Building bridges among education stakeholders is an important but underused strategy for creating a culture in which professional learning is seen as a shared responsibility. The National Center for School-University Partnerships, headquartered at the University of Mississippi, has embraced improvement science as a core strategy in its…

Purpose: Many researchers partner with schools but may be unfamiliar with practices for initiating contact and sustaining relationships with school leaders. Partnering with schools requires significant effort from the researcher to nurture communication and trust. This can pose challenges for researchers who are new to the field, have relocated to…

Purpose: This paper presents a case study of a school district-university partnership to co-design a Children's Cabinet, a cross-sector initiative bringing together institutional and community leaders to address youth well-being in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a vibrant, immigrant-serving community in the Northeast United States, the…

We describe the contours of one leadership preparation partnership between a university and urban high school district, to demonstrate the affordances that have allowed the partnership to process and weather challenges. Critically, we describe the actual work of collaboration, presenting one extended example of learning-in-action. As such, the…

There is a call to action to close disparities and address inequalities throughout various institutions across the United States. There is a growing amount of research on the topic of education in relation to how schools can better serve as critical societal change agencies. This qualitative study serves to answer questions on the experiences and…

Teacher retention is an important factor to the school context. It governs the success of students and school organizational health. Without a healthy and committed teacher population, schools begin failing to serve the very people they aim to help. School districts and research have identified several factors that aid in teacher retention. These…

Creating a strong clinical practice experience for every teacher at scale requires that three core actors--prep programs, school districts, and states--work together. This framework sets out the six focus areas of clinical practice backed by research and supported by the field as the most important to build a quality clinical practice experience.…

This literature review, aligned to National Council on Teacher Quality's (NCTQ) Clinical Practice Framework, explores various components of clinical practice and how they affect a range of outcomes, including aspiring teachers' feelings of preparedness, their entry into teaching, their retention in the classroom, and perhaps most importantly,…

Clinical practice opportunities are critical elements of teacher preparation. However, the landscape is extensive, encompassing an ever-growing variety of preparation models, from centuries-old traditional student teaching to newly minted registered apprenticeships. The purpose of this paper is to create a clinical practice lexicon for the…

Over the past five years, Albany State University (ASU) has reconstituted its Education Specialist Leadership Tier II Program to prepare school principals to work in some of the least served schools in southwest Georgia (and, as described below, outside of Georgia as well). Prior to the redesign of the program, ASU was struggling with a limited…

Cross-sector education collaborations, sometimes termed "collective impact" or "cradle-to-career" initiatives, have emerged in recent years across the U.S. as local interventions attempting to align services among educational institutions, local government, businesses, other community-based organizations, and philanthropies to…

We are a team of experienced teacher educators working with various licensure programs: teaching English to speakers of other languages, literacy, primary, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In the summer of 2020, as faculty in a college of education in an urban area in upper Midwest, we participated in a grassroots faculty-led…

Purpose: This study aims to analyze the experiences of a closed cohort of aspiring leaders and connects the university and school district partnership relationship to building the leadership capacity of the cohort. This study builds on previous literature in district-university partnerships and leadership preparation. Powerful learning experiences…

The purpose of this case study was to seek insight into the evolution of the Delran School District, within the New Jersey Public School Labor-Management Collaborative. The Labor-Management Collaborative brings together leaders from New Jersey School Boards Association (NJSBA), the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA), the American Federation…

Community schools integrate a range of supports and opportunities for students, families, and the community through a set of partnerships between the education system, the nonprofit sector, and local government agencies. They are an evidence-based strategy for implementing whole child education, which addresses the full scope of children's…