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The scholarship notion fostered by the Montgomery County Schools is a model that can be emulated by any school district. It demonstrates how both the students and the schools can save money and provide learning opportunities by working together in a symbiotic relationship.

Each school/university partnership is unique. Alicia Haller (2011), of the Illinois State Board of Education states “Learning to work in new ways means that the member organizations of the partnership cannot simply continue to do business as usual. Partnership work, therefore, is labor-intensive, creative, and messy. It takes time to iron out the bugs” (Haller, and Brown 2011).

Adopt-a-school

One informal program that met the needs of Reagan Elementary School in Clovis, California, took the latter approach and met with some success. The university offered incidental consulting, mentoring and coaching to this new Central Valley school with a new principal and a new staff put together from a list of teacher volunteers in the district. This created an instant need for team building and vision development and clarification. The university helped the staff in developing these basics by becoming a member of their leadership team. In this case; three faculty members representing the teacher education and educational administration departments of National University met with the principal and his leadership team in the morning before school started once each month for six months until the school was up and running. The faculty was introduced to the school through a student teacher who was assigned to this elementary school of highly diverse staff and student body. The faculty shared research on team building and the results of the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll on the public's perception of public school education. Additional meetings were held via e-mails and teleconferencing. Professional memberships were suggested such as the National Teachers Association and Phil Delta Kappa. The student teacher assigned was already a member of the Association of California School Administrators Student Charter group. The student teacher was also recruited to be a member of the leadership teams giving the group a student perspective on the various education issues discussed.

The results of this initiative resulted in increased communication with the university and a cost savings for the school by not having to hire an educational consultant to help in their transition. Time was saved by teachers not having to travel to conferences to stay up-to-date on current research. The university benefited by having positive exposure to a large number of prospective master’s candidates.

In the San Diego area, a private school invited the University in, also at the request of a student teacher. Here the principal was interested in offering more individualized programs. A cross-functional team of teachers from the university met to develop a strategy for the administrator and then met with the staff from the private school, introducing them to differentiated instruction and some specific computer models. This relationship has opened the door to more dialogue with the teachers and administrator and given the university an opportunity to promote their programs as well.

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Source:  OpenStax, Educational leadership and administration: teaching and program development, volume 23, 2011. OpenStax CNX. Sep 08, 2011 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11358/1.4
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