School Cooperation Network in Tübingen

At Tübingen, numerous university and non-university partners work together with educational practice in the field of education. These guidelines serve to define common objectives, key points and quality criteria with regard to the structure of school cooperations and inter-institutional collaboration.

The aim: a cooperation between academic and school partners,

• which is reliable and quality-compliant;
• and further develops in the long term.

The joint orientation of the diverse activities is made visible internally and externally in order to bundle the existing strengths, identify synergies and make them mutually usable.

• Close consultation with the contact persons at the schools is a prerequisite in order to enable bidirectional, reliable and trusting cooperations and transfer relationships on an equal footing.
• When developing and implementing research, transfer and cooperation projects, the framework conditions, goals and tasks of school practice are always taken into account. In the case of basic research, the relevance and benefits for school practitioners are made explicit.
• The preparation and implementation of research projects by doctoral students is closely monitored by their supervisors (e.g. the preparation of documents for the approvals to be obtained, cover letters for participating persons, etc.). The supervisors ensure the quality of these documents.
• Field access is not supported for student theses.   
• The guidelines of good scientific practice of the University of Tübingen and the safeguarding of good research with regard to ethical and data protection aspects will be adhered to.

For research and development projects in schools, this means in particular:

Before carrying out any research projects (includes quantitative and qualitative studies, as well as teaching and school development projects and implementation mentation projects) 

• all participating persons (school management, teachers, school social workers, pupils, legal guardians and other groups of persons) are comprehensively informed about the purpose, content and scope of the research project and their consent to participate in the study is obtained (taking into account the GDPR, e.g. informed consent, voluntary participation, right to discontinue participation and deletion of data, etc.);
• is closely coordinated with the contact persons at schools;
• a positive ethics vote is obtained from an ethics committee for empirical studies and evaluations (e.g. the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Tübingen https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/166674);
• approval is obtained from the school authorities in accordance with the school authority guidelines (in the case of participation by one school by the respective school management, in the case of several schools in the same regional council by the respective regional council, in the case of several schools in different regional councils by the Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs). 

After carrying out the research projects

• all participants receive feedback on the findings and implications.