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The promise of university-public school partnerships as contexts for mutually beneficial learning, or "simultaneous renewal," has been well established (Goodlad, 1994, 1999). However, difficulties in creating and sustaining these kinds of collaborative contexts for teacher education are also well known, including practical challenges such as time and distance, as well as the nuanced and layered tensions between institutional missions, cultures, and practices (Mantle-Bromley, 2002; Teitel, 1997). Contemporary efforts to create and sustain university-public school partnerships are further complicated by dramatically increased accountability pressures arising from No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Discretionary time for public educators is a scarce and dwindling resource. As high stakes testing and related accountability pressures increase on institutions of higher education, chronic shortages of resources to support collaborative work with public school partners are a widely acknowledged fact of life in partnership work. In the context of these kinds of institutional pressures it is clear that collaborative partnership work must be carefully designed to yield visible and valued benefits for both university and public school-based educators (Yendol-Hoppey, League, Gregory, Ohlson, & Jackson, 2006). In this article, the authors describe a design strategy aimed at creating shared opportunities for teacher learning and development, including the learning of university faculty, that may be embedded in practical activities related to the analysis of P-12 student work. The authors offer three illustrations of how they have used this strategy to design shared contexts for learning that are relevant to the (differing) needs of teacher candidates, public school colleagues and university faculty. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

In this article, we report on "Researching Mathematics Leader Learning" ("RMLL"), a project designed to support leaders in learning how to facilitate robust opportunities for teachers' mathematical learning. Our two-phase research design allowed us to construct a set of videocase seminars, enact the seminar design with leaders, analyze these data, refine our seminar design, and implement a second set of seminars with a new group of leaders. We drew on the noticing literature to examine leaders' pedagogical reasoning as they discussed videocases of professional development. In this article, we demonstrate how changes in our framework for leader development and the resulting changes in the prompts and tasks shaped leader noticing in three ways: (a) accounting for the mathematical work of the facilitator and teachers in the videocase; (b) linking the mathematical work to goals for teacher learning; and (c) reasoning around the facilitator's work in advancing those learning goals. Analysis indicates that in Phase II, leader discussions were more focused on the mathematical and pedagogical work needed to advance teacher learning. Based on our research and development work with over 70 leaders, we offer a set of design principles for leader professional development.

In this article, we argue that teaching is and should be a central element to learning to teach, particularly as teacher education once again turns toward practice. From this perspective, we must elaborate how such a shift addresses the need to bridge the gap between knowledge for teaching and knowledge from teaching, between theory and practice, and among university courses and fieldwork. If the intent of such a shift is to fundamentally change the preparation of teachers, we argue that it requires teacher education programs to do more than increase the amount of time candidates spend in clinical field placements. It requires, we argue, that teacher educators engage in simultaneous innovation in three related, but distinct aspects of program design and implementation: organizational structures and policies, content and curriculum, and teacher education pedagogy. Without such dynamic engagement, the practice-turn will go the way of many past reforms in teacher education--it will be symbolic but not significant or meaningful.

Filling the knowledge gap in the limited research on professional development leaders is an urgent issue if teacher learning is to be improved. This research and development project is studying how leaders learn to cultivate mathematically rich professional development environments. The authors adapted two frameworks from classroom-based research-- sociomathematical norms and practices for orchestrating productive discussion--to support leaders' understanding of facilitation of mathematics professional development. In this article, the authors describe the use of these frameworks in their work and argue for a third framework--the mathematical knowledge for teaching. Based on the analysis of their work, they believe that mathematics professional development leaders need to cultivate particular sociomathematical norms for teacher explanation and employ practices for orchestrating discussions to achieve the purposeful development of teachers' specialized knowledge of mathematics for teaching. Keywords: mathmatics professional development,' leader development,' mathematical knowledge for teaching,' sociomathematical norms, In a workshop on their new instructional materials, 30 intermediate and middle grade teachers worked in small groups on a staircase task to determine the number of cubes needed to [...]