Cultivating a school-university partnership for teacher learning

The Mitchell Scarlett Teaching and Learning Collaborative (MSTLC) is a vigorous, six-year-old partnership between two Title I schools — Mitchell Elementary School and Scarlett Middle School in Ann Arbor, Mich. — and the teacher education program at the University of Michigan. MSTLC was formed between educators who had related but quite different problems to solve: As the schools began to collaborate in 2010, the Ann Arbor Public Schools needed to address the achievement gap in its two lowest SES and lowest-achieving schools relative to other district schools, and the University of Michigan needed a school site where teaching interns could learn to teach diverse students and where it could implement and refine its newly reformed, practice-based elementary teacher education curriculum.