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The school counselor can reduce barriers to college access for students in underserved communities but there is a lack of focused support and professional development resources to assist them with this task. The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into how a collaborative partnership reframed professional development to increase counselors’ capacities and enrich their role in addressing educational inequities in a local context.

The authors employed an action-oriented qualitative case study through the lens of social justice to critically consider how urban school counselors took action to address local educational inequities in the postsecondary process. Data were collected over a ten month period and consisted of semi-structured interviews, 17 hours of meeting transcriptions, meeting notes, field observations, numerous field notes, researcher reflections, weekly e-mail correspondence, electronic data, counselor demographic surveys, and document analysis.

The inter-agency networked learning community model encouraged the school counselors to take ownership for their professional development, starting small led to greater collaboration, the counselors engaged in collective learning and counselors took a responsibility for the broader school community.

Inter-agency partnerships can address social inequities and initiate transformative change but further research is needed to explore how to address what happens as actors move in and/or out of the partnership. Acknowledging and validating the experience of the school counselors empowered them to take risks, invite new ideas, and adapt the new idea to their local school site. Reframing professional development began to transform how the counselors were viewed by the broader school community. Further research is needed to explore how educational systems can be empowered to engage in conversations to embrace change.

This study illustrated the transformative power of school counselors in building community, collaborating, and constructing bridges between each other, school administrators, and postsecondary researchers. Unless the current devaluing of school counselors shifts, the benefits associated with networked collaborative partnerships will likely go unrealized. We call on policymakers to reconsider the role of school counselors and call on them to ensure these positions are mandatory in all K-12 schools.

This study demonstrated how an inter-organizational collaboration between a university and a K-12 local education agency initiated transformative change. The collective action of the network equipped counselors with tools to build community with each other, within their individual school sites, and in the local community. Many studies provide models regarding what school counselors should do but few explore how to empower them to use the models to enact change. The action-inquiry approach provided an opportunity to explore how urban school counselors experienced and understood the process of engaging in professional development designed to help them try something new in addressing educational inequities in underserved communities.

Strengthening the nation’s technological workforce, competing and expanding its relevance in the global economy, and maintaining personal as well as homeland security will be highly dependent on the quantity, quality, and diversity of the next generations of scientists, engineers, technologists, and mathematicians. Production of a diverse generation of human resources with relevant, competitive skills is critical. However, so too is the need to raise an enlightened citizenry with cross-cultural experience and cultural awareness competency, with a broad worldview and global perspectives. These requirements are critical to understanding the challenges and opportunities of scholarly activity in a pluralistic global environment and positioning ourselves to capitalize upon them. Scholars with cross-cultural experience and competency are empowered to adapt and work collaboratively, nationally and globally, with scholars of different races, geopolitical, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds. Development of effective strategies to transform science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) departments for inclusion and to broaden the participation in STEM across cultures, socioeconomic standing, race, and gender in higher education has been a dominant topic of pedagogical interest of national priority in the last several decades. However, success in these endeavors is achievable only through systemic change and a cultural shift to address the underlying root causes of socioeconomic disparity, gender, and racial disparities and a paucity of cultural awareness among all educational stakeholders. STEM departments can only be truly transformed for inclusion through the development of sensitive, creative, and student-engaging curricula and targeted recruitment and retention of underrepresented minorities in STEM. Formation of well-coordinated alliances spanning educational sectors, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and community engagement and outreach are also critical to promoting inclusive and broad participation in STEM education.

The first section of the chapter gives an introduction to various challenges, obstacles, and hindrances that prevent a successful transformation of K–12 science education as well as STEM departments in higher education for inclusion. The second section discusses historical perspectives of the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith (UAFS) – the institutional profile, missions, and visions of UAFS as a regional university. Policies and strategies for addressing the socioeconomic disparity, faculty gender, and racial disparities and cultural competency awareness at UAFS are also highlighted in this section. Other approaches including targeted efforts to recruit and retain underrepresented minority students, provision of financial assistance for students from low-income families, and a creative “Math-up” curriculum innovation to promote inclusive and broad participation in STEM at UAFS are highlighted in the latter section of the chapter. Formation of alliances between UAFS, local K–12 school districts, and governmental and non-governmental agencies to promote broad participation in STEM at UAFS are discussed. The last section of the chapter provides recommendations for adaptation and sustainability of strategies and efforts aimed at transforming national STEM departments for inclusion.

Many K-12 teachers teach difficult topics as part of their curricula, and discussions of difficult topics are common across grade levels and content areas. As teachers increasingly engage with difficult topics in their classrooms, the need for high-quality professional learning experiences has also grown. In response, the purpose of this article is to introduce an emerging partnership between the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Initiative at Penn State and the Red Lion Area School District (Red Lion, Pennsylvania), conceptualized from the outset with an explicit focus on intentionally engaging in collaborative, inquiry-based professional learning surrounding difficult topics in formalized curricula and within educational practice.

The article briefly describes how the partners came together, then provides a high-level overview of how they approached their first year of collaboration. Next, the partners’ adaptation of inquiry-based professional learning is outlined. The article concludes by discussing lessons learned from the first year of partnering and implications for scholarship in the areas of school-university partnerships, inquiry-based professional learning, and difficult topics.

The article observes that it took educators participating in a difficult-topics inquiry community an entire year to begin shifting ownership of inquiry to K-12 students. It illustrates how school-university partnerships can be used to support difficult-topics inquiry and raises new questions about the role of difficult topics in partnership work.

The article contributes an original example to the literature that demonstrates how inquiry-based professional learning focused on difficult topics can provide a powerful basis for forming a school-university partnership.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a university-multi-school district partnership that positively affected the lives of P-12 immigrant, migrant and refugee students and their parents through an iterative collaboration of talent and resources among institutions.

This is a case study describing a university-school partnership grant-funded program detailing the processes, products, and implications for policy and practice.

University faculty and public school educators must work through intentional, contextually informed partnerships. It is through these partnerships that scarce resources of time, talent, and funds can be used wisely to build sustainable systems to educate students in K-12 schools and prepare future leaders for this work.

This is a case study limited to the suburban Chicagoland area. Generalities to other communities cannot be directly made.

This study builds on the extant literature of university-school district partnerships and sustainable leadership theory by exploring the processes for creating iterative and individualized structures that benefit both university and public school districts. This study implores universities to re-examine priorities and purpose, especially within schools and colleges of education, in order to remain viable, relevant institutions for positive school improvement.

In the past five years, state education agencies (SEAs) have increased the number of social and emotional learning (SEL) policies, oftentimes engaging stakeholders across the state. However, few use multiple sources of stakeholder engagement data to develop and improve their SEL standards and resources (Yoder, Dusenbury, Martinez-Black, & Weissberg, 2020). This chapter describes the experience of a nonprofit research organization supporting an SEA and a volunteer workgroup in Washington state to gather and use several forms of stakeholder input and feedback in developing statewide SEL guidance for K-12 educators. Operating from a research–practice partnership framework (Coburn & Penuel, 2016), the team assisted the workgroup members in applying both an ecological systems theory perspective (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006) and an equity lens to their work through an iterative process of data collection, interpretation, and use. This chapter describes the process and outcomes of this research–practice partnership and provides examples of how the workgroup incorporated stakeholder input and feedback into the development of SEL guidance and resources. We offer insights and lessons learned from these efforts to expand the perspectives represented in SEL research and policymaking. Our aim is to highlight the importance of stakeholder engagement to ensure that SEL guidance considers the priorities and values of diverse communities, especially historically marginalized communities. We hope to encourage more research–practice partnerships to investigate and amplify community perspectives in SEL.

Why do K-12 schools not perform better in educating English Language Learners (ELLs)? Part of the problem lies with higher education: We continue to produce pre-service teachers who are not prepared for today’s multilingual student population and, more importantly, most currently practicing teachers lack any such preparation.

This study investigated a teacher leadership program created by a partnership between a large US urban district, their teachers’ union and a university. We were part of an action-research partnership that examined the program’s implementation.

We employed a hermeneutic phenomenology methodology and mixed-method data collection methods and analysis strategies to understand the experiences of program participants. Data included interviews with program participants, union leaders and district administrators along with an analysis of projects that participants created during the program.

Teacher leadership programs were legitimized through diverse stakeholder collaboration, and involvement of a university partner was viewed as a value-add for teachers. Formalized teacher leadership programs professionalize teachers through expanding professional networks, developing leadership skills and lifting teachers’ voices. When teacher leader work is directed towards school improvement, teachers’ unique perspectives yield varied problems of practice and goals in ways that help schools address these problems.

This study has implications for districts seeking to create teacher leadership opportunities and for districts and universities seeking to partner for in-service professional learning opportunities.

This study underscores the role effective district-union-university partnerships can play in fostering pipelines for teacher leader development, which can better position school improvement efforts to be sustained over time.

This paper shares findings from a multi-year literacy professional development partnership between a school district and university (2014–2019). We share this case of a Literacy Cohort initiative as an example of cross-institutional professional development situated within several of NAPDS’ nine essentials, including professional learning and leading, boundary-spanning roles and reflection and innovation (NAPDS, 2021).

We asked, “In what ways did the Cohort initiative create conditions for community and collaboration in the service of meaningful literacy reforms?” Drawing on social design methodology (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010), we sought to generate and examine the educational change associated with this multi-year initiative. Our data set included programmatic data, interviews (N = 30) and artifacts of literacy teaching, learning and leading.

Our findings reflect the emphasis areas that are important to educators in the partnership: diversity by design, building relationships through collaboration and rooting literacy reforms in teacher leadership. Our discussion explores threads of reciprocity, simultaneous renewal and boundary-spanning leadership and their role in sustaining partnerships over time.

This paper contributes to our understanding of building and sustaining a cohort model of multi-year professional development through the voices, perspectives and experiences of teachers, faculty and district administrators.

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.

Many researchers partner with schools but may be unfamiliar with practices for initiating contact and sustaining relationships with school leaders. Partnering with schools requires significant effort from the researcher to nurture communication and trust. This can pose challenges for researchers who are new to the field, have relocated to a new university or need to rebuild relationships due to transitions in school staffing.

In this mixed-methods study, we interviewed and surveyed school and district leaders in Delaware to learn how researchers can best communicate and form relationships with schools and districts.

We found no singular best method exists to initiate contact with schools and districts. Rather, researchers should consider the unique needs of the local context. Leaders’ decision to participate in research was most influenced by their own interest in the research topic, alignment with schools’ needs and researchers’ willingness to build a relationship with the local education agency.

Despite broad acknowledgment about the importance of school–university partnerships, few studies directly engage educators in discussing their goals, preferences and needs when working with researchers. We sought to formalize an understanding of best practices researchers can consider when initiating contact and building relationships with schools, directly from the perspective of school and district leaders. Developing these understandings from practitioners ensures the information authentically represents the perspectives of those who researchers seek to connect with, rather than assumptions of the researcher.