Teacher educators broadly agree upon the need to prepare teachers who, as lifelong learners, are poised to meet the perpetually changing demands of teaching. One widely cited approach to addressing this need is to promote the development of an inquiry stance among teacher candidates by engaging them in the cyclical process of practitioner…

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…

Teacher candidates benefit from PDS through clinically rich practices embedded in education courses. Each year, the PDS Consortium of a college in western New York invites undergraduate students to become PDS representatives. These representatives attend meetings and assist with professional development opportunities. They serve while learning…

Hybrid teacher educators are school- and university-based teacher educators who work across the boundaries of schools and universities to facilitate the professional learning of teachers in the third space of school-university partnerships. This case study of 'Sofia" examined how a reassigned classroom teacher was transformed from her…

As classrooms become increasingly more diverse in terms of culture, linguistics, and student need, teacher education programs must evolve to develop teachers who are not only specialized in their field or content, but who are effective collaborators with colleagues and families. However, it is not enough for teacher candidates to have knowledge of…

The context of the present paper is a school of professional development for teacher educators. One of the school's unique features is the employment of tutors/mentors, who are colleagues of their tutees in different study programmes. It has been established that many teacher educators enter the profession "accidentally," whether from…

Apprenticeship and professional development schools (PDSs) are two models for teacher education. The mentors that are the focus for this research completed their initial teacher training through one of these models and now mentor in PDSs. The paper reports on how the way in which they were trained as student teachers influenced their role…

This qualitative inquiry explores perceptions and experiences of three urban educators who had been involved in PDS initiatives both from the school perspective as classroom teachers and mentors to interns and from the university perspective as urban teacher-educators. These ''boundary spanners'' provided insight into and appreciation for the…

This qualitative critical multi-case study examines the nature of resistance as it emerges within the work of two urban secondary teachers acting as teacher educators, each teaching a secondary teacher preparation course within their own respective school context. Both research sites are discursively and functionally similar in terms of their…

If a university-school partnership is to be viewed as a mutualistic relationship, benefits should be provided not only to the preservice teachers, but to the members of the school environment as well. As a means of exemplifying how to connect the learning of students, in-service and preservice teachers, and teacher educators, this article…

How can we better educate disadvantaged urban students? Drawing on over five years' experience in a broad partnership involving twelve urban professional development schools in five districts, a teachers' union, a comprehensive public university, and several community-based organizations, the contributors to this volume describe how they worked…

This article examines the issue of strengthening self-study research in teacher education by consciously situating individual studies within coherent research programs on particular substantive issues. Although acknowledging the positive professional development impact of self-study on teacher educators, this article calls for more closely…

Investigating University-School Partnerships: A Volume in Professional Development School Research, the fourth book in the PDS Research Series developed by the same editors, includes a collection of organized papers that represent the best and latest examples of practitioner thinking, research, and program design and evaluation in the field at the…

To improve teacher preparation, higher education must collaborate with public schools. Hindrances to collaboration include reward structures in higher education and programs of study (including that for future higher education faculty). The paper examines proposals for supporting teacher education faculty who work cooperatively with public schools…

This empirical study describes the administrative experiences of a collaborative model between a local middle school and a college of education. The project focuses on technology training and utilization using the current educational research concept Universal Design for Learning (UDL). UDL's basic principles of multiple representations, multiple…