Purpose: The purpose of this viewpoint article is to share the reflections of school and university leaders on the success of their emerging school-university partnership for the preparation of middle school teachers. Design/methodology/approach: The article is a reflective paper in which the leaders of the school-university partnership discuss…

Literacy skill development was identified as an area of need for underprivileged students in a school district. A digital storytelling workshop was conceived as a way to strengthen university ties with the Professional Development School (PDS) and the local library, while providing an engaging, essential, skills-focused summer literacy workshop…

This paper outlines the logistics and discusses the benefits of the Professional Development School (PDS) partnership between Sandhills Middle School (SMS) in Lexington School District Four and the University of South Carolina (USC). Through this partnership as well as the University of South Carolina's Center for Excellence, teachers at Sandhills…

Supporting Indigenous students' social-emotional learning (SEL) is important given the systemic impact of colonialism that has contributed to their higher mental health and academic disparities compared to White students. One way to promote SEL is through professional development for educators, yet there has been little research on the development…

This article presents a case in point of an inquiry community in a professional development school (PDS). The community (supported by an "Inquiry in the PDS" graduate seminar) spanned institutional boundaries and involved a range of PDS partners who collaboratively studied their own practices. The article describes the community and…

We investigated teachers' understanding of the Mathematical Practices (MPs; National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & the Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010) and the Mathematics Teachers Practices (MTPs; NCTM, 2014) using a Vignette Activity Sequence within a professional development setting with our Professional…

This exploratory case study documents the experiences shared by teacher candidates and cooperating teachers in two contrasting Professional Development School (PDS) sites over four semesters. At the ends of semesters during which courses were moved from the traditional university site delivery to public middle schools as part of an emerging PDS,…

Professional development schools (PDS), a specific type of school-university partnership, offer distinctive learning environments for teachers by encouraging innovation and modeling best instructional practices. In PDS partnerships, opportunities abound for teachers to assume learning-focused leadership roles such as team lead, instructional…

"Rethinking School-University Partnerships: A New Way Forward" provides educational leaders in K-12 schools and colleges of education with insight, advice, and direction into the task of creating partnerships. In current times, colleges of education and local school districts need each other like never before. School districts struggle…

Teacher candidates benefit from dynamic clinical practices embedded in teacher preparation programs. In this article, we discuss Clinical Urban Plunge (CUP), a clinically-based approach to integrating social justice and equity education in our Middle Level Teaching and Learning Program at Northern Illinois University. More specifically, we explain…

This work underscores how English Language Arts (ELA) faculty and school administrators in middle schools can partner with area colleges and universities to mine available data generated from high stakes writing assessments, and to answer teachers' questions about students' attitudes to writing. We first discuss the nature of the writing…

In this study, a PDS [professional development school] partnership is examined using the lens of "professional capital" (Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012) with an emphasis on the perspectives of teachers in preschool through grade 8. Findings suggest that teachers were less likely than university faculty to indicate that the partnership…

The overarching goal of the Common Core State Standards is to graduate students from P-12 schools who are college and career ready (CCR). School-university partnerships play an important role in preparing students, families, and teachers to achieve this goal. University partners can be especially helpful as children begin to imagine how they can…

The impetus for this study occurred when the principal of a secondary Professional Development School (PDS) questioned the traditional teacher education model utilized by the university partner. This principal asked the university to consider a model that better utilized both the teacher candidate and supervising teacher collaboratively to promote…

Universities engage students in traditional service-learning projects that often yield "good feelings", even a savior mentality, but typically leave the root causes of social justice issues unexamined and untouched. In contrast to traditional service-learning, critical service-learning bridges this gap with an explicit focus on justice…