Professional Development Schools

American colleges and universities that prepare future teachers have collaborated with elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools throughout the nation's history to provide those future [Page 732]educators with appropriate real-life experiences, particularly during the penultimate, student teaching, semester, quarter, or year. These school-university partnerships have proven beneficial to both the PreK-12 schools, which get additional hands in their classrooms as well as a firsthand look at potential new hires, and to the colleges and universities, who rely upon the PreK-12 sites for an element of realism in their teacher preparation programs. They also provide an avenue for reforming the teacher education process.

Professional development schools (PDS), initiated in the mid-1980s by the Holmes Group (now the Holmes Partnership), expand the collaboration between PreK-12 sites and colleges and universities beyond the preparation of future teachers. Professional development school collaborations focus not only on the preparation of future teachers but also on the professional development of those already in the teaching field, on the importance of collaborative school-university research and inquiry in furthering the profession, and on the degree to which these collaborations positively impact PreK-12 student learning. On the scale of school-university partnerships, then, PDS represent a more complex kind of relationship than the simple placement of student teachers in elementary, middle, or high school classrooms. They involve, instead, ongoing collaborations between the PreK-12 school's faculty and staff and the college or university faculty.

Three events between 2001 and 2008 highlighted the significance of PDS as venues for furthering school-university collaborations. First, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) in 2001 published PDS standards as a tool for evaluating the efficacy of a particular PDS and for determining the developmental stage of that PDS, from “beginning” to “developing” to “at standard” to “leading.” Second, while a number of educational organizations included discussions of PDS as part of their overall agendas, the 2005 creation of the National Association for Professional Development Schools (NAPDS) offered the first vehicle focusing exclusively on the work of PDS. Finally, the NAPDS, in response to questions about the differences between PDSs and other types of school-university partnerships, published in 2008 a statement titled What It Means to Be a Professional Development School.

The NAPDS statement offered what the association called the Nine Essentials of PDS work and is perhaps the clearest explanation of both the philosophical foundations and the logistical requirements involved in this very specific form of school-university collaboration. The Essentials begin with the acknowledgment that the relationship between the PreK-12 site and the college or university hinges on “a comprehensive mission statement that is broader in its outreach and scope than the mission of any partner.” All educational institutions have mission statements, but the PDS expectation is that the mission of the collaboration is more than the sum of the parts of each institution's mission. PDS participants, in short, are asked to give careful consideration to what each partner brings to the relationship and to craft the mission and goals of the collaboration, in part, on these relative contributions.

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