A Partnership for Change: A University Perspective.

Overview & Synopsis

A small-scale collaboration between members of a school of education and a public school district (involving some reading/language arts faculty and students from the University of Texas on the one hand and the curriculum director, volunteer reading teachers, media specialists, and elementary teachers in a school district in San Antonio, Texas on the other) illustrates how schools of education and public schools may forge partnerships to create new forms of teacher education and conduct inquiry about teaching and learning. The collaborative efforts centered on moving toward a literature base for the elementary language arts curriculum and illustrate Gary Griffin's seven critical features of an effective clinical teacher-education program. Griffin's framework proposes that the program must be embedded in a school context, and that the collaborative effort should be context-sensitive, purposeful and articulated, participatory, knowledge-based, ongoing, developmental, analytic, and reflective. (Four figures are attached.) (SR)