instead of piecemealed throughout the day . . . That’s how our district works. Currently, we are still kind of siloed” (District Partner #3).
Response to Challenges: Striving Toward Coherence
To shift toward a district-wide improvement focus, the co-design team first sought to integrate data-informed decision-making with the CLSP initiative. The CLSP director attended one co-design meeting. Although agreeing it was important to be there, the director was not able to join again, and planning of the leadership academy remained separate.
The co-design team next converged around another possibility for a district-wide focus—student engagement. Student engagement was the focus of another district initiative being led by the district’s curriculum department, involving instructional rounds in all schools. The co-design team perceived this focus as broad enough to align with the needs of many schools while providing a vehicle for district coherence, as illustrated in the meeting excerpt below: School Partner #1: We need to build something more cohesive . . . We’ve got no central focusing theme for all our schools to be moving our district forward . . . District Partner #1: We do . . . and it’s around student engagement . . . School Partner #2: I think that’s the piece we’re missing . . . School Partner #6: I know we’re an autonomous district, but we’re so autonomous that we never have anything that’s really centralized, and if we have a central theme . . . we’re really going to balance that autonomy with the district directive . . . Student engagement covers everything . . . It’s so broad in a good way . . . (December 8 Meeting Transcript)
After this meeting, university and practice partners shelved the original year-long plan and created a new plan to introduce a new focus on student engagement at the upcoming academy.
Re-emerging Challenges: Fragmenting Goals
The shift toward student engagement initially seemed promising. The curriculum department began to regularly join co-design meetings and facilitate portions of the leadership academy. Now there was a unifying focus across schools that involved another central office department. Feedback from the next academy suggested strong support from school leaders across the district for the new district-wide focus.
However, the shift also raised dilemmas about how to best utilize academy learning time. Two goals seemed equally important: to continue building leaders’ capacity for data-informed improvement and to foster improvement around student engagement district-wide. While the co-design team imagined a “through line,” in the middle of the school year, time was too short to reimagine how these goals connected to a longer-term collaborative vision. Having shelved the original plan, the co-design team’s interactions became focused on planning academy agendas to allocate time each to goal each month, as illustrated below: School Partner #1: Would it be reasonable to say that the [curriculum office] has . . . four 90-minute sessions? . . . University Partner #1: Do we still like this idea of introducing data to be collected [about student engagement]? . . . District Partner #1: Yes . . . We should think about developing that [data] section in roughly 40 minutes . . . (February 7 Meeting Transcript)
Over the coming months, feedback ratings from the academies declined. School leaders appreciated the curriculum workshops, but the combination of activities felt disjointed. By the year’s end, district leaders and university partners came to see the shift in focus as having ultimately muddied the collaborative aims of the partnership. As one district leader explained, “The focus of what I think was supposed to be [the leadership academy] sort of evolved over time . . . It seemed like it never got back to the original intent” (District Partner #3).
Summary
The partnership began with what seemed a compelling shared focus for collaboration. However, in a large district that valued school autonomy and tended toward a siloed central office, co-designing a district-wide professional learning series brought the work into a struggle for coherence. When the co-design team tried a mid-year shift toward a district-wide focus that brought in another district department, this initially promising stretch toward coherence had the effect of fragmenting the partnership’s work into multiple discrete goals that became disconnected from a longer-term vision. This struggle shows how organizational conditions—of district incoherence and siloing as well as limited time—created a difficult context in which to develop a coherent plan for joint work and led to fragmentating goals that strained the partnership.
The findings also show how, when collaborative joint work required more coherence and time than were possible, we navigated these organizational conditions by switching into a transactional mode. Facing limited time and readiness of district leaders to collaborate across departments, rather than seek to integrate data-informed cycles of inquiry with a focus on student engagement into a new vision for joint work, we shifted into a mode of service delivery and exchange. Treating the new goals of curriculum workshops and student engagement as independent from the original goal, we focused on dividing up time slots to ensure that each partner’s goals got its share of time on the agendas. While intended to build the district’s capacity for coherence, this transactional mode of interacting had the effect of pushing a longer-term collaborative vision to the periphery and undermining the quality of the design, eroding the depth of trust and focus for joint work.
Struggle #2: Responsiveness
Adaptations made in the struggle for coherence connected to another struggle for responsiveness to the needs of practitioners. Our analysis suggests that the partnership successfully fostered equity of voice during co-design meetings. At the same time, the absence of school leaders’ perspectives during the initial design of the partnership, combined with the overloading demands facing them during the year, left the co-design work vulnerable to “reactive responsiveness,” as we struggled to anticipate and respond to principals’ urgencies.
Initial Promise: Fostering Equity of Voice
University partners leading the partnership were committed to user-focused design and expected the professional learning series to adapt in response to school leaders’ expressed needs over time. District leaders were also committed to empowering school leaders to strongly influence the work, as District Leader #1 explained: Rather than it being [my] agenda for Leadership Academy . . . or someone like [University Partner #1 or #2] . . . the idea . . . was that we would involve practitioners in the planning . . . in a more collaborative way. (District Partner #1)
For this purpose, a co-design team had been intentionally constructed of school leaders, district leaders, and university partners. District leaders tapped school leaders they thought would be interested. To enable inclusive decision-making during co-design meetings, those with the most status in the group—the assistant superintendent and the university faculty members—made a point to explicitly seek out school leaders’ voices. University partners brought draft plans for designs and adapted them frequently based upon school leaders’ ideas.
Interview data revealed that school leaders perceived a strong influence over the partnership work and felt safe to disagree with district leaders or university partners. That plans often changed in response to their ideas made them feel heard and that everyone’s expertise was valued, as school and district partners described: I felt like everyone has a pretty equal voice. I felt like everybody was really heard . . . Most of the time if we pushed back and said, “I don’t think that’s going to work,” [the university partners] are very receptive to hearing that. (School Partner #2) I very much felt that it was 50–50 in terms of the influence, I didn’t feel that one was stronger over another . . . Everybody brought something. (District Partner #2)
School partners also emphasized feeling safe to bring up negative information about their district in front of district leaders and “outsiders”: “Sometimes in those situations there’s an unwritten rule like, ‘Do not divulge things to outside partners’ . . . But I didn’t get that feeling” (School Partner #3). By routinely reflecting together on feedback forms from all school leaders after each academy, the co-design team also sought to be responsive school leaders district wide. School partners perceived to “the reverence that we gave to that feedback” (School Partner #1) to be vital for making necessary course corrections.
Emergent Challenges: Unforeseen Needs of School Leaders
As the year unfolded, it became clear that the way the partnership had been launched made this adaptive co-design approach vulnerable to reactive rather than proactive responsiveness. The partnership’s initial design had been devised mostly by one district leader and two university partners. The co-design team was constructed a few months later. As such, the initial design was informed primarily by the needs of the district leaders and the university partners’ ideas, evidenced in how it was introduced in the first co-design meeting: District Partner #1: So the district has been for the last number of years aiming to establish some data visualization products . . . We made contact with some folks at [the university] . . . [and] began discussions with [them] around some of our needs . . . what emerged was a partnership . . . and the first part of that partnership is taking a dashboard that already exists and customizing it to our needs . . . Beyond that . . . what kind of training will people need to actually really make good use of this dashboard . . . Through our discussions with [the university] this spring, there has been quite a bit of wrangling back and forth about what it might look like . . . (June 30 Meeting Transcript)
The launch of the co-design process also ran up against limited time, which constrained responsiveness to school leaders’ perspectives. While university partners requested a three-day kick-off, school and district partners were able to commit to only one day, followed by hour-long meetings every other week throughout the summer and school year. While this was a substantial commitment of time for busy school leaders, it was limited for collaborative planning. Hence, much of the early planning was carried out by university and district partners. In this way, the partnership did not start by seeking to understand the needs of school leaders to anticipate pressing needs of conflicting demands that tend to arise throughout the school year.
Response to Challenges: Addressing Competing Priorities
The co-design team’s vulnerability to reactive responsiveness became especially clear around the midway point of the year, when new urgency emerged: The season for formal school improvement planning had arrived. Every January through March, school leaders were required by the district to work with stakeholders to create an annual school improvement plan connected to the next year’s budget. Yet, because the initial partnership design had not prioritized principals’ perspectives and needs, the co-design team had not started out with an understanding or plan for how to integrate formal school improvement planning with data-informed inquiry cycles, despite strong potential for a connection. The intense demands that formal school improvement planning would pose on school leaders’ time had also not been anticipated.
School leaders on the co-design team first raised school improvement planning as an urgent need as the first deadlines in January approached. This was around the same time that the co-design team made the shift toward a focus on student engagement. Once again, the co-design team struggled to determine how to prioritize learning time at upcoming academies. The team had already committed to a series of curriculum workshops about student engagement. School leaders pressed the group to dedicate remaining leadership academy time toward the urgent task of school improvement planning, while district leaders were concerned about losing the initial school inquiry cycles, as illustrated below: School Partner #1: We’ve got to tie this back to what is timely for principals . . . We’re working through our [school improvement plans] . . . District Partner #1: All the more reason to hear principals’ voices . . . But I want to circle back to . . . the data work that we sort of committed to . . . What we’re doing next is . . . to help them organize a new [six-week inquiry] cycle . . . School Partner #1: I want to consider what is the bandwidth of leaders in schools . . . School Partner #5: We need to be able to . . . look at each other’s [school improvement plans], to help each other out . . . District Partner #1: I’m also thinking about how far we’ve come from the first days in August . . . (February 16 Meeting Transcript)
A similar pivot resulted when principals shared another urgent need to review school climate data for an upcoming budget deadline.
These pivots were intended to be responsive, but accumulating pivots created challenges for the partnership’s collaborative work. One challenge was that these pivots—reactively conceived, without clarity about how they fit into a longer-term plan—came to be seen as competing with, rather than complementary to, the original partnership aims: We had two different timelines, and one of those essentially usurped the other one . . . The [school improvement planning] took center stage and stole the show. Now it’s gone, and we lost the thread on what happened earlier. (University Partner #2)
When leaders’ urgencies were addressed by adding new activities onto academy agendas, feedback about the series declined further. For the February session, about half of school leaders rated the usefulness as three out of four; one-sixth rated it as two. School and district leaders said that this was the lowest rating of leadership academy that they could remember in recent years. Participants reported that the workshops were overloaded and involved too much “lecturing” with too little room for application, as one leader expressed: “Not enough time to work with the data and too much time listening to talking.”
The extent to which this reactive approach to responsiveness was tied to early partnership decisions—and proved consequential—became clear during member checking. In written feedback, one school leader pointed to how school leaders’ needs, especially amid increased demands in the post-Covid era, had not been well-integrated into the RPP at the outset: Part of the reason the RPP failed is that the competing interests for school leaders’ time, effort, and attention were not well-baked into the RPP. There could have been a more intentional connection between what was top of mind for school leaders . . . and the data cycles . . . But both the district and university partners lacked direct, firsthand perspective on these leadership challenges in schools. (School Partner #1)
Summary
The partnership might have aimed for a more strategic and proactive responsiveness—or “responsivity” (Arce-Trigatti et al., 2023)—by involving school leaders in the initial partnership design. Instead, amid hierarchical district norms and limited time, district leaders and university partners designed the original vision, intending to be responsive to school leaders’ needs through co-design meetings along the way. This approach fostered equity of voice that made school leaders feel influential and heard in a way that fit the organizational conditions and capacities. But our findings also show how this “reactive responsiveness” undermined the success and sustainability of the RPP when it pulled the partnership into a more transactional mode. When school leaders’ needs were seen as independent goals separate from, and competing with, the partnership’s original vision, their needs were transformed into on-demand service requests to be met through short-term transactional exchanges. While responsive to immediate needs, reactive pivots and short-term transactions did not do much to build collaborative capacity and undermined the joint work and depth of trust required for long-term sustainability. When school leaders’ knowledge was disconnected from the partnership’s original vision, transactional reactive pivots displaced that original vision and left nothing new in its place.
Struggle #3: Mutuality
Struggles for coherence and responsiveness intersected with a struggle for mutuality. In a transactional partnership, mutuality can be accomplished through exchange—each partner’s needs are met as one assists the other to meet their respective goals. In a collaborative partnership, mutuality extends beyond an exchange to involve joint work. While our partnership initially seemed well-positioned for joint work, over time, the partnership’s origins pointed us toward a more transactional mode of interaction.
Initial Promise: Prioritizing District Needs
At the outset, the district sought an external partner to co-design a school quality data dashboard and professional development series with and for their leaders. University partners sought to engage in collaborative research to understand how educational leaders use school quality data with continuous improvement methods. That set up seemed conducive for mutual learning and joint work.
A formal partnership agreement noted responsibilities for both organizations to contribute to co-design and to research. However, mindful of the history of university-dominated partnerships, the university partners decided that, in the first months, priority should be given to the district’s needs. Thus, the partnership’s work was initially dedicated to populating the dashboard with data, making dashboard customizations, designing and facilitating professional development, and meeting regularly with district and school leaders for input on all the above.
This approach seemed to enable trust when the university team was seen to be committed to supporting district partners’ needs. Across all roles, participants viewed the university partner’s leadership as a strength of the partnership: In a partnership like this, a big piece of trust is follow-through. And I think that has been outstanding. (School Partner #2) There was no time wasting . . . We could be open and honest with each other (District Partner #2)
Emergent Challenges: Emphasis on Deliverables
University partners assumed that the initial arrangement—in which they led the work focused on providing the district with services—was temporary. Partly because the district had provided the bulk of the initial funding for the partnership, however, some district partners understandably came to view university partners as hired providers. In particular, the superintendent—who had approved the partnership but was not involved in the co-design team—began issuing requests to the university partners for additional on-demand products and services.
Although the new requests were not well-aligned with the original partnership agreements, the university team agreed to accommodate them temporarily—again, hoping to build good will. Instead, over time, the emphasis on deliverables—and the university partners as hired providers—began to erode trust, as one university partner explained: I think the superintendent looks at the partnership less as a partnership, and more like, what are we getting out of it? . . . I don’t think he’s thinking, how can we work better with [the university]? I think he’s thinking, what is [the university] doing for me and or for the district? (University Partner #2)
As deadlines for deliverables loomed, little time was dedicated to research. When the university partners added research tasks to steering committee and co-design team agendas, these items were often bumped to address deliverables perceived as more urgent.
The lead university partner also recognized how their positionality—in a role at the university that did not include support or funding for research—and their eagerness to take advantage of a propitious moment, prompted them to secure whichever funding seemed most convenient, which also played a role in this set up: We could have said . . . we’ll go out and look for funders who would like to fund us to work together in this way . . . But that would have delayed a lot of things. And sometimes with this work, I think . . . you have to jump when the iron’s hot. So we said, okay, well, the district actually has funds, and they were interested in using funds to fund this partnership for the year. (University Partner #1)
Response to Challenges: Attempts to Strengthen Joint Work
Mid-year, the steering committee introduced new strategies intended to strengthen the partnership’s joint work. One strategy was to read literature about RPPs to reflect on how we had been organizing ourselves. This proved enlightening. District leaders realized that they had been thinking about the work more as if it was a contract and had not understood how partnerships could be more collaborative, as one district partner said: I was very naive to what a research practice partnership is . . . When [University Partner #1] introduced some literature I sort of went oh, that’s what it is, even though we’ve been into it for 6 months at that point . . . We have been trying to work on a contract with an outside provider, right? So the full extent to which there’s a difference in those partnerships, in a partnership versus a contract was, I think, hit me. (District Partner #1)
District partners began to sense that the superintendent’s emphasis on deliverables was interfering with the intentions to organize as an RPP, as two district partners explained, I think our RPP has not been so far a very pure one . . . because of that concept of the RPP being the means to a product or 2 or 3 or 4, right? . . . It was a transactional type of you know. We’re paying this amount of money to value, and it is in the products that we’re going to receive. (District Partner #1) I think he also wanted to kind of see like, we’re paying $250,000. What are we getting out of that? And I think it was a justification to the school committee to say, these are the deliverables that need to be met. (District Partner #3)
Building on this new understanding, the steering committee decided to launch a new research team to create protected time for research. When the research team began to meet, however, it soon became clear that only the university partners would be attending. University partners continued to add research plans to RPP meeting agendas. From the point of view of some district and school partners, this approach offered mutual benefit: The university partners were providing their knowledge and services to meet the district’s needs, and in exchange the district provided access to do their research. As one district partner explained, It seems to me that the district wants to use your knowledge and expertise to be trained or to learn more about data analysis processes . . . And you want to come into schools and identify or witness or analyze how it’s being applied. (District Partner #2)
For other partners, this arrangement undermined the collaborative intention as it signaled that district and university partners’ goals were not interconnected.
What [the district] is getting out of this are certain products. There’s a sense that well, so what the university is getting out of it is research that you guys want to do right. That, again, is not thinking sort of collaboratively . . . It’s not that we’re invested in it, right. (District Partner #1)
As the partnership became centered around products and the university partners as hired providers, research was seen as a separate activity offered as a favor “for” the university.
Summary
Initially, we thought our partnership well-positioned for mutuality involving joint work. However, the original set up and funding of the partnership created conflicting understandings about what kind of partnership we were building, positioning the university partners as contracted service providers rather than design-based research partners. Efforts to strengthen joint work faltered when the origins of the partnership pulled our interactions into a mode of transactional exchange.
Epilogue: The Fizzle
By the year’s end, as the funding concluded, the dashboard was in place, and the leadership academy series concluded. Our “contract’ had been fulfilled—but the future of the partnership had become uncertain. In the wake of several mid-year shifts, the original focus of the partnership had moved to the periphery, and a new vision was unclear. University partners were interested in continuing the partnership around a longer-term district priority. However, a district-wide focus for the coming year was uncertain, as was the district’s interest in collaborative research. The superintendent then made a unilateral decision to contract with another third-party organization to provide professional development to school leaders, unrelated to student engagement, CLSP, or data-informed decision-making. After this, the superintendent left the district. During the same period, the lead university partners changed institutions.
The conclusion of funding and leadership turnover in both organizations created tumult, but these could have been surmountable challenges. University partners were well-positioned to continue the work from their new institutions. The assistant superintendent that had initiated the partnership became the new superintendent. However, our unresolved struggles left the partnership in a tenuous state of waning momentum, and an emphasis on short-term deliverables had strained trust. Amid this tenuousness and uncertainty, prospects faded for a long-term RPP, and partners did not pursue new funding. The university partners continued to work with the district in the coming year in a narrower capacity that did not involve collaboration.
Discussion
Our findings reinforce claims in prior literature that RPP criteria like trust, mutuality, and equity are contingent capabilities. As in previous studies (Denner et al., 2019; Farrell et al., 2019b; Nelson et al., 2015), university partners fostered trust and mutuality by initially prioritizing district needs. Existing research also emphasizes that, given the tendency toward university-dominated partnerships, establishing trust and equity requires intentional efforts to be responsive to practitioners (Arce-Trigatti et al., 2023; Denner et al., 2019; Klar et al., 2018; Penuel et al., 2013b). Accordingly, when our partnership began with a shared focus perceived as relevant and adapted in response to emergent needs, school leaders felt heard and influential.
However, our findings also add important nuances that complicate principles like trust, mutuality, or equity for partnerships. As suggested by prior scholarship (Farrell et al., 2019a; Henrick et al., 2023), our partnership struggled with collaboration due to how the organizational conditions of each partner shaped the way we entered into and interacted in our partnership. Yet, most prior literature tends to focus on partnerships that were able to sustain and succeed in the long-term. By tracing situated dynamics in a partnership that did not sustain and adding the lens of transaction and collaboration, our findings reveal new insights about how and why interorganizational conditions may influence partnership success and sustainability: When interorganizational conditions pose barriers for collaboration, a partnership might shift into a transactional mode of interaction. While prior research based on successful partnerships suggests that initial transactional exchanges might build trust that furthers the partnership’s collaboration (Farrell et al., 2019b; Nelson et al., 2015), in our case, transactional modes of interaction—by inviting an emphasis on independent goals and short-term exchanges around service delivery—undermined the depth of trust and organizational capacity building required to enable joint work and sustain collaborative partnering. Applying a transactional-collaborative lens shows how constraints posed by organizational conditions can pull a partnership into a transactional, exchange-based relationship, even if partners proceed with collaborative intentions.
Our findings suggest that organizational conditions of district incoherence can interfere with long-term partnership success and sustainability. The partnering district in this case, like many districts, harbored several conditions that made coherence a struggle, including a tendency toward siloing in the central office and a preference for school autonomy (Hatch, 2001; Honig, 2009; Spillane et al., 2022). While prior scholarship has implied that district incoherence may pose challenges (Coburn & Penuel, 2016; Farrell et al., 2019a), our study demonstrates one possibility for how and why: Efforts that seem promising for a partnership’s collaboration to help a district stretch toward coherence—such as adopting a district-wide improvement focus that bridges initiatives between central office departments—can have the paradoxical effect of fragmenting the goals of the design work. When organizational conditions do not allow for sufficient time or trust to collaboratively determine how to integrate new foci into a vision for joint work, partners may revert into transaction—treating new foci as discrete goals to be accomplished through short-term exchanges.
Our findings also reinforce prior research about how dynamics of status and authority within districts can shape interactions in RPPs (Coburn et al., 2008). Our data did not suggest status dynamics between researchers and practitioners to be particularly important in our partnership, as emphasized in some prior research (Denner et al., 2019; Penuel et al., 2013b). Rather, more salient status dynamics were posed by the norms and structures of a hierarchical district organization (Boyd & Crowson, 2002; Hannaway, 1993). In particular, the outsized influence of the superintendent on the partnership proved pivotal. Even though he was not involved in the work of the co-design teams, as the executive leader at the top of the hierarchy, his status and authority—and tendency toward unilateral decision-making—strongly shaped how the partnership was defined and its demise. As RPP literature has noted, “control over resources provides a great deal of power in shaping an RPP’s work” (Yamashiro et al., 2023, p. 19). Our findings from studying dynamics in a fizzled out RPP show how these power and status dynamics can also become consequential for whether a partnership succeeds or sustains. In our case, the outsized influence of executive leaders promoted a transactional orientation that reinforced the view of our partnership as a service contract, undermining trust and joint work.
Our findings further show how working within the district hierarchy can shape university partners’ approach to responsiveness in ways that influence partnership success and sustainability. Prior work has reflected about the risks for responsiveness to be shaped by, and reinforce, hierarchical district norms—such as when university partners build trust by first working those in positions of power (Vakil et al., 2016). Our study adds empirical support to this caution. Our findings also extend prior literature conceptualizing responsiveness in RPPs. Complementing Arce-Trigatti et al.’s (2023) concept of RPP “responsivity” as “a systematic and concerted effort to be responsive,” our study suggests the potential for an alternate type of “reactive responsivity” that may arise when organizational conditions inhibit a more “systematic” or proactive approach. Our case shows how reactive responsivity can arise when university partners work with practice-side organizations abiding by hierarchical norms and facing multiple, competing demands with insufficient time and resources. In this context, a partnership’s initial purpose and vision may be crafted around the needs and voices of those with status and authority to get the partnership off the ground. Our case showed how adapting partnership plans in response to lower-status stakeholders’ needs and voices along the way may lead to “reactive responsiveness.” This reactive approach may invite a transactional mode of interaction that undermines trust and joint work if the needs of lower status partners are treated as discrete and short-term service goals that are disconnected from, or competing with, a longer-term partnership vision.
Finally, our study shows how early funding decisions may be consequential for partnership success and sustainability. In our case, partners’ decision to proceed with the most convenient source of funding—largely provided by the district—positioned the partnership as transactional at the outset. Despite university partners’ aspirations that this “should be” a collaborative RPP, the partners had, in effect, arranged a contract for services. On the one hand, such a contract could be seen as offering vital resources for launching an open-ended, long-term collaborative venture. On the other, this arrangement seemed quite similar to many other “partnerships” before—a contract for services—and most partners lacked a framework for understanding how a collaborative RPP might be different.
Struggles for coherence, responsiveness, and mutuality show how both organizations proceeded with assumptions that their existing conditions were sufficient for a collaborative partnership. As it turned out, existing conditions were sufficient to create an infrastructure for crossing boundaries—but it was forged around funding that emanated from a transactional core. This infrastructure opened doors to pursue joint work through co-design. But when co-design turned out to require more complex demands and resources than existing organizational conditions could support, we pivoted into a series of short-term transactions. Transactional interactions sustained the partnership long enough to complete our “deliverables” but also undermined both the trust and shared vision for joint work needed to sustain a longer-term collaborative partnership. While we do not assume our struggles are unique to “young” or “failed” partnerships, our relative immaturity as a partnership probably made our partnership more vulnerable to dissolution in the face of these struggles.
Implications
These findings suggest that developing RPPs may require more than partnership-focused interventions. Partnerships may be more likely to succeed and sustain to the extent that districts and universities are able to engage in systemic organizational change. This has important implications for how scholars, practitioners, and grant makers might support the development of sustained and successful RPPs.
One implication is that the source of initial funding of a partnership can be consequential. Even though our partnership agreement spelled out a multi-year co-design collaboration, when its first year was primarily funded by the district, strings were attached with expectations of deliverables that set us up for a transactional, closed-ended relationship. This seems a likely situation for any partnership whose initial funds are provided by a public service organization accountable to stakeholders for every dollar they spend. For a university-district partnership to sustain and become collaborative, our findings provide empirical warrant for advice offered by NNERPP: Initial funding might be better coming from a third-party sponsor with an open agenda that would support responsiveness to practitioners’ needs, such as local foundations (NNERPP, n.d.).
Second, developers of partnerships should carefully consider which kinds of initial goals make for a fruitful longer-term collaboration. It is possible that our partnership diverted into transactional interactions because the partnership’s initial goals were rather transactional: to design and deliver a professional development series and data dashboard. Perhaps our partnership would have been more likely to sustain if we had started with a goal that required interdependence and that inspired deep enough commitments to sustain through challenges. A more explicit focus on equity, such as an equity-focused district improvement goal, might have made for a more compelling focus for long-term collaboration, given that equity-focused goals tend to be complex aims that require combined efforts of diverse stakeholders and cannot be solved via short-term transactions. In this way, our findings lend weight to arguments in favor of centering equity in RPPs (Henrick et al., 2023; Ishimaru et al., 2022; Oyewole et al., 2022; Tseng, 2024; Villavicencio et al., 2023; Yamashiro et al., 2023).
A third implication is that setting up partnerships to last may call for an extended launch phase for joint visioning and planning. As suggested by existing literature, one reason our partnership may not have been able to sustain through our struggles is that we did not establish a sufficiently robust infrastructure (Farrell et al., 2019a; Penuel & Gallagher, 2017). Doing so would involve time and effort to first assess district needs and create new roles and structures for collaboration as needed (Farrell et al., 2022). An initial phase might involve, for example, efforts by district leaders to create more central office alignment and establish a district-wide improvement goal. This phase might also involve an opportunity for university partners and executive and middle-level district leaders to come together with other stakeholders, including front line professionals, to establish a shared vision for joint work (Arce-Trigatti et al., 2023; Coburn et al., 2008).
However, the above implications leave us with some dissatisfaction. All suggest that foundations for collaboration can, and must, be created upfront. To some extent, our findings indicate this. Yet, these implications also seem to preclude the possibility of collaboration in partnerships unless a seemingly unusual set of circumstances and abundance of resources manifests, including (a) university partners who can secure an aligned grant with few strings attached, or do initial work without funding; (b) university partners willing to spend substantial time building relationships with a district partner, with highly uncertain prospects for this resulting in publishable research; (c) university administrators who support, and perhaps even fund, faculty involvement in such work; (d) district partners who invite university partners to conduct needs assessments before tangible benefits or risks of a partnership may be known; and (e) district partners with political capital and skill to restructure central offices as needed to foster coherence and protect space for time-consuming collaboration. Are these simply the necessary preconditions to realize the promise of RPPs? Or are feasible alternatives possible, considering a current sociopolitical context of limited resources, a fraught political environment, and prevailing district structures of hierarchy and bureaucracy?
To consider this, we offer a final implication: Developers of partnerships should take serious heed of the risks of expecting too much too fast (NNERPP, 2023). Ultimately, it may be that our partnership could not overcome our struggles because we jumped in opportunistically. We assumed that group development could evolve into joint work involving collaborative research, regardless of the starting point. We expected to be productive and get results immediately within a few months. Might it have been wiser to instead focus more time on building relationships and infrastructure in early stages? Would district partners be interested in this? To what extent would such time and effort be responsive to educators’ needs, given the urgent challenges they face?
This implication means accepting joint work and collaboration as longer-term aspirations, not starting points. We hope that empirical analysis of our striving and struggles offers useful nuances to existing RPP literature—and encourages more partnerships to disseminate insights about their “failures.” After all, partners in this case embarked with what appeared to be initially favorable conditions—but that turned out to be quite inadequate for the complexity of the endeavor. Partnerships might be more likely to sustain and succeed if aspiring partners and funders have a more robust empirical knowledge base about struggle and failure in RPPs to guide partnership design and course corrections.
The results of this study suggest a need for further research about situated dynamics in partnerships that do not sustain. This is a study of one partnership in which the lead authors were insiders. Given that the longevity of partnerships cannot be predicted, future research might build upon our insights if other aspiring RPPs similarly devote attention to the systematic study of their internal dynamics. It is important to note that our insider status may introduce some bias into the findings. While we tried to limit this potential by bringing in an outside perspective and repeated member checking, the possibility remains that interviews were limited by social desirability bias. Future research about partnership dynamics may benefit from involving outsider analysis throughout the study.
Finally, while we chose to focus our analysis on situated dynamics at the group level, our findings point to potential field-level dynamics at play. Future research might bring an institutional lens to bear to consider how misalignments and tensions between institutional structures and logics can shape internal partnership dynamics. Research might offer field-level analyses by comparing initial stages of multiple district-university RPPs to infer institutional conditions and practices in districts and universities that hinder or enable partners to learn from and surmount inherent partnership struggles.
Footnotes
Appendix A
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the educators who participated in this study and offered their valuable insights to shape the analysis. We would like to thank Jack Schneider, Abeer Hakouz, and Derrick Dzormeku for contributing ideas during the initial stages of this research. We would also like to thank Hayley Weddle, Kathleen Cunningham, Jennifer Karnopp, and Sarah Fine whose discussions about early drafts provided great encouragement to disseminate an analysis of our “failure.” Furthermore, we sincerely thank the editors and reviewers of this manuscript whose thoughtful and rich feedback resulted in a much stronger contribution, we believe.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by funding from the participating district and the authors’ university as part of a university-district partnership. Financial support during the publication stage was provided by the University of Oklahoma Libraries’ Open Access Fund.
Authors
ELIZABETH ZUMPE is an assistant professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Oklahoma, 4502 E. 41st Street, Building 4W122, Tulsa, OK 74135; email:
PETER PIAZZA is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Furcolo Hall 813 N Pleasant St, Amherst, MA 01003; email:
KATHERINE ASHTON is a Graduate Research Assistant and PhD student at the University of Oklahoma, 4502 E. 41st Street, Building 4W131, Tulsa, OK 74135; email: