The University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE), and the School District of Philadelphia (SDP), have a researcher-practitioner partnership called "Shared Solutions." They consider Shared Solutions to be a hybrid of the "place-based research alliances" and "design research teams" described by Coburn et al. (2013). Like a research alliance, they have a formal research data agreement, a shared agenda, and a detailed plan for co-dissemination of findings. They also operate somewhat like a design research team, in that their research agenda includes analyzing data incrementally to identify paths of improvement and then crafting interventions that respond to these findings. In their efforts to build a long-term partnership "focused on investigating questions of policy and practice that are central to the district" (Coburn et al., 2013, p. 4), they have built in activities that create routines to sustain and build the partnership (Penuel, Fishman, Cheng, & Sabelli, 2011). Grounded in lessons from the field (e.g., Bryk, Seabring, Allensworth, Easton, & Luppescu, 2010; Coburn & Stein, 2010), their approach to developing a meaningful, effective, and sustained partnership includes the following key components: (1) establishing working groups; (2) holding regularly scheduled meetings; and (3) establishing a culture of joint decision making. Shared Solutions' research agenda focuses on studying the district's "improving" schools--reform models whose goal is to student academic achievement by providing a productive and safe learning environment, strong leadership, and high-quality curricula and teaching. To study the SDP's school improvement models, Shared Solutions adopted a conceptual framework, based on the work of Anthony Bryk and colleagues (2010), which identifies five essential supports for successful schools--leadership, parent-community ties, professional capacity, school climate, and instruction. Their framework combines Bryk et al's (2010) work with research on school turnaround and reform (e.g., Desimone, 2002; Herman et al., 2008; Herman & Huberman, 2012). Instrument development, and all researcher-practitioner discussions fostered by the partnership were grounded in this jointly adopted framework, which served as a powerful strategy for developing shared interpretations (e.g., Hubbard, 2010).