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In a move to produce more highly qualified teachers and increase P-12 student achievement in their hard-to-staff schools, Denver, CO, Jacksonville, FL, and Waco, TX professional development schools, or PDSs as they are commonly known, have developed models to ‘scale up’ or expand the number of sites to accommodate all teacher candidates at the participating universities and provide additional support to new teachers. The effort was supported by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations with the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) as the convener.
Professional development schools are partnerships between a college and university and a P-12 school designed to train and induct new teachers. PDSs commit to develop a ‘learning community’ through inquiry and action research on-site at the P-12 school. They also aim to further the development of experienced teachers. Traditional roles and responsibilities are blended. University faculty teach, observe, and evaluate candidates at the P-12 school, and P-12 faculty serve as adjunct faculty at the college or university.
Denver, Jacksonville, and Waco school districts are all in urban locations and serve a majority of low income students of diverse backgrounds. Groups of leaders including the associate superintendent or COO of the districts; a union representative, deans of the education schools at the universities; and practitioners from the PDS sites made up the teams from each site who developed the models.
The smaller of the three sites, Waco/Baylor University, developed a plan to address the needs of all teacher candidates at Baylor University; these candidates intern in schools with diverse populations in Waco. The design has already moved from the drawing board to reality as the number of PDSs has increased from one to ten in the past 18 months.
One of the larger districts, Denver, identified the quadrant of the public schools that was neediest in terms of teacher quality, retention, and student achievement, and designed a model to serve the needs of all children in the schools in that quadrant. The quadrant includes 25 elementary, five middle schools, and five high schools. The design calls for a network of 11 professional development schools in the quadrant to support teacher preparation and induction for all of its schools. Veteran teachers and principals will be recruited to staff the PDSs. Training will be provided to all staff members as well as leaders of all schools in the quadrant to enable them to take advantage of the PDSs as a resource.
The third district, Jacksonville, focused on providing quality teachers in high need content areas, identifying middle school teachers in the core subjects and special education, and science teachers at the secondary level. Their plan includes developing Inquiry Science Centers which would involve the participation of several higher education institutions and include science and education school faculties working together to develop a challenging curriculum. The Centers would support intensive science teacher preparation as well as in-service education. PDS classrooms would be open for observation to all district teachers and offer on-site opportunities for master’s degrees.
Work of the project was directed by Marsha Levine, Ph.D., Senior Consultant for Professional Development Schools at NCATE. Levine notes that “developing site specific visions of what ‘going to scale’ might look like, and having local teams figure out the strategies they would use to make it happen takes us one step closer to making it a reality in these cities. We are committed to continuing the work to produce high quality teachers for high need schools.”
The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) is the teaching profession’s accrediting body, with 33 professional and policymaker organizations representing millions of Americans supporting high quality teacher preparation and development |
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