Executive Summary
The Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) is a proposed large-scale, sustained program of education research and development (R&D). Its purpose is to provide a powerful knowledge base, derived from both research and the study of practice, that can support the efforts of teachers, school administrators, colleges of education, and policy officials to improve student learning. The defining feature of SERP is the tight coupling of research and practice: effective educational practice is both the goal and the subject of the R&D program. Program priorities will be negotiated among practitioners, policy makers, and researchers, and practitioners will work in collaboration with researchers in the execution of the program.
The SERP committee, in its report A Strategic Education Research Partnership, proposes an organizational design for carrying the SERP mission forward. At the heart of that design are networks through which focused, coordinated, and sustained programs of R&D are carried out, often in schools or school districts that serve as field sites. At full function, SERP would have multiple networks. In the start-up years, the committee proposes three, one of which would be a learning and instruction network.
To provide a more detailed vision of the program a SERP network might undertake, a separate SERP panel was convened to design an illustrative agenda for the learning and instruction network. To narrow program focus, the panel asked two questions: