Education Commons^™

Successful Leaders Beating The Odds: Leveraging Instructional Rounds With Professional Development In School-University Partnerships, Amy Daggett Petti

Education Faculty Publications and Presentations

How do we prepare and support better teachers during financial crisis? A newly formed university-district partnership, utilizing Professional Development School (PDS) research leveraged instructional rounds as a professional development strategy for mutual benefit. This article synthesizes two successful schools' journeys toward innovative and transparent improvement of teachers' practices, for both tenured and preservice teachers. Analysis of each school's video documentation of instructional rounds, observations, interviews, focus groups, and artifacts of the partnership yielded increased leadership capacity, improved culture, and continuous professional learning, even within a context of staff reduction and budget crisis. These schools' stories have critical application to teacher …

Preparation In Practice: Simultaneous Preparation Of Educational Leaders And Future Teachers For Social Justice In Professional Development Schools, Amy Daggett Petti, Sabrina Flamoe

Education Faculty Publications and Presentations

In times of crisis there are opportunities for innovation. Teacher preparation, leadership preparation, and education in general are facing a time of crisis. Teacher and principal preparation and performance are no longer just the fodder of educational journals and elite academics. When mainstream publications such as Newsweek run a cover image of a chalkboard with repeated lines of text, "We Must Fire Bad Teachers" as the solution to "saving American Education" (2010), we know the public perception of teacher preparation, teacher professionalism, and leadership in schools is in a crisis.

This chapter examines a case study of a school committed …