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.

The rationale for this chapter is that democracy in the United States is in crisis and that higher education is contributing to the crisis. Research universities, given their influence on schooling, affect the degree to which a society functions democratically. Changing higher education is, therefore, necessary for creating a democratic schooling system andb for democracy itself.  An approach needs to be identified to transform higher education institutions into democratic civic universities that have positive effects on K-12 schooling. We contend university-assisted community schools (UACS) are that promising approach. We make the case for higher education’s significant impact on the schooling system and democracy, describe the democratic goal of community schools and define UACS as a type of community school, place UACS within the context of school-university partnerships, provide examples from Penn’s Netter Center, and propose UACS as a means to reduce obstacles to developing democratic civic universities.

School–university partnerships (SUPs) have the potential to create equitable outcomes for students in material and intentional ways. Our chapter includes a case study that exemplifies ways in which SUPs can be organized around equitable outcomes for students who have been historically marginalized. We tease apart specific aspects of this SUP with a focus on creating robust collaborative learning spaces for all partners in the SUP, building upon and honoring the unique contributions of each key role in the SUP, identifying the new teacher profile (knowledge, skills, practices, and dispositions) desired by all SUP members, and designing the experiences and activities that will support new teachers achieving that profile. We share strategies that help our SUP to create a healthy ecology for teacher preparation that is focused on social justice and equity for both candidates in our program and the students in partner schools.

Teacher education programs, practitioners, and scholars committed to school–university partnership (SUP) and professional development school (PDS) structures have long relied on potentially confounding titles, sets of principles, lexicons, and concepts to guide their work. In this chapter, the authors consider eight of the key terms associated with PDSs and SUPs, drawn from an analysis of the language used in the constitutional documents of the National Association for Professional Development Schools (NAPDS), the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), the Association of Teacher Education (ATE), and other organizations. The authors examine the meanings of these appellations and identify metaphors they propose practitioners are “partnering by,” and suggest alternative metaphors that might be more accurate guides for future SUP/PDS work. The authors contend that the SUP/PDS teacher education field might rethink both the language and the metaphors in which partnership practices are grounded to facilitate progress toward the effective implementation of these structures.

School–university partnerships leverage resources through collaboration for mutually beneficial outcomes (NAPDS, 2021). This chapter explores global collaboration to extend the reach and benefits of School–University partnership. Changes in P-12 learner demographics require global-minded teachers who can meet new classroom needs. This chapter argues for the use of existing and effective professional development schools (PDS) structures to rethink the scope of School–University partnership. Strategies for maintaining and evaluating international School–University partnerships will be shared as well as global practices to develop global-minded teachers who are not able to travel. The chapter concludes by suggesting new areas of research as well as next steps to expand global perspectives for School–University partnerships.

In this commentary I take the idea of an “SUP 3.0” as offered by Diane Yendol-Hoppey and her colleagues and use it as the overarching consideration for my discussion of inquiry and innovation in school–university partnerships (SUPs). Previously, SUP researchers may have considered the developmental stages of partnerships as outlined by the professional development school (PDS) Standards of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE, 2001) as an organizer for their critiques of partnership efforts. My colleague Jeanne Tunks and I (2007) collaborated on how to align the PDS standards with the appropriate research methodologies put forth by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) to provide partnership researchers practical advice in the hopes of one day attaining what traditionally has been regarded as the gold standard of research–experimental (or at least quasi-experimental) design. However, fallout from the No Child Left Behind Act (2001) impacted many schools by not only narrowing curriculum and teaching but also causing distrust about the nature, purpose, and logistics of educational research, thus undermining the ability to share ideas and learn from one another, including issues about race and equity.

This chapter illuminates how the action research methodology is well-suited to tackle common problems within school–university partnerships (SUPs) and generate systems-level change. This innovation is described through the story of a collaborative action research study in a SUP induction program that resulted in systemic change to the school district and the university teacher preparation program. The purpose of the action research was to design, implement, and evaluate interventions that enhanced a school district’s induction program. Interventions included a virtual New Teacher Orientation during the COVID-19 pandemic that created school-based learning communities for 200 new teachers and a virtual professional learning community that built mentoring capacity among teacher leaders. The authors suggest that SUPs would benefit from engaging in action research that addresses systems level change and that SUPs should leverage action research to address complex common problems, such as teacher retention.

The authors in this section address administrative and teacher leadership in and for school–university partnerships from a wide variety of perspectives. In my view, the authors did an admirable job of making sense of a domain in which there is a lack of consensus around common definitions. The label “school–university partnership” is used in the literature to refer to a wide variety of relationships, making the authors’ task more difficult. Having noted the lack of definitional consensus I feel obligated to clarify my thinking about partnership types. In their chapter, Provinzano and Mayger provide useful guidance in conceptualizing partnerships. They discuss transactional, authentic, and transformational partnerships. In my view, their discussion, though helpful, blurs the lines between authentic and transformational partnerships, so I will clarify how I see this typology using their labels.

Twenty years ago, one of the commentators for this part and I were deeply involved in school–university partnership (SUP) work and published an edited volume for the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE; Wiseman & Knight, 2003) focusing on research linking university partnerships to student outcomes. While not the explicit topic of the book, themes of leadership echoed throughout the volume in the form of facilitation, gatekeeping, and collaboration needed to accomplish partnership goals. I became convinced that SUP leadership is a key factor in creating a third space (as characterized by Snow in this part) in which two or more organizational cultures are integrated for improvement of teachers, administrators, students, and community. So convinced that I pursued a leadership position at Southern Methodist University (SMU) with the express desire of developing a model for SUPs that incorporated aspects of several types of partnerships and, more importantly, studying how the various factors within SUPs affect success. Now, two decades after our book, I am currently involved in a public–private partnership with four partners: a large urban school district, a small private university, a major international industry partner, and the community in which the school is located (Wieselmann et al.

School-based teacher educators (SBTEs) are critical to the success of School–University partnerships. To better understand the complexity of the SBTE role, this chapter reviews current literature about SBTEs while also presenting the results of a small study of the voices of SBTEs. The three key areas of literature about SBTEs are (1) the complexity of selecting and matching SBTEs with university students, (2) the education of SBTEs for their mentoring role, and (3) the voices and identity explorations of SBTEs. The results of a small focus group study of SBTEs highlight the voices of SBTEs as they identify challenges to their role as well as facilitators of their role. The chapter concludes with a call to action for the PDS community to better understand the complexity of the SBTE role as well as to center the voices of SBTEs in both the implementation of PDSs and further research about PDSs.

Recent legal and educational decisions have caused educational stakeholders to examine and redefine what it means for school and district demography to be diverse, equitable, inclusive, and anti-racist (DEIA). For some, DEIA is seen as being “limiting” to the very people who have created the legal, economic, educational, and historical obstacles which have limited and prevented opportunities for people of color (POC) for centuries and generations in the US. Rather than acknowledging and removing the intentional and external educational obstacles for POC, it has become a blame the victim proposition. Fortunately, or unfortunately, because the historical and social constraints for people of color have been ongoing, for decades (or centuries) the ways in which POC have worked around and through these challenges have had to be consistent, creative, and effective.