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Post-COVID-19, public K–12 schools are still facing the consequences of the years of interrupted learning. Schools serving minoritized students are particularly at risk for facing challenges with academics, behavior and student social emotional health. The university counseling programs are in positions to build capacity in urban schools while also supporting counselors-in-training through service-learning opportunities.

The following conceptual manuscript demonstrates how counselor education counseling programs and public schools can harness the capacity-building benefits of university–school partnerships. While prevalent in fields like special education, counselor educators have yet to heed the hall to participate in mutually beneficial partnership programs.

Using the multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) and the components of the university–school partnerships, counselor educators and school stakeholders can work together to support student mental health, school staff well-being and counselor-in-training competence.

The benefits and opportunities within the university–school partnerships are well documented. However, few researchers have described a model to support partnerships between the university counseling programs and urban elementary schools. We provide a best practice model using the principles of university–school partnerships and a school’s existing MTSS framework.

The chapters in this book focus on how university-school-community (USC) partnerships are implemented in colleges, universities, school systems, and community organizations around the world. The purpose of these multi-disciplinary programs is to reform teaching and learning experiences for all participants. Using case studies and other empirical research, this volume presents a broad and in-depth overview on a variety of USC partnerships to assist educators in the process of transforming organizations using innovative approaches to improve community and school system development. This chapter will provide an overview to this volume and establish a framework for better understanding the nature of university partnerships to enhance community and school system development.

Regarding the implementation of public policies focused on teacher education, it can be noted that in recent years the Brazilian Federal Government has intensified its proposal for programs focused on initial teacher training. Since 2007 in Brazil, the Institutional Scholarship for Teaching Initiation Program (PIBID) has become a public policy organization focused on teacher education. Through analyzing the implementation of these projects approved in the PIBID environment, it is possible to note that different activities have been developed in the university-school partnerships and that these joint actions supply a multiplicity of collaborative experiences. The main contribution that the PIBID performs for future teachers is that of conceiving a different educational space, which considers the school as a locus of teacher learning. Through this partnership, future teachers can experience a period understood as “pre-teaching,” during which it is possible to project themselves into their future teaching profession, experiencing their dilemmas, challenges, and successes. We can also single out the involvement of the teachers in the partner schools in the development of research into their own practices and the movement of universities in (re)thinking their teacher training courses.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a new conceptual model integrating research, university-community partnerships, and an innovative undergraduate team approach to more effectively and efficiently address social problems while enhancing university-community relations and providing valuable learning experiences for students.

The paper describes the rationale for, and the key components, steps, and activities involved in piloting the conceptual model of university-community engagement. The model integrates research, community engagement, and undergraduate development and education along with ongoing evaluation by the relevant stakeholders.

As illustrated in a brief case study presentation, the model has significant promise in meeting several university and community objectives simultaneously. Specifically, it focusses on community needs by addressing a mutually agreed upon social issue, it builds and strengthens university-community relationships as a partnership of equals, and it promotes undergraduate development and learning in a way that integrates knowledge and service to society. Specific outcomes in each area are summarized.

This approach is a viable option for university and college professors interested in synthesizing several important foci: research, developing and sustaining university-community partnerships, and undergraduate development and learning.

The initial experience with the model indicates that it is an efficient and effective means for colleges and universities to simultaneously meet the goals of education, individual and collective citizenship, community engagement, and research productivity.

This special issue reveals how lesson study in China continues to serve as a powerful platform to support change in teaching. The papers included in this issue explore how university faculty members and researchers support teachers to cross boundaries resulting from the introduction of key competencies-based (hexin suyang 核心素养) curriculum reform (KCR).

The theme of continuity and change is examined against the backdrop of Chinese lesson study's (CLS's) consistent supporting role in enabling curriculum reform. These analyses make use of concepts involved in understanding boundary crossing, such as using boundary objects and their roles, to help make sense of the new theories, tools, and resources as well as relationships engendered in responding to the reform's demand. While recognizing the continuity at play in Chinese LS, the authors use the lens of learning at the boundary of research-practice partnerships (RPPs) (Farrell et al., 2022) to contemplate the future of CLS.

The papers touch on three major themes: (1) the role of university-school partnerships in meeting the new demands of key competencies reform; (2) resourceful tools, strategies and structures to support boundary crossing for teachers; and (3) roles and relationships for mutual learning in university-school partnerships. Together these three themes, considered across the papers in this issue, point to the need to redefine CLS to engender versatility and hybridity and to enlist mutual learning relationships in future university-school partnerships. Such redefinition positions lesson study to both continue and change.

The papers in this issue are expected to promote mutualist learning in future CLS research-practice partnerships. To do so, research needs to move from focusing on change of a single case teacher to clarifying what experts and teachers each learn from the LS and from each other. Attention also needs to focus on the collaborative discourse and ways such discourse is able to promote mutual learning, emotional support in facing change as well as critical and constructive problem solving.

Practically, to better support boundary crossing, this special issue encourages academics and teachers to identify and work around boundary objects and their enabling features to enhance knowledge and identity of both university and teacher participants for more effective research-practice partnerships.

This special issue offers a pioneering set of studies that contributes to an in-depth understanding of how CLS is supporting the current competencies-based reform in China. It also provides concrete future directions for research and practice to enhance university-school partnerships' response to reform.

An ever-increasing emphasis is being placed on the concept of cross-institutional educational initiatives. Among these are university–school partnerships, seen as possessing immense multidimensional potential. The model of university–school partnership espouses distinctive advantages: it promotes close collaboration on an array of pedagogical elements, a manifold of opportunities for inter-professional learning, a unique course delivery, and the development of innovative curriculum materials. There is a consensus that effective teaching calls for more than possession of craft skills and knowledge, but should go beyond traditional pedagogical bounds, in which the innovation in new educational models is embedded in a nexus of relationships involving close multi-faceted, cross-institutional collaborations, incorporating elements of informal education. The proposed chapter aims to address the theoretical discourse and practical application of such partnerships, guided by the conviction that an effective partnership constructs new enabling structures that span the boundaries of school/university, placing an increased focus on learning for all stakeholders. It aims to supplement the existing theoretical discourse by presenting an implemented cross-institutional partnership as a case-study – a university class of intercultural competence – undertaken in cooperation among the Institute of European Studies, Jagiellonian University, and High School No. 8 in Kraków. The case study aims to illustrate how a cross-institutional partnership contributed to the development and implementation of innovative and active teaching methods, placing a particular emphasis on elements of informal education. Through a variety of methods, such as outgoing seminars, peer-mediation, and city games, the outlined partnership model serves as an effective example of innovative practices in higher education.

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.

The contribution explores the methodology, strategies and activities of inter-institutional partnership among university, school, territory initiated by the Degree Courses in Primary Education Sciences of the University of L’Aquila. It illustrates the experiences of an active partnership undertaken at the five-year, single-cycle Degree Course after the reform introduced in Italy by the law 249 of September 2010 aimed at encouraging local development in a national and international perspective (Bologna Process, 1999). These activities focus on the need to strengthen the cultural and professional profile of future teachers through curricular and extracurricular activities involving the use of cultural heritage goods, tangible and intangible, of the territory. The aim is to renew methodological approaches to ‘science teaching’ through the use of appropriate technologies that make it possible to realize the process of teaching-learning adequate to provide the multi-lettered of the XXI Century with sets of skills and knowledge more and more updated. The contribution focuses, in particular, on the project titled ‘Museum in … click! – Cognitive processes and new technologies applied to archaeological heritage in museums for cultural fruition qualitatively appreciable’. This project involved University, Superintendence of Archaeological Heritage (SAH) of Abruzzo and local schools in a partnership where teachers and students from schools of the territory were busy in direct training to build educational proposals and multimedia products for their peers to improve the quality of use of cultural goods involved. The project, funded by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism – Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo (MIBACT), provides a good example of practices within a partnership model that feeds a teaching system where the different skills of the stakeholders interact inside a common cultural area pursuing the same goals.

In 2008 the University of Tasmania and the Tasmanian Department of Education (TasED) entered into a high-level Partnership agreement. The Partnership in Teaching Excellence, funded by the Federal Smarter Schools National Partnerships – Improving Teacher Quality agreement, included higher education funded places for teachers wishing to complete a Master’s degree, and at the other end of the profession, an innovative alternative teacher education pathway for final-year pre-service teachers (PSTs), run as a competitive scholarship program. The intent of the program was threefold, to assist PSTs in becoming quality reflective practitioners with the capacity to work in high needs schools, explore ways of improving mentor teachers and PSTs’ reciprocal relationships, and increase the retention of teachers in TasED schools. Begun at a time of intense industrial action, the Partnership program appeared rather one-sided with little apparent benefit conferring to the University and was at all times highly contentious.

Using Kagan’s six stages of collaboration as a framework, and drawing on interviews with the first cohort of scholarship PSTs, and a range of personal files documenting the beginnings of the Partnership, including minutes of meetings, PST results, and unpublished reviews commissioned by the TasED, this chapter explores the beginnings of the Partnership, as together those on the ground worked out what “Partnership” meant. It presents an evaluation of those initial successful first years, including the learning outcomes of the PSTs and discusses the lessons learned for establishing future university/school Partnership. The Partnership program continued to 2013, when Federal funding for the project was discontinued.

A recent President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology report predicts a shortfall of 1 million college graduates in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields in the United States over the next several years (2012). Recommendations to address this include diversifying the STEM workforce, which is plagued by a lack of gender diversity (Hill, Corbett, & St. Rose, 2010). University–School partnerships are crucial in developing a pipeline that moves interested primary and secondary students (aged 5-18) into majoring and eventually working in STEM fields. The lower involvement of women in STEM fields is multi-factorial and affects all communities, including Abilene, Texas. Abilene Independent School District’s STEM high school, the Academy for Technology, Engineering, and Science (ATEMS) consistently has a female student population at or below 35%. A local university, Abilene Christian University (ACU), has struggled to increase female undergraduate students in STEM fields. Creating a University–School partnership between ACU and ATEMS aided in building a STEM pipeline for girls in the Abilene community. In this chapter, we describe this collaboration between ACU and ATEMS and highlight the key features that led to success of the collaboration.