Journal of Teacher Education

Of all the reform efforts in teacher education, the professional development school (PDS) shows the greatest promise, because its aim is to tie reforms in teacher education to reforms in schools. We describe an evolving partnership between the University of Utah and the Salt Lake City School District to create professional development schools, and we discuss several dilemmas confronted in the process: didactic versus constructivist views of teaching and learning, replicative versus reflective orientations, basic versus applied research, program continuity versus equity in faculty loads, coherence versus democracy, and collaboration versus academic freedom.

We examine the work of one professional development school by studying the question, "What characteristics support change in a professional development school?" We suggest six guiding principles: (a) Role shifts of members of the school's steering group need careful nurturing; (b) the nature, direction, and pace of change need to evolve from the school community participants; (c) school community strengths need to serve as the foundation for change; (d) the expectation of continual growth needs to be established in the school community; (e) a balance needs to be struck between supporting and challenging professional development efforts; (f) the school community needs to acknowledge and embrace the complexities of curriculum and instruction.

We describe the development of professional development schools at the University of South Carolina in terms of the five stages of collaboration identified by Kagan: formation, conceptualization, development, implementation, evaluation, and termination/reformation. Other research on the change process is also considered. In addition, lessons learned from the collaborative activities involving school personnel and university faculty are described.

Proposals for professional development schools rarely distinguish between elementary and secondary schools. The high school department, rather than the school as a unit, may be a more appropriate and productive focus for secondary level university-school collaboration aimed at achieving the goals of the professional development school for three reasons: Initiating and managing the complexity of whole school-university collaboration may be overwhelming; the goals pursued by faculty schoolwide are different from and potentially less productive than those of dynamic departments; and departmental goals are more consistent with the collegial and content-in-context needs of beginning teachers. We use the 9-year experience of a collaborative, master's level, internship-based secondary teacher education program and especially recent collaboration with the science department of a metropolitan high school to illustrate the potential of department-based professional development sites.

Although the cooperating teacher is vital to student teaching, little has appeared in the professional literature about being a cooperating teacher. Journals of eight experienced elementary teachers who supervised student teachers were the primary data source for this study. Inductive analyses revealed several consequences of having student teachers: interruption of instruction, teacher displacement, disruption of classroom routine, breaking teachers' isolation, and shifting of the teachers' time and energy. These findings challenge assumptions about field-based teacher education programs.