Working at the Intersection of Research and Practice: The Love to Read Project

Abstract

There is growing interest in the use of research-practice partnerships in education, in an attempt to narrow the widely recognised gap between educational research and practice. However, there is a tendency for partnership research to be weighted towards first-person accounts and the majority of literature comes from the US. This article describes the process of researcher-teacher collaboration to co-design an educational programme, and teachers’ evaluation of this process, set within the context of a longer-term research-practice partnership in the UK. This paper discusses the benefits, challenges and methodological considerations associated with research-practice partnerships. Implications for future research-practice partnerships are highlighted, as are lessons learnt for those interested in working collaboratively and productively at the intersection of research and practice.

Using an assessment decision tree to align students’ reading needs to support in school

“…Alonzo et al, 2022), 'research-practice partnerships' (for a review, see Sjölund, Lindvall, Larsson, & Ryve, 2022) that enable research with research-practice co-production at its core (e.g. McGeown, Oxley, Ricketts, & Shapiro, 2022). There is also a clear role for 'translational' or 'implementation' science (Komesidou et al, 2022;Solari et al, 2020) that translates existing bodies of research for practice (e.g.…”