(Download) "School/University Collaboration: The Power of Transformative Partnerships." by Childhood Education * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: School/University Collaboration: The Power of Transformative Partnerships.
- Author : Childhood Education
- Release Date : January 22, 2008
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 196 KB
Description
Professional development schools (PDSs) as a form of collaboration between schools and universities have tremendous potential to improve both. Schools and universities (especially the teacher-preparation side of universities) are collaborators in what is arguably the most critical goal in the United States--the education of its children. Historically, however, they have not actually collaborated. Although some forerunners and precursors of PDS exist (see Teitel, 1999), the scene in the 1980s when the Holmes Group and others began to promote the PDS idea was pretty bleak. The two institutions with the biggest stake in the learning of children had little to no systematic dialogue, let alone collaboration, with one another over substantive issues. Framed by different forms of governance, focus, tempo, reward systems, and power, the separation was so strong that one of the early works on PDS described school-university collaboration as "multi-cultural education" (Brookhart & Loadman, 1989). The collaborations that did take place were isolated, based more on individual and personal connections than on institutional commitments and partnerships. Those institutional collaborations that did exist were often one-sided, or what Jon Snyder (1994) calls SIPs--"school improvement projects" that a university might take on to "fix" one or more schools. Even when schools and universities shared a concrete task, such as the preparation of new teachers, the dominant paradigm was to work separately. The university would take responsibility for coursework and "theory," and the school (more accurately, individual school teachers) would provide student teaching opportunities and the "practice" experience. Some connecting mechanisms usually emerged, as when a university supervisor visited a student teacher a half dozen times or offered a practicum seminar to help prospective teaches unite theory and practice. Such mechanisms, however, have never been more than thin bridges across a great chasm. Without systematic ways to coordinate how people from schools and universities could work together to support preservice teachers, the work remained fragmented. What is more, there were no ways for these two groups to learn from each other and improve their practices.