By Deborah Stipek

The field of education suffers from a disconnect between research and practice— one that prevents the development of a knowledge base that contributes to steady educational improvement.

Unlike other fields, where research is typically directly connected to practitioners’ production or implementation, educational research is done mostly in universities or other organizations that are completely separated from schools. If this disconnect is not addressed, we will continue to spend too much time re-inventing the wheel rather than working on school improvement from a foundation of systematically developed knowledge about how children learn and what educational practices work.

Stanford’s School of Education, like many others better-known for their research than for their influence on practice, is experimenting with different strategies to close the research-practice gap. We are trying to conduct more of our research in real schools, districts, and communities, and to document the wisdom of expert practitioners.

Our most ambitious effort to integrate research with practice is the establishment of a K-12 public charter school, located in a low-income community near the Stanford campus. This initiative serves as the ultimate accountability for our work—we are practicing what we preach, and the outcome is visible to all. We help design the curriculum, assist teachers with instructional planning and assessment, and provide professional development. Research is embedded in the work so that we are systematically documenting and sharing what we develop and learn.

The work of one of our faculty members, Aki Murata, is representative of this approach to research. The collaborative, practice-oriented professional development program in place at the charter school takes a “lesson study” approach, similar to one developed in Japan. Dr. Murata is investigating how the charter’s elementary school teachers use research-based evidence to improve their teaching methods. Her findings suggest that research affects practice when it is shared in the context of teachers’ own instructional planning. The participating teachers were best able to apply new knowledge when it was introduced at two critical points: when they were setting student learning goals and when they were pre-assessing student understanding.
Dr. Murata also found an additional benefit of the direct interaction between researchers and practitioners: expert teachers’ often tacit knowledge became visible and could be documented and made available to novice teachers.

In addition, at a school where most of the children are English language learners, Stanford researchers are testing an assessment instrument for tracking children’s literacy skill development, and at our high school, we are fine-tuning and assessing a number of innovations, including an advisory system, an early college program, and student exhibitions.

In these and many other projects at the Stanford School of Education, our research faculty and doctoral students collaborate with practitioners. We are learning the benefits of having opportunities to observe problems of practice first-hand. This, in turn, informs our research questions and interpretations and teaches us how to communicate our findings in ways that are useful to teachers and administrators. Along with other schools of education that are committed to connecting research and practice, we hope that these deep and sustained partnerships with practitioners will contribute to steady and lasting improvements, and that schools throughout the country will increasingly implement practices that are based on a solid foundation of research.

Deborah J. Stipek is the I. James Quillen Dean and Professor of Education at Stanford University.