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 outlines how Children’s Aid has partnered in community schools work with institutions of higher education in New York City and beyond. This work includes establishment of a satellite college campus in a public intermediate school; development and implementation of multi-year evaluations of Children’s Aid community schools; professional development partnerships with all New York City graduate schools of social work; and, most recently, the co-creation of the nation’s first on-line course on community schools. The chapter explores several key themes: (1) how the centrality of partnerships to the work of community schools makes these venues fertile ground for innovative School–University collaborations; (2) the mutually beneficial nature of these partnerships; (3) the role of Children’s Aid as a coordinator of these School–University partnerships; and (4) lessons learned about factors that enhance or hinder effective School–University collaborations. Findings from the multi-year community school evaluations and other relevant research are presented.

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.

There are an exceptional number of publications on the transition from elementary (primary) school to middle school, also known as secondary school, junior high school or lower-middle school. The major reason is that the transition to middle school is an event that has multiple and harmful implications. Several reasons contribute to the difficulty of secondary school adjustment, including misleading advertisement of the schools, a significant change in the teachers’ behavior and academic demands, and, especially, the developmental transitions to adolescence and the associated difficulties in managing parent-adolescent relationships. Relying on the P–E Fit Model, it is commonly agreed that the characteristics and demands that secondary schools impose on newcomers do not fit the needs of adolescents. In line with their developmental needs, secondary school are more oriented to their peers’ expectations than to those of their teachers and parents, and are more engaged in matters related to their self-esteem and social life, rather than learning “boring materials” or staying at school while their out-of-school life seems to be more exciting. Interventions to foster adjustment to secondary school are presented and discussed.

School principals play a critical role in developing and nurturing effective school–university partnerships (SUP). This is especially true in community school contexts, a type of SUP where public schools benefit from partnerships with community resources. To provide a more nuanced understanding of the leadership skills required for principals to do partnership work, the purpose of this chapter was twofold: (1) to describe what is known about the role of principals engaged in partnership work, and (2) to provide examples from the authors’ own research on how school principals can advance partnerships, especially with universities, to foster an effective SUP. Implications for school principals and university partners are discussed, as are challenges school principals encounter when attempting to advance sustainable SUPs. The chapter concludes with policy and practice considerations for school and university leaders.

Teacher residencies are an important component of university-district partnerships and often grow out of a desire to ensure students have equitable access to quality teachers. However, it is critical to consider how problematic roots and rationales for teacher residencies alongside questionable implementation practices may position these programs to perpetuate the very inequities they claim to push against. This chapter reviews the evolution of teacher residency programs in the context of educational equity and outline how guiding documents and associated research position teacher residencies in relation to notions of educational equity and where these aims diverge. We end with our freedom dreams (Kelley, 2020) for ways forward as a love letter to teacher residency program providers and to residents themselves, as we encourage readers to locate themselves and their work in these histories and contemporary implementation practices so that we may dream up more just ways forward in teacher residency work.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the role of leadership in designing school–university partnerships (SUPs). Four fundamental concepts of design science are discussed: (1) wicked problems, (2) design principles, (3) design thinking, and (4) pilot testing. These concepts can be applied to three different types of SUP design opportunities: governance, professional development, and clinical experiences. Successfully leading the design process requires an understanding of the value of design, the skills needed to lead the process, and a vision for the power of design. Design leadership is illustrated through a hypothetical example.

In this part, authors review the historical development of school–university partnerships (SUPs) with an emphasis on key researchers and organizations that not only created visions for partnerships but also provided guidelines and parameters for doing the work. In keeping with the mission of the handbook, the authors in this part also reflect on the role of diversity, equity, and social justice as portrayed in the origins of SUPs and set forth recommendations to preserve, enhance, and sustain SUPs as an innovative approach to teacher preparation and school reform. Authors’ reflections on the origins of SUPs and their potential for moving the effort forward represent the array of approaches that come under the general heading of “SUPs.” Despite variances in philosophies and methods for doing the work, SUPs remain a major vehicle for improving schools and teaching.

A common mistake is to identify adjustment with positive behaviors and successful performance. Thus, for a significant rate of school students there is a gap between teachers’ and parents’ impressions and the students’ internal feelings of adjusting to school. However, the gap is bidirectional, with some students feeling adjusted to school even though their academic achievements are moderate or low. The existing literature on school adjustment supplies rich and relatively consistent information regarding the process that leads some students to dislike their school setting, become unmotivated to learn, and to drop out of school. However, the literature on students on the other edge (i.e., who adjusted well to, and even flourish at school) is partial and limited. Generally, comprehensive measurement of students’ school adjustment leads to the subdivisions of school students as Maladjusted, Accurately Behaved, Adjusted, and Flourishing.

According to the research, white teacher candidates may have negative attitudes towards urban students and schools (Bazemore-Bertrand & Porcher, 2020; Hampton et al., 2008). However, research also finds that carefully designed experiences outside of university classrooms can heighten learning and have a significant impact on preparing teacher candidates to teach in urban school settings (Bazemore-Bertrand & Handsfield, 2019; Porcher et al., 2020; Porcher, 2021). Partnerships between universities and urban schools offer chances to expose teacher candidates to teaching practices that are rooted in diversity, equity, and antiracism which in return prepares them to effectively teach not just in urban schools, but in all schools. In this chapter, the author shares the results of a School–University partnership (SUP) that centered around preparing teacher candidates to teach in urban schools. Specifically, the author described the benefits and challenges regarding designing a SUP with urban schools that center equity and antiracism.

Advancing equity, opportunity, and access in PK-12 student learning is an important matter in student–university partnership (SUP) research. The four chapters presented in this part of the handbook coalesce around a common theme of advancing student learning by utilizing SUPs to build the capacities of educators who think, act, and teach for equity. More specifically, the authors propose that activities within SUPs build synergy for adult learning in ways that support equity and student learning.

The first two chapters unpack how SUPs are designed to place equity and student learning at the core of intended and implemented outcomes for partnerships. Polly and Colonnese provide a systematic review of literature relating student learning, academic achievement, and SUPs, while offering an individual case and a five-point framework for future research linking partnerships and equitable student learning outcomes across social markers. Centering the learning outcomes of culturally and linguistically diverse students, Wong and colleagues use one SUP to showcase how meaningful relationships, collaborations, and combined efforts across multiple stakeholders enabled opportunities for pre-service teachers to develop high-leverage and evidence-based practices associated with equitable teaching.

The next two chapters center on explicitly anti-racist SUP theory and practice to redress racism within schools.

The transition to elementary school (i.e., 1st grade) is not the first major life-course transition that children have experienced. However, due to its nature and expanded intervention in children’s lives, transition to 1st grade is a significant, exciting, and magical event. In the academic domain, new elementary school students are expected to gain mastery over literacy. This is not an easy task, especially in cases of diglossia, and it is considered as a first step in school adjustment. However, elementary school adjustment is more than literacy; it includes a vast list of demands, such as: wake up earlier, wear uniform, carry/pull a (heavy) bag, sit on a chair for hours, exposure to punishments, concerns with toilet needs, managing well socially during class breaks, encountering parents’ questions, worries, and higher expectations, etc. Several figures are important along this process, especially the homeroom teacher. Yet, parental and familial reactions to various events are also crucial, calling for an efficient school–family collaboration. Altogether, successful adjustment to elementary school will significantly shape students’ feelings toward learning until graduation from high school.

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.