Skip to content

Multilevel Professional Development School Partnership

Design · All designs
Evidence · 1 claim (1 against) · 1 study (1 qualitative), q3 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 1 claim rests on one study

Description

This pattern structures a school-university research-practice partnership as three nested, hierarchically linked meeting groups, so that Boundary Crossing Learning can be pursued deliberately at the institutional, interpersonal, and intrapersonal levels rather than left to chance. A policy group (school boards, school directors, the university-side project leader and professor) meets a few times a year to set strategic intent and resourcing. A broad knowledge community (school directors, internal facilitators, teacher educators, a research educator) meets more often to develop and operationalize partnership policy. Within each participating school, a small knowledge community (student teachers on placement, in-service teachers, the teacher-research educator, and an internal facilitator) meets regularly to plan, conduct, and discuss classroom-embedded research. The three tiers are connected vertically by the same people occupying roles at more than one level (brokers), and the structure's success depends heavily on whether research topics chosen at the small-community level connect visibly to that school's actual teaching priorities — a generic, imposed research topic produced sharply lower teacher engagement than a topic tied to a live school priority in the source study.

Implications

Context

Requirements

  • At least one broker per school able to move between the small knowledge community and the broader partnership structure, ideally with institutional standing (e.g., a school director or internal facilitator) to carry decisions both directions
  • A process for selecting each school's research topic collaboratively, anchored in a live, already-valued school priority (e.g., an existing pupil-diversity policy) rather than a generic academic topic

Constraints

  • The structure tends to concentrate deep involvement in brokers; teachers not in a bridging role often remain peripheral even when the structure is functioning as designed — see Boundary-crossing mechanisms unfold sequentially across levels, and broker centrality creates an involvement paradox [-M]
  • Bridging more than two practices at once (e.g., teaching + teacher education + research, as in the source study) can produce a trade-off, where strengthening one connection weakens another
  • Evidence is a single five-year case study of one partnership; the structure's necessity (versus a simpler two-tier design) is not tested against alternatives

Grain Size

Program (a multi-year, multi-school research-practice partnership)

Target Goals

Target Learners

  • In-service teachers, student teachers, teacher educators, and school leaders in a research-practice partnership, at institutions without pre-existing research-integration infrastructure

Theory

Supporting

Claims

Supporting

Design

Sequence

  1. Establish the three-tier meeting structure (policy group, broad knowledge community, small knowledge communities) with explicit role descriptions and at least one broker per school.
  2. In the first year(s), expect and plan for coordination work at every level — establishing routines, shared vocabulary, and information flow — before expecting deeper mechanisms (identification, reflection, transformation) to emerge.
  3. Select each school's research topic collaboratively, prioritizing visible connection to an existing school priority over topic novelty or academic interest.
  4. Monitor for broker over-centrality (a broker describing themselves as "the one who keeps it alive") as an early warning sign, and use Broker Position Circulation to address it before it becomes entrenched.
  5. If bridging more than two practices at once, watch specifically for one connection strengthening at another's expense, and treat this as an expected design tension to manage rather than a implementation failure.

Affordances

Personalization

  • A single-school partnership can likely drop the top policy tier and operate with just a broad knowledge community and one small knowledge community, though this reduces the structure's capacity to sustain institutional-level buy-in documented in the source study.
  • (none yet linked)

Examples

  • A five-year Dutch academic professional development school (PDS) partnership spanning five primary schools and one teacher-education research department, studied through video-recorded meetings, interviews, and documents across 2006-2011.

Key Sources

Page metadata
Field Value
type design
id multilevel-professional-development-school-partnership
title Multilevel Professional Development School Partnership
description A three-tier meeting structure — a strategic policy group, a middle-management "broad knowledge community," and within-school "small knowledge communities" — for building a durable research-practice partnership between a teacher-education institution and multiple schools.
status review
grain_size program
author Akkerman, S., & Bruining, T.
generated by claude/unspecified on 2026-08-29
trust unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources 1 — akkerman-bruining-2016

Frontmatter is the page's machine-readable record — see the Schema & Guide.