A ‘Partnership in Teaching Excellence’: ways in which one school–university partnership has fostered teacher development

Maintaining the Balance: Creative Practices in University-School Partnerships for Teacher Education

“…When teachers act as mentors for preservice teachers and receive appropriate support from university faculty they can feel renewed and this reignites their commitments to best practices and professional advancement: Nugent and Faucette (2013) for example, found that some teachers deeply regret losing interns when the program ends. There are also benefits to schools as such partnerships can provide a supply of recent graduated teachers into schools with which they are familiar as they have completed professional activities at that site (Allen, Howells, & Radford, 2013).…”

“…Much of this research has focused on the quality preservice teacher professional development that is afforded by these alliances. Recent researches have consistently shown that when partners have a shared set of core beliefs and a commitment to enact these through key social practices then the partnership can address the gap between theory and practice and can enhance preservice teacher engagement and learning (Allen, Howells, & Radford, 2013;Miller, 2015).…”

Introduction to the Special Issue: How to educate a nation’s teachers. Debating quality initial teacher education for today and for the future

“…Greater collaboration and integration between teacher education providers and university and schools/centres to strengthen the bridge between theory and practice in ITE programmes is also a recurrent theme in the literature (Allen, Howells, & Radford, 2013;Darling-Hammond, 2006;Zeichner, 2010). Darling-Hammond (2006) summarised the features of effective teacher education programmes succinctly:…”

Creating and Sustaining Professional Learning Partnerships: Activity Theory as an Analytic Tool.

“…The need for effective school university partnerships to improve the quality of teacher education and teacher professional development has received significant attention in recent years both internationally and nationally (Allen, 2011;Allen, Howells, & Radford, 2013;Bloomfield, 2009;Darling-Hammond, 2006;Moss, 2008;Tsui and Law, 2007). Although forms of partnership exist for many purposes in education, one of the primary aims of many current partnerships between schools and universities is to enhance the quality of preservice teachers' learning concurrently with supporting teacher professional development.…”

“…The key questions here concern not necessarily the forms of the objects but the facilitating conditions to support the professional learning underpinning processes of collaborative or partnership work. A number of studies (Allen, et al, 2013;Yamagata-Lynch & Smaldino, 2007) have stressed the importance of creating these conditions to nurture the effective partnership. The partnership is arguably stronger if it is based within and around the professional experience and the professional learning of all parties.…”