Designs for Simultaneous Renewal in University- Public School Partnerships: Hitting the "Sweet Spot"

The promise of university-public school partnerships as contexts for mutually beneficial learning, or "simultaneous renewal," has been well established (Goodlad, 1994, 1999). However, difficulties in creating and sustaining these kinds of collaborative contexts for teacher education are also well known, including practical challenges such as time and distance, as well as the nuanced and layered tensions between institutional missions, cultures, and practices (Mantle-Bromley, 2002; Teitel, 1997). Contemporary efforts to create and sustain university-public school partnerships are further complicated by dramatically increased accountability pressures arising from No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Discretionary time for public educators is a scarce and dwindling resource. As high stakes testing and related accountability pressures increase on institutions of higher education, chronic shortages of resources to support collaborative work with public school partners are a widely acknowledged fact of life in partnership work. In the context of these kinds of institutional pressures it is clear that collaborative partnership work must be carefully designed to yield visible and valued benefits for both university and public school-based educators (Yendol-Hoppey, League, Gregory, Ohlson, & Jackson, 2006). In this article we describe a design strategy aimed at creating shared opportunities for teacher learning and development, including the learning of university faculty, that may be embedded in practical activities related to the analysis of P-12 student work. We offer three illustrations of how we have used this strategy to design shared contexts for learning that are relevant to the (differing) needs of teacher candidates, public school colleagues and university faculty. Theoretical Orientation Our approach relies particularly on socio-cultural theories of learning (Brown, Collins, & Duguid 1991; Rogoff, 1996; Vygotsky, 1978). One of the promising features of this general theoretical orientation as an approach to problems of teacher learning is its conceptualization of learning as change in the ways individuals participate in socially and institutionally situated activities (Chaiklin & Lave, 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). This approach re-frames many traditional dichotomies in learning theory, such as those between "acquisition and generalization" or "theory and practice" as differences in activity. In the context of programs of teacher education and professional development, this perspective brings very practical questions to the foreground regarding what kinds of activities are undertaken, in what contexts, and with what participants. For example, instead of assuming that a preservice teacher learns a concept or skill in a university classroom and then must "apply" it to her practice in a public school classroom (or somehow translate "theory into practice"), socio-cultural theory suggests that what is learned is always a complex interweaving of activity, situation, and participation, and that learning to do something in a university classroom is not the same thing as learning to do it in a public school classroom. Understanding learning to teach as more than acquiring ideas or behaviors focuses theoretical and programmatic interests toward approaches to teacher learning embedded in practice. One of the most promising contexts for such an approach consists of activities that focus on analysis of student work (Gearhart, Saxe, Fall, Schlackman, Nasir, Ching, Bennett, Rhine, & Sloan, 1999; Kazemi & Franke, 2004; Little, 1999). In one of the few studies which has attempted systematic description of linkages between school reform policies, opportunities for teacher learning, and student achievement, Ancess (2000) found that what most drove teacher learning (and concomitant changes in practice) was teachers' motivation to affect student outcomes--which was heightened by their examination of student work. …