In contemporary education, the role of teachers as leaders has gained prominence, particularly within school–university partnerships (SUPs) and professional development schools (PDSs). Teacher leaders play a critical role in improving teaching and learning in schools and in establishing and maintaining partnerships. In this chapter, we explore the multifaceted dimensions of teacher leadership within the context of SUPs and PDSs, including its historical underpinnings and evolving nature. We acknowledge the challenges associated with teacher leadership and assert that teacher leaders in a SUP are essential to a partnership’s success. We discuss the ways in which teacher leadership should, and can, be supported as a professional, impactful and important role in schools. In addition, issues of diversifying the teacher leader workforce and why that is important are also addressed.

This review of research on school–university partnerships (SUPs) begins by presenting an overview of the relevant literature including scoping reviews, research mapping, systematic reviews and traditional literature reviews published between 1997 and 2023. The review found three questions were typically addressed in the studies; the first focused on the characteristics of successful partnerships, the second on the outcomes of partnership work and the third on the extent to which partnerships focused on issues of equity. In addition, the review noted that since the earliest reviews of research on PDSs there has been a concern with the quality of that research. A number of suggestions are offered to improve the quality of research including attention to the development of appropriate measures for evaluation, an appreciation for complexity, a close investigation of local context, and a stance of patience and humility. The chapter closes with technical and ethical guidelines for future research.

This chapter includes a systematic review of 111 peer-reviewed articles that were identified through ERIC via EBSCO Host with keywords related to student learning, student achievement, school–university partnerships, and professional development schools. Despite the keyword indicators focused on student outcomes, only twenty articles actually included student learning data, while 36 included data on teachers, teacher candidates, or administrators related to partnerships hoping to improve learning, and 65 articles were descriptive and included no data sources at all. We use a case from our own partnership work to provide a potential framework for future research in School–University partnerships and elaborate on implications for consideration for scholars hoping to link partnerships and their influence on student learning outcomes.

As school–university partnerships (SUPs) continue to establish themselves in the larger context of improvement efforts in the field of education, it is less clear how they relate in design, process, and outcomes to other types of collaborative education research efforts (Penuel et al., 2020). In this study, we address calls for research on school-university partnerships (Darling-Hammond, 1994; Coburn & Penuel, 2016; Farrell et al., 2022) by examining the inputs and processes of different variations of collaborative education research (Penuel et al., 2020). We hypothesize that the inputs and processes of these collaborations have more similarities than differences. To test this hypothesis, we selected purposeful cases of a professional development school and a research–practice partnership launched during the same time period – the 1990s. Findings and implications for the field of collaborative education research and school–university partnerships are discussed.

This chapter discusses the policy landscape and partnership environment for teacher preparation. The chapter highlights three collaborative models (professional development schools, teacher residency programs, and registered apprenticeship programs) that promise to generate the diverse, well-qualified, and highly committed educators P-12 schools need. Current policies that support these models are delineated and emerging research about the models is introduced while recognizing a significant need for continuing research, particularly with registered apprenticeship programs, only now beginning to graduate their first completers. Feedback from policy-makers and key players among the constituencies that create and lead teacher preparation is utilized to generate recommendations for future action and to suggest crucial areas for additional research.

This chapter explores recent literature focused on teacher inquiry in Professional Development Schools (PDSs). The first part of the chapter surveys the conceptual history of teacher inquiry, considering the contributions of teacher education researchers and national organizations. The next part of the chapter identifies some of the many different approaches to teacher inquiry that are found in PDS work. To better understand the role of teacher inquiry in PDSs, the chapter presents a review of recent articles about teacher inquiry published in the journal of the National Association for professional development schools, school–university partnerships. The review tabulated and described articles that focused on each of four aspects of teacher inquiry in PDSs: types of support for teacher inquiry, categories of teacher inquiry, how teacher inquiry supports student learning, and the frameworks and structures of teacher inquiry. The chapter concludes with a discussion of what can be learned from this review and about potential future avenues for scholarship surrounding teacher inquiry.

PDS scholarship tends to be published across a vast array of disparate venues and, because of this, researchers and practitioners often struggle to make sense of what we know about PDS implementations. We initiated a search of journal-length studies related to PDS and confronted a concerning obstacle: very few of the published studies focused on PDS as an entity. In short, while there are numerous publications that highlight the contribution of PDS to classrooms or groups of teachers and several studies that explore the implementation of educational practices in PDS spaces, these studies rarely examine PDS as a multifaceted, systemic institutional practice involving multiple stakeholders, and extending across institutions. Thus, in this chapter, we present our journey to identify studies that treat PDS as an entity. We then situate our analysis within the history of PDS review scholarship and highlight implications for future research.

Teacher education programs, practitioners, and scholars committed to school–university partnership (SUP) and professional development school (PDS) structures have long relied on potentially confounding titles, sets of principles, lexicons, and concepts to guide their work. In this chapter, the authors consider eight of the key terms associated with PDSs and SUPs, drawn from an analysis of the language used in the constitutional documents of the National Association for Professional Development Schools (NAPDS), the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), the Association of Teacher Education (ATE), and other organizations. The authors examine the meanings of these appellations and identify metaphors they propose practitioners are “partnering by,” and suggest alternative metaphors that might be more accurate guides for future SUP/PDS work. The authors contend that the SUP/PDS teacher education field might rethink both the language and the metaphors in which partnership practices are grounded to facilitate progress toward the effective implementation of these structures.

Schools and universities have a long history of collaboration to address educational goals, but at present these partnerships find themselves at a crossroads navigating myriad contextual factors influencing both teacher education and PK-12 schools. In reviewing the evolution of the Mason Elementary PDS program, as well as the historical phases of School–University partnerships (Catelli, 2021), we identified partnership elements and ultimately designed a program framework that facilitated responsiveness in challenging times. Through examples, we demonstrate how our framework sustains partnership efforts in our context. In closing we recommend school and universities create supporting frameworks for adapting flexibly in their unique settings.

Publications about practitioner inquiry in professional development schools (PDSs) tend to emphasize localized descriptions. This has led to a tension in the scholarship between valuing knowledge generated through reports of practitioner inquiry and valuing the generation of methodologically rigorous, potentially transferable knowledge about practitioner inquiry. This chapter addresses that tension by highlighting localized descriptions while aiming to produce new knowledge about practitioner inquiry within the PDS movement. The chapter’s purpose is to construct an up-to-date perspective on practitioner inquiry as a distinctive PDS practice. The authors conducted a systematic review of descriptions of practitioner inquiry in PDS literature published between 2008–2022. The chapter begins with an overview of the foundations of practitioner inquiry in PDSs. The review’s method is described, then its findings are presented through a five-part typology of ways practitioner inquiry was commonly positioned. The chapter concludes by discussing future directions for research about inquiry in PDSs.