The Orange County Educational Advancement Network (OCEAN) facilitates two types of partnerships:
Research-Practice Partnerships (RPPs)
We invite schools and education organizations to join OCEAN and develop partnerships with researchers at UCI.
Each school partner is matched up with a UCI faculty member and dedicated graduate student (although over time, we hope that partners may meet and work with a variety of faculty experts depending on needs).
We ask each partnership team to commit to the following:
Meet regularly to develop deep, long-term relationships over several years. In effective partnerships, educators and researchers develop a real understanding of each others' work, areas of expertise, and personal trust. The foundation of this relationship is to commit to meeting regularly as a team to develop new projects together and facilitate data sharing, problem solving, and analysis.
Start with a problem of practice that is high-impact for the school, and develop strong research agendas to investigate issues of practice.
Focus on long-term projects that are mutually beneficial for practice & research.
Networked Improvement Communities (NIC)
We ask each partnership to also participate in the broader Networked Improvement Community. This participation means coming to regular meetings throughout the year where all the partners meet each other, share best practices, and identify county-wide issues that we may research together as a group. Partners with shared interests band together into a larger NIC to investigate ways to solve a common problem through a continuous improvement process. We hope the network will:
We see this process as a way to innovate, build from our schools' many strengths, and infuse data, research, and design to make an impact across Orange County.
Research-Practice Partnerships (RPPs)
We invite schools and education organizations to join OCEAN and develop partnerships with researchers at UCI.
Each school partner is matched up with a UCI faculty member and dedicated graduate student (although over time, we hope that partners may meet and work with a variety of faculty experts depending on needs).
We ask each partnership team to commit to the following:
Meet regularly to develop deep, long-term relationships over several years. In effective partnerships, educators and researchers develop a real understanding of each others' work, areas of expertise, and personal trust. The foundation of this relationship is to commit to meeting regularly as a team to develop new projects together and facilitate data sharing, problem solving, and analysis.
Start with a problem of practice that is high-impact for the school, and develop strong research agendas to investigate issues of practice.
Focus on long-term projects that are mutually beneficial for practice & research.
Networked Improvement Communities (NIC)
We ask each partnership to also participate in the broader Networked Improvement Community. This participation means coming to regular meetings throughout the year where all the partners meet each other, share best practices, and identify county-wide issues that we may research together as a group. Partners with shared interests band together into a larger NIC to investigate ways to solve a common problem through a continuous improvement process. We hope the network will:
- Identify Promising Practices that our Network of Schools Employ to Support Youth
- Share these practices with one another
- Refine and iterate on these practices based on the unique contexts of each school
- Collect data to track how these practices impact youth across the county
- Use the data to learn together about what's improving and what challenges emerge
- Iteratively use our learning to design a next cycle of improvement
We see this process as a way to innovate, build from our schools' many strengths, and infuse data, research, and design to make an impact across Orange County.