Realities of a School-University Partnership: Focus on Leadership

Abstract

In this school-university partnership, university faculty team with high school teachers to advance content literacy for immigrant students. Using a narrative research design, we retell stories, chronologically structured by comentoring developmental phases, to retrace our individual teams' activities. With a distributive perspective of leadership, we examine interactions among university faculty, teachers, and administrators and reflect on the ways of and reasons for accomplishing partnership tasks. In the process, we identify leadership strategies that either offset problems highlighted in the literature or address struggles confronted in this cross-cultural endeavor, and we offer insights regarding essentials for facilitating school-university collaborations. Isolation ensures that new learning seldom leads to change in practicein what teachers teach or how well they teach.-Goodlad (1970, p. 72) School-university collaborations have the potential to lead instructional change. University faculty and schoolteacher alliances, in pursuit of closing the achievement gap, appear to be a powerful force in school reform. Unfortunately, these relationships are fraught with difficulties. Mullen, Kochan, and Funk (1999) affirmed the need to build "stronger collaborative cultures" between schools and universities and to develop "inclusive

Using research to inform practice through research‐practice partnerships: A systematic literature review

“…The models of practice are taught to practising teachers so that they can be included in teaching practice. For instance, partnerships described by Askins and Schwisow (1988) and Kamler et al (2009) used models of cognitive instruction. One of the partnerships then constructed and implemented a course including several teaching strategies included in the cognitive instruction model.…”

Exploring the Principal’s Role in Cross-Sector Partnerships: Sensemaking and Politics in a High-Performing Early College High School

“…The ECHSs were a source of pride for the region and for BRCC. Mr. Rodriguez did not have to build buy-in around the reform’s promise (Kamler et al, 2009)—he merely had to advocate for the best way to put the model into practice. In short, preexisting relationships, strong partnerships, and political will created a favorable environment for Mr. Rodriguez to pursue his vision for HPEC (Honig, 2009).…”

“…One condition that is vital to cultivate cross-sector partnerships is developing a shared vision (Bryk et al, 2011; Kolleck et al, 2020). Other best practices for implementation include creating structures to support shared learning and collaboration, negotiating shared-resource distribution, using data to guide decisions, and cultivating stakeholder buy-in (Kamler et al, 2009). Effective and consistent leadership is also important, because administrator turnover can undermine partnership sustainability (Miller et al, 2017).…”