Notes
Finished reading: The Hobbit, Or, There and Back Again by J. R. R. Tolkien 📚
Listened to the audiobook narrated by Andy Serkis, which I think made it much more enjoyable than when I read it in print 20+ years ago. Highly recommend.
Me, listening to an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation with my eyes closed: “Is that Harry Groener? It sounds like Harry Groener.
opens eyes, looks at screen
Narrator: It was, in fact, Harry Groener.
There’s been some hard stuff this week, but I also went to the pool and had dinner outside on my gorgeous deck with my gorgeous family and that was really great.
🍿 Watched The Company of Wolves. Peak 80s gothic fantasy with a gorgeous score and the grossest werewolf transformations I’ve ever seen.
💬📚 “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
I slept for 9 hours instead of 10 last night (what a luxury, I know, believe me that I give up a lot of leisure time to sleep this much and I don’t like it) and my body is punishing me I guess by giving me brain fog.
A body should not require this much sleep.
But mine does.
The Jiminy Cricket or Frog (of Frog and Toadl in my head: “If you do X, the whole week will go more smoothly.”
Me: “Nah, I’m gonna try and finish up Return of the Obra Dinn.”
Did not finish: A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara 📚
Beautifully written. After 400+ pgs of almost non-stop trauma, this book was actively making me unhappy so I set it aside. Definitely search around for content warnings before reading.
Picture of the view from my deck didn’t seem to actually end up attached to the post about working from the deck. Whoops!
Went to apply for passports for myself & M today and the passport person just wasn’t there, didn’t contact the people with appointments to reschedule or anything and I’m rather angry and frustrated because this is not a quick or easy process.
My legs started getting medically-restless by 4 pm today. I didn’t have caffeine after 2 or so, took a warm bath with epsom salt & essential oil, took 900mg magnesium orally & 400 topically None of it seems to have helped. All tense & tingly. Chronic illness is for the birds.
Is there space for robust research-practice partnerships in the time of COVID, or are people too tired for this kind of long-term collaboration?
💬📚 “It was impossible to explain to the healthy the logic of the sick, and he didn’t have the energy to try.” - Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
💬📚 “This was not what he thought acting would be, but what had he known about what acting would be?” - Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
💬📚 “…he was an optimist. Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world.” - Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
💬📚 “He felt in those minutes his body’s treason… that he would be betrayed by it again and again, that he could expect nothing from it and yet had to keep maintaining it.” - Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
💬📚 “He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved. - Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
That feeling when your favorite people meet your other favorite people and everyone gets along.
M. styled my jewelry for our morning playdate. The earrings are stylized bats. He was going for “spooky and pretty,” which, as W pointed out, is what I’m usually going for, too.
I ventured into the world of Duolingo fanfiction looking for Odile/Melissa stories because they’re a very cute couple, but what I found was… Not what I was looking for.
I cannot adequately convey how much I appreciate that Duolingo accepts “y’all” as the correct translation of the second person plural.
🔖 Read The Big Bang Didn’t Happen.
I know very little about cosmology, but this makes some good points about the limits of academic funding and publishing and the value of public science communication.
Coburn, C. E., & Penuel, W. R. (2016). Research-practice partnerships in education: Outcomes, dynamics, and open questions. Educational Researcher, 45(1), 48.
Coburn and Penuel review evidence of the outcomes and dynamics of research-practice partnerships in a variety of fields and then articulate a research agenda for exploring these outcomes and dynamics in the field of education.
Research-practice partnerships “are long -term collaborations between practitioners and researchers that are organized to investigate problems of practice and solutions for improving schools and school districts” (p. 1). “…research on the impact of RPPs in education is sparse and focused on a narrow range of outcomes” (p. 2).
Extant research focuses on the challenges of RPPs, not on the designs or strategies participants in the partnerships use to address those challenges.
Key characteristics of research-practice partnerships: they are long-term, involving a shared, “open-ended commitment to build and sustain a working collaboration over multiple projects” (p. 3) “they focus on problems of practice: key dilemmas and challenges that practitioners face” (p. 3) they are mutualistic, with researchers and practitioners sharing authority and jointly negotiating the direction of the work “they involve original analysis of data,” in which participants collect and analyze their own data along with analyzing existing administrative data, answering key questions (in the case of education, these are usually questions posed by the school district)
Outcomes
Most research in a variety of fields focuses on the impact of interventions that are themselves outcomes of RPPs, rather than on the impact of the RPPs themselves.
Much research points to positive outcomes from RPP-developed interventions, but a lot of RPPs are not subject to any systematic inquiry and thus it isn’t apparent whether or not the success of the interventions is due to their creation as part of an RPP. “…these studies do not address the value of the partnerships themselves, above and beyond the particular innovations they produce” (p. 7)
Evidence suggests that participation in research-practice partnerships leads to greater access to research, but mixed evidence suggests that it is not clear whether greater access to research necessarily leads to greater use of research in decision-making.
Little systematic research investigates the influence of co-design on intervention uptake, or whether participating in RPPs “builds a deeper understanding of the research process or research findings, an appreciation for the value of research to inform decision-making, or capacity to engage in research-informed practices and policies or use research as part of continuous improvement efforts” (p. 8). There is also scant research about unintended outcomes of RPPs.
Dynamics
Most research on the dynamics of RPPs, “how they actually work and the mechanisms by which they foster educational improvement,” relies on first-person reflections of researchers involved in the work written after-the-fact, rather than systematic inquiry conducted simultaneously with RPPs themselves by outside investigators.
What research there is conducted by outside investigators focuses primarily on the challenges participants in RPPs face, including difficulties in communication and expectations, limitations imposed by the organizational realities of school systems, and the politicized environment present in educational organizations.
This research rarely illuminates strategies RPPs use to address these challenges, and almost never addresses both dynamics and outcomes simultaneously.
Research Agenda
Coburn and Penuel suggest the following elements of a research agenda for studying RPPs in education:
- Outcomes: consequences of RPPs for students, individual & organizational change, use of research, spread & scale of innovation, negative/unintended outcomes, whether RPPS influence the wider field, failed partnerships
- Comparative studies: how varying designs & contexts impact outcomes
- Targeted studies of specific strategies: tools, strategies, and routines for addressing challenges
- Political dimensions of partnerships: whether politics gets in the way of research use, strategies for navigating politicized environments
“With a broader evidence base in both the dynamics and outcomes of RPPs, we can develop a better sense of whether, when, and how RPPs are a viable and effective way for research to support broad and sustainable improvements to educational systems.” (p. 15)