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The Value of School-University Partnerships

and Professional Development Schools

By Cynthia Coler, Krystal Goree, Donnan Stoicovy, Drew Polly, Bernard Badiali,

Rebecca West Burns, Michael Cosenza, and Kristien Zenkov

Representing a variety of school-university partnerships, the authors argue that such
arrangements support professional learning, innovation and reflection, and collaboration and
shared decision-making. Discussions of practices and structures within their partnerships offer
guidance for those interested in such collaborations.

rofessional development school (PDS) partnerships, sometimes called school-
Puniversity partnerships, are formal, mutually beneficial collaborations between
a school or school district and a college or a university (National Association for
Professional Development Schools [NAPDS], 2008, 2021). These partnerships
are multifaceted and simultaneously serve numerous purposes. When the idea of
PDS partnerships originated, the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher
Education (NCATE, 2001) identified four pillars of such collaborations:
• preparation of teacher candidates (future teachers),
• professional learning and professional development of PK–12 and university-
based faculty,
• student learning outcomes, and
• inquiry into problems of practice.
These pillars of PDS partnerships spurred leaders of educator-preparation
programs around the United States to form partnerships with local schools and
school districts. In 2008, a group of teacher educators and school leaders published
The Nine Essentials of Professional Development Schools in order to establish a
common understanding and nomenclature around partnership work. Partnerships
between schools and universities have evolved since then, and in 2021, the NAPDS
responded to those changes with an updated version called The Revised Nine
Essentials for Professional Development Schools.
In the past decade, research on PDSs indicates that these partnerships can improve
teacher effectiveness, student learning, teacher retention, and the development of
teacher candidates into successful beginning teachers (del Prado Hill & Garas-
York, 2020; Polly, 2017; Putman & Polly, 2021; Snow et al., 2016). In this article,
we describe examples where partnerships have supported professional learning,
innovation and reflection, and collaboration and shared decision-making. Three of
the authors (Coler, Stoicovy, and Goree) share detailed descriptions of how school-
university partnerships can enhance teaching and learning.

Partnerships to Support Professional Learning: Coler
Flory Academy of Sciences and Technology (FAST)—an elementary school
in southern California—and California Lutheran University (CLU) entered a PDS
partnership in 2007 that continues today. During one of the staff meetings at FAST,
the teachers and their student teachers had the opportunity to engage in professional
learning when Dr. Michael McCambridge, a professor from CLU, began his brief

6 The Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin: International Journal for Professional Educators