Beyond Silent Participation: Co-Production -The Deliberate Practice of Empowering Every Voice in School Improvement

Joanne Casey; Victoria Anstey

A persistent tension exists between educational researchers, who emphasise theory-based reforms, and school leaders, who must navigate practical implementation challenges (Getenet, 2019). At the same time, research (Casey, 2022) points to enlisting external, trusted research practitioners, who have extensive experience and knowledge in a discipline or field, and capitalise on their ability to boundary cross theory and practice. A research practitioner's knowledge of these workspaces orients them toward building trust first. Relationships matter. The value of collaborative partnerships between academics and practitioners is amplified through fostering trust and facilitating effective collaboration. These partnerships can play a more nuanced role in disrupting binary worldviews and mindsets that reinforce privileging theory over practice or practice over theory (McCabe et al., 2021). The purpose of this paper is to describe and explain how a School Leader and Research Practitioner enacted theory in practice and practice in theory. More specifically, how a school leader co produces the school's Annual Improvement Plan by drawing on a research-informed framework that foregrounds collaboration as imperative to the work, acknowledging the time, effort, and energy required to build and maintain the different types of relationships within the multiple demands of educational settings. Using research-informed processes and adaptive pathways, this case study amplifies contemporary ways school leaders intentionally, and with deliberate practice, apply knowledge to empower all learners. The approach shared here explains how this school leader navigates the social and cognitive complexity of collaboration while leveraging its potential for professional growth, building capability and enacting an explicit improvement agenda to increase student achievement and school community wellbeing and culture. Evidence demonstrates increased stakeholder engagement, accountability, and more authentic implementation of improvement initiatives. What follows is a personal account, by the school principal (Victoria), of a snapshot of an adaptive process with theoretical interjections (Joanne). This interweaving of practice and theory, and theory and practice replicates, to some degree, the type of dialogue that often occurs between this Principal and Research Practitioner as they cogitate through and within the work that occurs in schools on a day-today basis.

Beyond Silent Participation: Co-Production -The Deliberate Practice of Empowering Every Voice in School Improvement

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