Research and Practice in Education: Building Alliances, Bridging the Divide

For all the rhetoric of linking research to practice, Coburn and Stein et al help us understand clearly how research and practice can come together to improve education in the United States. This book will set the agenda for future collaborations between researchers and practitioners committed to education reform and improvement.

This book is essential reading for all who work with schools to support improvement in the quality of instruction. The authors frame the question of how productive relations can be forged between research and practice as an empirical issue. Their findings are comprehensive and encompass the development of sustainable, long-term partnerships, the design of tools that bridge research and practice, and the development of school conditions that support teachers' learning. The image that emerges of successful researcher-practitioner partnerships is of complex, two-way relationships in which intermediary organizations frequently play a critical role. The work reported in this book has far-reaching implications for funders, for researchers and the type of work they conduct, and for intermediary organizations.

Whether you're thinking about implementing a new program, building a researcher-practitioner partnership, or having productive ideas travel to new sites, "What works?" turns out to be the wrong question. The right one is: What helps collaborative programs develop and take hold, and what causes problems? That's the question Coburn, Stein, and their colleagues explore. This book contains valuable lessons for researchers and administrators who want to make things better in our schools. You'll think differently about making change happen after reading it.

Coburn (Univ. of California, Berkeley) and Stein (Univ. of Pittsburgh), both education policy scholars, offer an insightful collection of empirical examples in which social and education theory has informed educational policy. This book's strength is its critical account of contexts where theory succeeded or failed to make long-lasting educational change. Vignettes contribute to the four useful policy perspectives: innovation-focused partnerships, tools for enabling theory into practice, conditions for knowledge development, and approaches for school districts to use research in decision making. The focus is a practical one....A useful entry point for theory-focused researchers wishing to join policy conversations. The strongest section deals with approaches to introducing theory into school district decision making. Yet, readers will find value throughout, as the book's central aim is to identify situations in which researchers' findings have resonated with educational decision makers so that theoretical perspective became part of policy making. The book could prove essential to those studying policy and curriculum theory in education, as well as public policy or administration researchers. Summing Up: Highly recommended.

Cynthia Coburn and Mary Kay Stein take aim at the idea that researchers can develop a set of plans or prescriptions that, if followed by practitioners, can transform teaching and learning....Although Coburn and Stein argue that the principal aim of their volume is to make visible the inner workings of research-practice partnerships, perhaps just as significant is the image these cases provide for what it means to bring about improvements to teaching and learning at scale.

I applaud Coburn and Stein and the contributions to this edited volume for systematically investigating an issue of utmost importance and relevance and recommend this book to innovators and designers (those whom Coburn and Stein identified as the new players in research -- practice perhaps), researchers interested in impacting educational outcomes, and university leaders hoping to move their institutions toward locally embedded research. The book may also be helpful to school superintendents and principals, those whom the authors identified as increasingly bridging research-theory relationships, and funders, as a source of ideas for evaluating grant proposals that extol research-practice partnerships.