BETTER: Research-Practice Partnerships and Research on Transfer to Educational Practice
BETTER stands for "Bring Educational Research to Teachers and Teachers' Experiences back to Research". We investigate and support the transfer of knowledge and interactions between educational research and school practice.
In BETTER, we understand transfer between educational research and school practice as a multidimensional and bidirectional endeavor. Multidimensional means that transfer includes different, partly independent facets. This includes the practical relevance of the research results themselves, different channels of publication and dissemination of research results, as well as personal interaction and collaboration between actors from research and from school practice or school administration. Bidirectional means that transfer is not only seen as the task of researchers who bring their findings into practice. Practitioners such as teachers or school administrators also take an active role in the process, for example, by actively constructing and interpreting knowledge, or by contributing valuable contextual knowledge about supporting and hindering conditions for implementation in schools. We build on this notion of transfer and try to make it usable for research projects at DIPF and beyond. In our work, we focus on forms of long-term collaboration between researchers and teachers from which both sides benefit in their work. We are establishing such research-practice partnerships (Campus Schools and Peers4Practice projects) and investigating their underlying mechanisms (PaTH project). Furthermore, we accompany partners of educational policy (project NRW Evaluation) as well as schools and teachers (project KoaLa) by engaging in co-constructive collaboration between research and educational practice, e.g. for the implementation and further development of digital tools for teaching (alea.schule project) or for teacher training (DiFA project). Another goal of our work is to learn more about how results of educational research can be turned into practically relevant knowledge for teachers (project KONTEXT Grundschule), and how future teachers can be supported during their training to use educational research findings for their own instructional work in classrooms.
Teacher and Teaching Quality
The department of Teacher and Teaching Quality (TTQ) focuses on the investigation of quality and effectiveness of educational processes.
- Campus Schools Frankfurt
- KONTEXT Grundschule – Cooperatively Created InfoTEXTs for Primary Schools
- PaTH – Participative Knowledge Transfer between University and School Practice
- Peers4Practice – A Tandem approach for Early Career Teachers and Researchers
- SYNERGIE – Systematic, Sustainable and Evidence-Oriented Professional Development in Schools
