“Only organizations that have a passion for learning will have an enduring influence.”
( Covey, Merrill, & Merrill, 1996, p. 149)
Professional Development School ( PDS)
A Place where EVERYONE teaches and EVERYONE learns
Coming Together
The literature on preparing and sustaining quality teachers has suggested that to be successful, teacher preparation and development require a mutual collaboration and a synergy of effort among partners, most typically a school district and a university teacher-preparation program. Together, the partners are responsible for creating environments that can be transformed into clinical sites dedicated to best practices and professional growth for all. Seton Hall University’s College of Education and Human Services and the Cranford School District committed, in 2000, to form a rich and evolving partnership as a professional development school (PDS).
A Professional Development School’s essential goal is to improve teaching and learning for all: the K-12 children, the developing teachers, and practicing teachers. In our 15th year of partnership, we remain motivated by the belief that the simultaneous renewal of teacher preparation and the public school creates enhanced learning opportunities for all stakeholders.
We began our partnership with the formation of a governance board to create policy and oversee implementation of our goals. Membership represented the broad range of constituents involved in the PDS: teachers, future teachers, administrators, students, and a board member. We sought to create a learning environment to help future teachers meaningfully translate theory to practice and for practicing teachers to collaboratively learn and inquire, thus moving from practice to theory. The expected outcome was learning for all.
Working Together
Establishing a PDS partnership, with a focus on learning for all, is a complex task requiring relationships, policy, and practices mutually acceptable to all parties. Throughout our 15 years, we continue to work together in a learning community centered on communication, dialogue and reflection. As a result of this partnership, all of the following have occurred: changes were made in mentoring programs, evaluation designs, ongoing PD with teaching clinics, lesson study and close reading, onsite course offerings, action research into transfer of learning personalized learning, and co-planning and co-teaching resulting in new design models and development of innovative ways to use technology to enhance learning opportunities.
Staying Together
Sustaining a PDS relies heavily on developing a willingness to create a culture of inquiry that transcends individuals and organizations across time. To engage in collaborative inquiry, the PDS grounds the work directly in the questions developed by members of the governance committee and school-university community. This idea is akin to Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s (2009) “inquiry as a stance.”
Our PDS partnership has pursued this notion of inquiry through action research. Most recently, we have engaged in an ongoing investigation on the use of questioning to increase student learning. We will continue with the importance of rich, effective, and meaningful questioning this year to enhance teaching and learning for all.