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The United States Department of Education School Leadership Program funds aspiring and current school leadership preparation programs throughout the United States. These projects represent over 100 million in funding educational leadership development since 2002. In this book we have sought to provide the reader a variety of lessons learned from grants originally awarded in 2008, 2009, and 2010. Within these pages you will learn about the experiences of grantees and how they have worked to provide exemplary preparation for aspiring and current assistant principals and principals in the United States. It is our hope that you will use these chapters to support and strengthen your own programs in order to provide training for our schools’ leaders, who, in turn will work to provide high quality educational experiences for our nation's students.

This chapter provides an overview of the development of a USDE SLP-funded leadership preparation partnership between a local school division and our university. We specifically describe our efforts to cultivate an authentic and purposeful partnership that would allow us to move beyond the limitations of the traditional leadership preparation programs that have been so widely criticized in the literature. This chapter describes the research and development efforts which involved iterative cycles of design, implementation, reflection, and redesign that helped to identify problems of practice and develop meaningful solutions to these identified areas of need. We also discuss four key elements of effective university–school partnerships that grew out of our efforts to build and refine an effective partnership.

Josh Bendickson is a Ph.D. student at Louisiana State University in the E. J. Ourso College of Business. He teaches principles of management in the Rucks Department of Management and is also involved in the Stephenson Entrepreneurship Institute. His research interests include strategy, entrepreneurship, and management history.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a Year 1 account of a partnership between a university and rural school district focusing specifically on how the project has helped to bridge the theory to practice divide and strengthen university‐district ties.

A design‐based research paradigm was utilized to investigate how creating more authentic and contextually relevant university‐school partnerships and embedding leadership preparation in the context of practice may help build stronger bridges between theory and practice.

The findings highlight that holistic approaches to leadership preparation, developing relationships, coordinating meaningful professional development, realism in design and experiences, and introspection are all ways that cohort members, as well as other district personnel, have been able to build stronger bridges between theory and practice.

The findings can assist universities and districts in developing and supporting partnerships that contribute to relevant, practical, and meaningful leadership preparation.

The authors' analysis highlights that aspiring leadership students who do not engage in meaningful and contextually relevant activities will not be able to bridge the theory to practice gap when working in the actual leadership field. Authentic experiences provide realistic views and understandings of the requirements, challenges, and rewards of educational leadership positions.