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Project Teacher Leadership is a PDS initiative, which has formed university–school teams to foster collaboration, inquiry, and leadership. University professors, intern teachers, and veteran K-12 teachers engaged in collaborative conversations about authentic experiences in their work to uncover troubling problems of practice and develop strategies for addressing them. In doing so, participants began to develop increased professional agency and leadership. The project drew strength from examining problems through varied perspectives and systematic inquiry, and the inquiry process motivated participants to advocate for changed practices better suited to ensure all students’ learning.

This chapter describes a teacher leadership professional development program for K-12 science teachers constructed through a partnership between a university and five school districts. The development and implementation of the program drew from the literature on teacher leadership, communities of practice, and distributed leadership. The program supports teachers through a two-year fellowship program where they examine their teaching practices, attend professional development workshops, and undertake an independent teacher leadership project in their own schools. The chapter also describes the research conducted by the university to improve the program and shares findings and future implications of this research.

This chapter describes the development of a teacher leader preparation program that emerged from a partnership between a university and a local high-needs district. Using a sociocultural approach, researchers conducted a needs assessment for teachers in the district. Drawing on this data and extant literature, researchers designed a program aimed at increasing opportunities for distributed leadership. The Beginning Teacher Project is built around five signature features, including targeted professional development, ongoing dialog, turnkey training, instructional decision-making, and community engagement. The chapter traces the development of the program and describes the signature features in detail.

This chapter features three personal reflections written by practicing teacher leaders from Florida, Ohio, and Maryland. The first reflection describes a collegial partnership between a practicing special education teacher and an undergraduate intern which has been sustained for many years. The second recounts a teacher leader’s serendipitous experience in cultivating new teacher leaders through collegiality, collaboration, and leading by example. The third describes how a college instructor’s participation in Project Teacher Leadership provided new leadership opportunities and inspired educational and professional growth. The chapter concludes with five questions for discussion and reflection.

In today’s educational climate of data, differentiation, and accountability, teacher leadership is essential; and professional development schools (PDSs) offer distinctive settings for teacher leader practice and development. Building on chapter one, this chapter defines teacher leadership in PDSs, introduces distributed leadership theory, and provides a brief history of teacher leadership in the United States before asserting several characteristics that render PDSs ideal settings for studying teacher leadership. Instead of asking why we should study teacher leadership in PDSs and other school–university partnerships, a better question might be, why wouldn’t we?

This study explored the perceptions of Arab professionals toward pracademia and the ways they position themselves as professionals in this field.

Narrative data were elicited through semi-structured interviews with a total of eighteen pracademics identified for their work in teacher education. Participants included ten professional development (PD) specialists, three university supervisors and five specialists working at the Ministry of Education in Qatar.

Narrative analysis of the interviews revealed variations in their identity renegotiations, with one group experiencing an emerging pracademic identity and the other group “holding on” to their previous practitioner identities. The narratives further provided insight into Arab pracademics relating to three themes: (1) definitions and roles, (2) knowledge and skills and (3) relationships with others, all of which pertain to pracademic identity construction.

The study contributes to understanding the identity renegotiation of pracademics working in multiple contexts in an Arab setting. Several recommendations are offered to support pracademics' identity renegotiation as a social activity.