Designs for Simultaneous Renewal in University-Public School Partnerships: Hitting the 'Sweet Spot'

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.)