Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Purpose In the Fall of 2019, Marietta College and Marietta City Schools, in Marietta, Ohio, piloted a program to improve literacy knowledge and pedagogy through completing LETRS training, a two-year literacy professional development based on the science of reading, as peers. Design/methodology/approach This project was aligned to effective professional development research that states better trainings are content-specific, allow support and collaboration and are ongoing throughout the school year (Blank and de las Alas, 2009; Darling-Hammond, Hyler, and Gardener, 2017) and respect participants work/life schedules (Bigsby and Firestone, 2017). Findings Some benefits of this collaboration were that teachers, college faculty and teacher candidates were able to communicate more effectively about literacy because we all had shared background knowledge and spoke the same language when it came to literacy. We were also able to make more meaningful clinical experiences for our teacher candidates because we created a stronger connection between the knowledge and pedagogy taught in students’ literacy courses and the practices they saw in real classrooms. Inservice teachers saw the college faculty and teacher candidates as strong partners, which greatly strengthened our clinical preparation. Practical implications The paper includes implications for the development of stronger partnerships between teacher preparation program faculty and school partnership faculty and more authentic and meaningful clinical experiences for teacher candidates. Originality/value This project shows how meaningful partnerships and clinical experiences can be created when partnership faculty are seen as peers.
Institution: Utah Valley University
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4402365842