ERIC Number: ED400228
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 1996-Apr-11
Pages: 18
Abstractor: N/A
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University-School Collaborations: A Need to Reconceptualize Schools as Professional Learning Communities Instead of Partnerships.
Myers, Charles B.
An analysis of school-university collaborative efforts to establish partnerships and professional development schools (PDSs) suggests that most of these efforts focus on the induction of student teachers, interns, and beginning teachers. Little attention is devoted to helping university-based teacher educators or experienced school faculty study their own practice, improve their work, or reform what they do. Nor is there much attention to rethinking or recreating schools as organizations, reconceptualizing student learning, or adding to the knowledge base for teaching. To a large extent, the partnerships that were studied perpetuated several ideas about schools, learning, teaching, and professional development that have been challenged by many education scholars and reformers. Among these limiting conceptualizations are the view of teaching as a non-theoretically based craft and of schools as factories. Although current reform, restructuring, and partnership endeavors will not, for the most part, create the kinds of schools, learning, teaching, and teacher knowledge and competence that are needed, these efforts can identify: (1) points of intrusion into practice; (2) places of departure from current practice to more meaningful visions of what schools, learning, and teaching should be; and (3) vehicles for reaching these visions. PDSs and comparable broad-scale reform efforts are appropriate starting places for creating learning community schools. (Contains 27 references.) (IAH)
Descriptors: Academic Achievement, College School Cooperation, Constructivism (Learning), Educational Change, Educational Principles, Elementary Secondary Education, Faculty Development, Higher Education, Knowledge Base for Teaching, Partnerships in Education, Preservice Teacher Education, Professional Development Schools, School Restructuring, School Role, Teacher Educators
Publication Type: Speeches/Meeting Papers; Opinion Papers
Education Level: N/A
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Language: English
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