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This work underscores how English Language Arts (ELA) faculty and school administrators in middle schools can partner with area colleges and universities to mine available data generated from high stakes writing assessments, and to answer teachers' questions about students' attitudes to writing. We first discuss the nature of the writing assessment. Next, we dissect the process of generating teachers' hypotheses about the levers that impact students' writing performance. We then turn to available data to address teachers' hypotheses and analysis of that data. Replication for this school of widely observed findings about adolescent writing, though compelling, was not the impetus for this study. The purpose of the work was to strengthen the relationship between the K12 setting and the College. Here, the product of the professional development, and the answers this research provided was equally as meaningful as the process, which strengthened the bond between these two institutions.

Much has been written about school-university partnerships including their general intent to positively impact student learning through the continuous professional development of classroom teachers. This article, which offers an in-depth description of the growth of a school-college partnership, follows the development of a partnership between a school and a college of education from what could be described generally as a partnership to a true PDS model. Here we analyze an effort undertaken to build and strengthen the partnership between the school and the college within the framework of the ''Nine Essentials'' of the National Association for Professional Development Schools. We present the school-college partnership's joint philosophies, emerging structure, and resulting outcome. The outcome of the six-month collaborative project was the emergence of a partnership model aligned with the ''Nine Essential'' components and an established and mutually beneficial research agenda.