Partnership and Powerful Teacher Education

Growth and Challenge in an Urban Neighborhood Program

Tom Del Prete

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367110215
• eBook ISBN: 9780429656569
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This collaborative volume offers an in-depth portrait and valuable reference for the development of clinical or school-embedded partnerships in teacher preparation by drawing on the decades-long partnership between a university and set of schools in an urban neighborhood. In the midst of a national movement towards partnership-based clinical teacher education, this book explains and illustrates the roles, commitments, and collaborative practices that have evolved.

Divided into three parts, contributors outline the theory and practice of the clinical teacher preparation model and its neighborhood focus, covering topics such as:

• The social and institutional context of partnership development and teacher education;
• Key collaborative and learning practices;
• Challenges and questions that have emerged, and what can be learned from the experience.

Written with voices of university faculty, school educators, program graduates, and students from partner schools, Thomas Del Prete offers a volume perfect for those looking to be inspired by an example of clinical teacher education and partnership in an urban community and to learn what can be achieved with conviction and perseverance over time.

1 Introduction: Partnership and Powerful Teacher Education

Thomas Del Prete

It is widely acknowledged that of all the in-school factors affecting a student’s education, none is greater than quality teaching (National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) 2010: 1; National Research Council 2010: 9). It naturally follows that of all the priorities in education, the recruitment and preparation of teachers is at or near the top. Still, while there is some agreement on the characteristics of powerful teacher education, and a strong push towards more and deeper clinical experience, there is hardly agreement on a single model (Darling-Hammond 2014). To some extent, this reflects different responses to the demand for teachers able to meet a commitment to high standards and college readiness for all students (National Research Council 2010); to some extent, it reflects different views on how to meet increasing public pressure for high achievement in schools. It also reminds us of the challenge of institutional change on a small and large scale: as universities lean forward to new approaches, new practice-embedded “early-entry” models develop more rapidly outside the traditional university framework (Zeichner, Payne, and Brayko 2018: 174).

To be sure, we are in the midst of a proliferation of models to meet the priority of quality teacher preparation, some university-based, some rooted in charter school networks, some independent. Some of these models are built from a blueprint of teacher preparation as a combination of courses and field experiences, a matter of learning and then applying knowledge. Some reflect a movement towards more exclusively practice-based models, such as “residencies,” grounded in a learning-by-doing philosophy, with varying degrees of preparation, guidance, and support. Some are linked to varying philosophies of schooling and teaching. In our view, which we share with many colleagues, teacher preparation is a journey into a complex practice, with different forms of knowledge—conceptual, experiential, contextual—as critical guides, best located at a new nexus of university and school, one firmly ensconced in practice. Yet, as central as it may be, this focal point of effort, as we will discuss, may not do justice to the full compass of complexity.

Educators have long understood the potential of partnerships between universities and schools as fertile ground for developing powerful models of teacher education and school practice. The promise of partnerships lies especially in their potential to integrate conceptual learning with clinical experiences, and to exemplify and support the development of effective practice. Partnerships are also in a strong position to address the priority of preparing teachers committed to ensuring that all students become powerful learners ready for advanced education, civic engagement, and career: they can strive to exemplify it.

Yet the work of partnership is as challenging as it is promising, and there is still much to share and learn about enduring and effective collaborations and the practices that support them. And the challenge is wrapped up in larger questions of how we develop practice in different neighborhoods and communities that ensures affirming and empowering learning experiences for the students who live in them.

The movement towards University–school partnerships or “clinical partnerships”

The Holmes Group report (1986), generated from concern for high-quality teacher preparation and education in the United States, helped spur the development of university–school partnerships. Over the next two decades, the report gave rise to more than 1,000 “professional development school (PDS)” initiatives nationwide (Hammerness and Darling-Hammond 2005: 415). The PDS movement recognized the reciprocal relationship between effective teacher preparation and good schools, the importance of creating environments of powerful learning for students and teachers alike. Although these initiatives have not enjoyed equal success or longevity, the response of employers and supervisors suggests the effectiveness of this basic collaborative approach in preparing strong first-year teachers (Darling-Hammond 2014).

A “Blue Ribbon” report issued by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) in 2010 and a kindred report by the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (2010) gave further incentive to the development of partnership-based teacher preparation by calling for “the transformation of the education of teachers to a clinically-based, partnership supported approach” (NCATE 2010: v). The NCATE report emphasized the high value teacher preparation students place on their experiences in the field in proportion to the comparatively little attention paid to integrating field experience with other program elements and to understanding what in the nature of field experience makes it valuable. In this regard, the report echoed the only recommendation that the National Research Council (2010) could “safely make” regarding fieldwork in its study of teacher preparation, citing the lack of evidence: that fieldwork should be designed “thoughtfully” (p. 62). The NCATE report states, “We must place practice at the center of teacher education” (p. 2). It pointed educators to promising clinical education practices, including residency models such as the Boston Teacher Residency (p. 13), and our own “Round” model (p. 11).

If universities need a greater incentive to action, then the proliferation of alternative pathways to teaching, many embedded in practice and built on the promise of direct relevance and impact, can provide it. The demand for effective teachers has led to scrutiny if not skepticism of university-based programs, and given rise to alternatives represented by Teach for America, school-based programs, and charter-school affiliated teacher preparation initiatives. Consistent with the NCATE Report, our partnership work grows from a conviction that universities and public schools working together, combining dynamically their complementary realms of knowledge and expertise, can develop powerful models of teacher learning and school learning.

Partnership, Underserved Communities, and Context

How to build strong partnerships with powerful teacher preparation models in underserved communities with a history of low-performing schools? Even as we might all agree that powerful partnership-based teacher education requires a school setting in which there is some measure of exemplary teaching and a culture conducive to teacher learning, we must acknowledge the challenge of developing such sites, particularly in settings chronically underserved. As Darling-Hammond (2014) observes, “Developing sites where state-of-the-art practice is the norm is a critical element of strong teacher education, and it has been one of the most difficult” (p. 554). To meet this challenge, some universities have sought to develop new schools dedicated from the outset to partnership in support of powerful teacher and student learning (Darling-Hammond 2010: 216); our colleagues overseeing the Boston Teacher Residency program have adopted this approach as well. As we will describe briefly below and more expansively in Chapter 3, one of our partner schools—University Park Campus School—represents this strategic direction.

But at least part of the answer to the question of how to build powerful models where they are most needed may lie in a broader view of partnership and teaching. What role do local communities and social context play in building partnerships and practice? How to involve student and community voices to inform and enrich, if not guide, programs, to make them more socially and culturally aware, responsive, and integrated? How to engage and support teacher candidates who do not live in the community or communities like it—who may feel committed to working there but who, whether because of race and privilege or social background, do not share an innate perspective—in becoming powerful teachers for the community’s schools? How can partnerships cultivate and sustain environments of trust, relationship, and commitment conducive to both teacher and student learning? The subject of increasing attention and research, these questions are framed typically in terms of community-based and context-specific approaches to teacher preparation (Lee 2018; Guillen and Zeichner 2018; Matsko and Hammerness 2014; Zeichner, 2018; Zeichner, Bowman, Guillen, and Napolitan 2018). They have especial relevance for settings characterized as “urban.” Community-based and context-specific approaches recognize the variability and vitality represented by urban spaces, and the importance of the lived experience, knowledge, and perspectives of their students and families to the formation of school cultures, teaching, and learning. To university and school they add an important people-centered dimension.

While we have concentrated most of our effort at the intersection of university and school, we also have broadened our vision over time, both in terms of thinking about the educational space formed by the partnership in our neighborhood and in how we understand and support the development of practice in our social context. On the one hand, we have sought to bring together our university and partner schools to form a broader neighborhood-based educational community and weave a more connected (if not seamless) experience for neighborhood students. We have aimed in this process not only to foster an ecology of support, but also to thread a history of trusted commitment, affirmation, and fulfilled aspiration into the fabric of the neighborhood. Now, on an annual basis, dozens of students in our partner secondary schools will participate in summer academic programs with an on-campus component, take advanced placement courses at one or another of each other’s schools, and enroll in at least one course at the University before they graduate, earning dual high school and university credit. At least a handful will go on to complete a degree at the University. Most of these students will have interacted with teacher candidates at different points, and many will know education faculty working in the teacher preparation program by name. A few will enter our Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program, which qualifies them for teacher licensure in Massachusetts.

Kim Surrette was one of them. Now a teacher at one of our partner schools, she and her family moved into the neighborhood when she was in 5^th grade, part of a pattern of frequent relocation and interrupted schooling. A year later she entered University Park Campus School (UPCS), a school that had opened only recently as a joint initiative of the University and school district, and still in the process of unfolding a planned 7–12 grade span and curriculum. Persevering through a period of homelessness while a UPCS student, with great support from her teachers, Kim qualified for admission to the University. Living outside the neighborhood while homeless, however, she was unable to take advantage of the University’s promise of a free-tuition education for residents of five or more years. Notwithstanding, she was given a generous scholarship to attend and went on to complete the fifth-year MAT program. After several years she found a professional home as a teacher in another of the University’s partner schools, working with a principal—also a graduate of the University teacher preparation program—who had once been her history teacher. She now teaches both ESL and history to neighborhood students. As Kim puts it, she is “working to keep the promise [of the partnership] for other neighborhood kids” (K. Surrette, personal communication, July 16, 2018). With support from a University faculty member, she also actively researches her students’ discourse and learning patterns in order to better understand them and develop her practice. As a teacher who is white and a native English speaker, she recognizes that she has much to learn from her students, notwithstanding her knowledge of the neighborhood. She shares what she is working to understand with the cohorts of MATs placed in her school (we refer to our teacher candidates as “MATs”).

As powerful and connected as narratives of neighborhood student achievement such as Kim’s are, however, they are not universal; and so they compel the question of how to ensure that all students have similar powerful learning experiences. Where there is unevenness in experience and accomplishment—as, for example, in the case of recent arrivals to the neighborhood with various language and cultural backgrounds—how do we account for them? What are the implications for practice and its development? Even with an increasing number of narratives of student accomplishment, therefore, spanning many years, we are challenged to think more broadly about teacher preparation. In response, we have tried to enhance our neighborhood-based approach to partnership, and our practice-based approach to teacher preparation, with more student-centered and community-based perspectives. In this effort we align with emerging attention in the field to social context and the critical role that the perspectives and knowledge of students and their communities can play in preparing teachers (Guillen and Zeichner 2018; Lee 2018; Matsko and Hammerness 2014; Zeichner 2018). Some of our initial steps in this regard—such as having neighborhood students introduce our teacher candidates to the neighborhood and share perspectives on teaching at the outset of the program—we explain in different places, in particular in the chapters on the design of the MAT program (Chapter 4), on our student- and community-centered summer programs (Chapter 12), and on the interconnection of one colleague’s research, the partnership, and teaching in the MAT program (Chapter 13).

Guillen and Zeichner (2018) suggest to us a program model, beyond clinical partnership, that brings university, school, and community into “solidarity”—into a closer, more dynamic relationship. We see the possibility of cultivating and integrating these three dimensions in the model that we are developing. Figure 1.1 illustrates our evolving theory of action for powerful teacher and student learning and our aspiration: to develop a partnership community that is integrated with the neighborhood and focused on understanding and developing powerful practice (“partnership community of learning”), cultivating a “hybrid space” (Zeichner 2010) of learning, mutuality, and transformation for all concerned. We believe that such a model can become socially ingrained and self-sustaining, embodied and nurtured by former neighborhood students like Kim and her many like-minded colleagues. They in effect become teachers especially prepared to teach in the neighborhood, to learn from and be part of its formation, and (we hope) to learn how to teach in others as well. In this respect, they align generally with the concept of “community teacher” developed by Murrell (2000), which he characterizes as “an accomplished urban teacher who develops the contextualized knowledge of culture, community, and identity of children and their families as the core of their teaching practice” (p. 340).

Figure 1.1 Integrated neighborhood-based partnership model

We envision the co-developed space at the center of the partnership as a place of practice development and co-learning. We see it as a place where someone like Kim, who knows the neighborhood well, still learns at the point where the neighborhood’s multiple cultural lenses and languages converge—in her classroom. We understand it as a common fertile ground where different perspectives interact openly, respectfully, intentionally, and reflectively, with both empathetic and critical regard, generating insight, knowledge, collaboration, and a sense of mutuality.

But what happens in this space? What practices can evolve to bring together perspective and understanding across distinct and sometimes distant university and school realms of work and knowledge? What practices bring into view and incorporate knowledge of community and students, of practice and research?

A host of questions lies in front of those traveling a path such as ours, focused on a school partnership and perhaps an urban neighborhood and its schools:

• How to development a partnership community in support of powerful learning—that puts students at the center?
• How to develop a partnership community committed to developing pedagogies that support practice-based and clinical learning?
• How to learn together across university-school boundaries, drawing on the strengths of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Partnership and Powerful Teacher Education
• PART I: Social Context and Partnership Development
• PART II: Clinical, Collaborative, and Contextual Teaching and Learning Practices
• PART III: Lessons, Challenges, and Questions
• Appendix I: Clark University Master of Arts in Teaching Program Curriculum Unit Plan Guidelines
• Appendix II: Sample Teacher Rounds and Round Sheets
• Appendix III: Clark University Adam Institute for Urban Teaching and School Practice Partnership Curriculum Team Guidelines
• Appendix IV: Sample Partnership Agreement UPCS–Clark Innovation School Partnership Agreement
• Appendix V: The Professor of Practice Role in Education (adapted from a Clark University internal document)
• Appendix VI: Book Study Group Reading List
• Index