The partnerships described in this article represent the fruits of two decades of collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), community organizations, and the public schools in Philadelphia (particularly schools in West Philadelphia, where Penn is located). Penn's Center for Community Partnerships (CCP) has worked with other…

Evidence suggests that student teaching is one of the most influential components of a teacher education program, and the cooperating teacher exerts the greatest influence on a student teacher. Therefore, it is vital to understand how the role of experienced teachers is affected by the implementation of a professional development school (PDS) as…

Teacher education in California is currently under attack. Politicians and the general public have lost confidence in the entire educational system. While some critics argue that too many credential courses are required, the majority seem to criticize Colleges of Education for simply failing to produce quality teachers. One question asked by both…

In this retrospective case study, the author describes the process of initiating a new partnership between the Master of Education in Teaching (MET) program at the University of Hawaii and a public elementary school, which would service as the field site for the student cohort in this two-year field-intensive certification program. Included in the…

Over the past 20 years, the Professional Development School (PDS) model has been proven to be a successful way to induct teacher candidates into the teaching profession. Induction has been recognized as a way to counteract attrition from a profession that loses as many as 50% of its teachers within five years of entry. Using the PDS model of…

To address calls for restructuring and reform in the mid 1980's, educators proposed joining schools and universities in collaborative partnerships to improve education. Little attention has been given in the educational reform literature, however, to the field of teacher education for teachers of students with blindness or low vision. Reform…

In the present climate of declining resources and increased accountability, partnerships are instrumental in achieving student outcomes. The purpose of this article is to describe an unusual university and district partnership supported through America Reads Challenge and AmeriCorps. The America Reads Challenge was to mobilize an army of reading…

Partnerships between universities and public schools that recognize the interdependence and mutual benefits derived from an alliance have become a cornerstone of educational restructuring (C. Dean, P. Lauer, & V. Urquhart, 2005; J. L. Goodlad, 1991; Holmes Group, 1990). Although interrelated, these partners exist in distinctive milieus in which…

This paper details the structure and process of preservice teacher training and new teacher induction at Melrose Elementary School in Oakland (California), an urban professional development school associated with the California State University at Hayward. In addition to providing an overview of the school, describing the school-university…

A collaboration called PACE (Professional Alliance for Collaborative Education) was formally initiated between the DePauw University (Indiana) department of education and the Metropolitan School District of Lawrence Township (MSDLT), located in suburban Indianapolis. The purposes of PACE are: (1) to improve the training of preservice teachers; (2)…

An analysis of a number of university-school collaborative efforts in the United States and Canada to establish professional development schools, and of action research efforts in the United Kingdom, has shown that the partnership efforts studied devote significantly less attention to ideas about the nature of learning, teaching, schools, and…

This document reports on a collaboration between Webster University (Missouri) and Pattonville School District (Missouri) to develop a Professional Development School (PDS) Partnership. The goals of the partnership centered around student learning and reflected five themes: cultural diversity, technology to support learning, constructivist…

This paper offers a review of the literature on university-school collaborative efforts and describes the status of such efforts in Mississippi. A K-12 task force appointed by the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Education was assigned to perform an audit of Mississippi collaboratives. The audit identified many school-university partnerships…

In 1993, the Minnesota state legislature established a Teacher Residency Program, and it directed the Minnesota Board of Teaching to report to the education committees of the legislature on developing a residency program as part of teacher licensure. The residency program proposed in this report is one of three components of a restructured teacher…

One method of training principals and teachers to lead substantive change initiatives lies in partnership activities between schools and the local university. The Collaborative School Improvement Program (C-SIP) is a successful school-university partnership that focuses upon collaborative relationships between Eastern Michigan University and area…