ABSTRACT

This chapter describes a long-lasting and highly productive program of work launched in 2005 by the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) and the Boston Public Schools (BPS). It highlights the ways in which the partnership model contributed both to a coherent set of programs and tools that have been taken up by practitioners in districts around the country and to the generation of new research knowledge and instruments. The chapter focuses on the ways in which the complex contexts of practice often shifted the nature of the work and triggered significant adaptations to the SERP model. As a partnership organization, SERP approached districts to participate in the Reading for Understanding studies in the spirit of genuine collaboration. The SERP program of work originally launched with BPS has achieved several of the central goals for which the SERP organization was established— goals that are not accomplished in more traditional models of research.