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Productive symbiotic partnerships can be built when distinct differences between parties complement one another -- when each partner contributes something another lacks. Partnerships built upon a notion of reciprocity of the relationships in the exchange of goods, services, ideas, assistance, and knowledge among individuals and organizations are the foundation for meaningful educational renewal. Reciprocity suggests a tie between two or more parties in which each party contributes something and receives something in return. What is received must be perceived to be of sufficient value to sustain the relationship.
The three school-university partnerships studied are all voluntary arrangements. They have been entered into, and in some cases applied for, for two major reasons. First, participants are committed to improving education at all levels of the system. Second, they have some kind of self-interest, or at least the belief that the relationship would be beneficial to themselves and their institution. In these partnership arrangements, all members have much to contribute to the joint enterprise.
In each partnership, the university provided access to knowledge, research, and expertise. In many cases, the university faculty provided inservice training, and the affiliation with the university often meant that formal credits could be earned for professional development. In addition, the affiliation with university faculty tended to affirm the credibility of school faculty. Many teachers felt that the university’s willingness to collaborate was an indication that their own expertise was recognized.
In return, the universities received access to schools for research, "apprenticeship" training, and supervision of student teachers. The schools provided a real-world laboratory for learning about a host of issues of interest to both academics and practitioners. Although not consistently acknowledged, the schools also provided the university access to the expertise of practice.
In these sites, the benefactor and/or provider of resources was not always either the schools or the university, but the partnership itself. The collective expertise of partnership members was a resource from which all members could benefit. Miller and O’Shea (in press) observe that a partnership is not so much an "institutional arrangement as it is a set of reciprocal relationships among members. (....) Through conversation, interaction, and common work, members find ways to influence each other, to provide colleagueship and support, and to encourage self-empowerment and progress."
While holding great promise, school-university partnerships also present great challenges. Challenges encountered in one or more of the sites studied were the tension between the need for collaboration and efficiency, the culture clash between the norms of schools and universities, resources (both human and financial) to sustain reform efforts, and the development of shared and expanding leadership.
To provide background for the lessons learned through the cross-case analysis, a narrative summary of each case is presented here, which has been condensed from much longer descriptions that fill Volume II of this report. To set the stage, it is important to understand that the context of the three school-university partnerships is quite different: Toronto is a large multicultural urban center with very large school districts, ranging in size from 44,000 - 77,000 students in hundreds of schools; Maine is a mix of rural, small towns with very small school districts (the two studied here have four elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school), and one moderate-size city; and West Virginia is a mix of rural and one moderate-size city with school districts of intermediate size (43 schools in the most populous county). Both the scale and the social milieu within which these initiatives developed contributed to the structure of their partnership organizations. In each case, the partnership is connected to a single university teacher education program. In Toronto and Southern Maine, there are a number of school districts engaged in the partnership; in West Virginia, the connections are with individual schools.
The major strategy of reform in each of the initiatives is an extensive investment in professional development. While the approaches differ, all three demonstrate a belief in the potential of teachers to bring about substantial changes in education. Each case summary provides a brief overview of the history and structure of the school-university partnership’s reform efforts.
The mission of the partnership "is to establish more systematic approaches to teacher development at all stages of the teaching continuum by transforming schools, districts, and faculties of education to environments of continuous learning." (Fullan, 1993) In Toronto, staff development is an integral part of the overall strategy for professional and institutional reform that focuses on changing the culture of the school.
As Figure I-1 indicates, the structure of the Learning Consortium mirrors the complexity of the diverse metropolitan area within which it is located. Each member institution pays an annual $20,000 membership fee to support a small administrative staff (two full-time people, a director, and an administrative assistant) and the partnership’s day-to-day operations.
Governance of the Consortium is provided by two committees. The Steering Committee is made up of the Directors of Education (i.e., district superintendents), the Dean of the Faculty of Education, and the Director of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. This committee meets once a year to review the work and progress of the partnership and to discuss the direction of future work. The Learning Consortium is run by the member representatives to provide services to their constituents. Because four of the six partners are school districts, the partnership has been largely school-driven, with most activities designed for educators in the member districts. The representatives to the Consortium committees occupy high-level positions within their organizations, and the Consortium uses the hierarchical structures of each organization to disseminate information about the partnership’s programs.
The primary decision-making body for the Consortium is the Planning Group, which meets monthly. The Planning Group is composed of one representative from the staff development departments in each board and from the Faculty of Education, along with a delegate from OISE. The director of the Consortium sits on both committees. A number of subcommittees have been formed to plan and coordinate activities in specific areas. Committee participation represents an additional investment on the part of the member organizations; only the director is paid for this work.
The most substantial participation of the university has been through a pilot preservice program sponsored by the Consortium with student teachers placed in Consortium schools for their practicum experiences. While the Learning Consortium provides philosophical and resource support to the preservice program, it is administered within the Faculty of Education. The program’s director, a professor in the Faculty, developed the program by building relationships directly with a small number of individual schools, with the support of a small team of Faculty instructors.
The distinguishing features of the reform efforts in Toronto are the extensive formal structure developed to provide professional development, the prominent role of a few highly visible leaders in the reform effort, and the changing identity of the Faculty of Education at the University of Toronto. The primary strategy for reform has been a sustained focus of teacher development. The Consortium offers an extensive menu of professional development programs through institutes, workshops, and conferences. The member boards provide the infrastructure for disseminating and expanding these opportunities to the individual school level.
The dean has been a highly visible leader in the partnership’s development, and he still provides the vision and inspiration for the organization. He has, however, been able to step back from "center stage," as a number of leaders have emerged within the boards, many from the original cohort that participated in the LC’s first Training of Trainers course. The boards have also invested in leadership training to ensure strong leadership in individual schools. A few prominent leaders within the faculty have fostered improved relationships between the university and schools, but there remains great need for additional faculty involvement and investment in school development.
Efforts to change the culture of FEUT have been slower to develop. Through explicit normative expectations, the infusion of new faculty, beginning efforts in faculty development are gradually effecting change. The pending merger with OISE will compound the challenge.
The Southern Maine Partnership, in its ninth year of operation, began as a grassroots "device for bringing together institutions that need each other for the solution of tough problems" (Miller & O’Shea, in press). The original format of the partnership took the form of loosely defined cross-role discussion groups focusing on topics of mutual concern: early childhood, mathematics, middle-level, and secondary education. The partnership has always been about challenging educators to grow, engaging educators from all levels in dialogue about school change as well as individual development. The focus was on improving teaching and learning in schools, which led to discussions about teacher preparation. The University of Southern Maine’s (USM) teacher education program, ETEP, has been completely transformed as a result of the school-university partnership.
Figure I-2 displays a less complex, but equally expansive structure. The Southern Maine Partnership (SMP) began as a small informal agreement between a single faculty member in the College of Education and six district superintendents and has since grown to include 25 school districts throughout Southern Maine. The Partnership is supported through annual membership dues, and more recently, through additional external grant funding. The SMP began as a low-key network of teachers and administrators who got together monthly to tackle issues of concern in their practice. These Educators’ Groups, in which K - 12 teachers, principals, and superintendents met across districts to discuss readings and explore innovative practices, have remained the core of the Partnership’s teaching and learning activities. The network of educator groups created numerous opportunities for school-to-school linkages within and across districts. The groups are convened and facilitated by either volunteer university or school faculty members, and each group sets its own agenda. The superintendent group is the decision-making body for the Partnership.
In the course of its first ten years, participation of both school- and university-based faculty increased, reaching a high of 17 different groups in 1990, with the involvement of several hundred K-12 educators and about 10 USM faculty members. Like the Learning Consortium in Toronto, the SMP was driven largely by the schools’ agenda. While in the beginning there was minimal administrative structure, with additional support from outside grant funding, the administrative staff of Partnership grew to include five professionals, the Partnership director, (a faculty member at USM released from one-third of her teaching load for Partnership work), one administrative assistant, and one graduate student. The SMP’s affiliation with the university and its faculty director have significantly changed perceptions of the university among school-based educators to the point where the lines have blurred between Partnership activities and university faculty involvement in the schools. As membership grew, so did the range of K - 12 professional development opportunities sponsored by the SMP. In 1989, the dean of the college of education mobilized several key superintendents to strategically use the SMP in collaboration with the USM faculty to address reform of teacher education.
The network structure of the Partnership is essentially radial, coordinated, and supported administratively and logistically in an office located at the University. Because of its location within the university, the figure gives the impression of being university-controlled. Participants interviewed noted that the SMP is a true partnership, with its location signifying more the university’s commitment to provide resources (facilities), than control.
The new preservice program that developed, the Extended Teacher Education Program (ETEP), has emerged as a separate organization within the College, but it has deep roots within the Partnership. All of the school districts chosen to be professional development sites for ETEP have been active members of the SMP. Each of the five ETEP sites was collaboratively developed by a Steering Committee dominated by school-based faculty who had been active participants in the SMP. The local steering committee is the decision-making body for each site, and each site is codirected by one university faculty member and one school faculty member. Because these school districts are quite small in population, although geographically spread out, the two site directors are able to provide quite comprehensive supervision and support to the small cohort of 18 - 20 student teachers in each site. The ETEP sites are largely autonomous, coordinated within each district with little interdistrict contact or communication.
The most distinguishing feature of the reform efforts in Southern Maine is the substantial integration of multiple reform initiatives across multiple organizations. The reflective culture that developed early in the SMP has permeated the professional lives of educators in the schools, school districts, and teacher education program at the University of Southern Maine. In addition, the emergence of broad-based leadership has facilitated curriculum and assessment articulation across the K-12 system and the ETEP program.
A major grant from the Benedum Foundation was obtained in 1988 to launch the Benedum Project. The project’s goals are directed at simultaneously and collaboratively redesigning teacher education at WVU and developing professional development schools. The project established five professional development schools in 1990, and has added eight more in 1994.
The Benedum Project is both the youngest and smallest school-university partnership, and has the least established structure. Figure I-3 illustrates the structure that was most prevalent during the period of study, but the structure has changed during its six-year history, with another transformation currently under way. The Project began within the dean’s office in the College of Human Resources & Education (HR&E), then moved out to a more peripheral position, but still within the College. The school-university tie is a direct one: the county, or district offices of education, while supportive and significantly involved in the planning stages, have not been central participants in the partnership.
The Benedum Project was for most of its history coordinated by three professional staff members, an administrative assistant, and a few graduate students. They established two decision-making bodies, the Cross-Site Steering Committee (CSSC), and the Program Review & Integration Team (PRIT). The CSSC was cochaired by one school-based educator and one university-based educator, and served as the decision-making body for Professional Development Schools. Like the other two sites, the professional development aspect of the initiative has been heavily school-oriented, but unlike the others, not school driven. The second governance structure, the PRIT, was established to guide the reform of teacher education. It also had representation from both HR&E and the PDS sites, but also from the College of Arts & Sciences -- a unique feature of the Benedum Project is its broad-based university participation in the reform. This is the only site where there has been substantial participation from departments outside of education.
Like the Southern Maine Partnership’s educator groups, the CSSC also created opportunities for numerous school-to-school linkages, which produced an Elementary Teacher Network to support teacher-to-teacher connections across school districts. The Benedum Project staff facilitated the development of many individual school faculty-university faculty collaborations, relationships that were strengthened by common interests and good ideas.
The PRIT was most active during the first few years of the partnership, when it coordinated the work of numerous ad hoc committees working on different aspects of redesigning the teacher education curriculum. After having completed the "grand scheme" of the design, work on the teacher education redesign slowed and the PRIT’s role was diminished. Control of the teacher education work was moved from the Benedum Project, and a new governance structure was emerging, the coordinating council for teacher education within the College of HR&E, with participation from a few key Arts & Science and school-based educators.
The most significant role of school-based educators in the reform of teacher education has been the development of two Teacher Education Centers (TECs). These centers, largely designed and coordinated by the school-based teacher educators, with strong support from one WVU faculty member, are viewed as the prototype for field placement experiences within the new program.
The two distinguishing features of the Benedum Project are that it was initiated as a university-wide project with substantial participation from academic disciplines across campus, and that it has evolved as almost two separate reform agendas: the development of PDSs and the reform of teacher education. Although there is significant involvement of some school faculty in the teacher education reform, and significant involvement of some university faculty in the school reforms, the two efforts remain fairly separate.
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[Cross-Site Analysis: Descriptive Findings ]