The accrediting body, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), has set forth a set of new standards that demand excellence and produce educators who raise PK-12 student achievement. Standard 2: Clinical Partnerships and Practice requires that educator preparation programs (EPP) seeking accreditation should have strong…

This paper discusses the role of evaluation in the development of Professional Development Schools (PDS) and how evaluation techniques can be used to increase the rigor of self-study activities in a PDS. Evaluation activities may be challenging for a PDS given limited resources. Yet, creative use of school and university expertise can help PDSs…

In this article, I outline three structured protocols that professional development school steering committees and other collaborative groups could use to support an intentional reflective process aimed at growth and improvement. Using these protocols provides all participants with a voice in identifying current strengths and areas for growth,…

Universities systematically use assessments to evaluate programs of teacher education. The Professional Development Schools Partnership was a well-established collaboration with more than 11 years of work with area schools. However, two questions became the center of a discussion for evaluating, monitoring, and identifying the accomplishments of…

The article deals with one of the most important components of a professional development school (PDS) partnership--sustainability without funding. According to Ganesan, Das, Edwards, and Okogbaa (2004), sustainability is one of the most difficult components of actualizing a school-university partnership. The PDS partnership depicted in this…

While "Dancing With the Stars" often shares the background of the dancers and shows some of the preparation that goes into the dances, it does not always give viewers the background of the dances being danced. Many people are never knowledgeable about where dances came from or how they began. In this article, the author provides some…

The purpose of this study was to develop a model for evaluating a professional development school program to enact an evidence-based model for a continuous cycle of program improvement. Guided by the logic model for program evaluation, we developed three survey instruments based on the professional development school standards of the National…

Periodic reexamination of existing professional development school forms is good practice to ascertain whether goals are being met. Such an assessment was sparked by a request from a superintendent in a 14-year-old professional development school structure at a public college in the Northeast. This assessment revealed that although the…