Chapter 5: Collaborating on Problems of Practice: A University/District Partnership Model

Many professional organization and state legislatures have encouraged universities and school districts to create partnerships to better align the content and curriculum taught by university faculty, who are preparing teachers and leaders, with the expectations and needs of districts leaders, who are employing those professionals (Darling-Hammond et al., 2007; Mendels, 2016; Orr et al., 2010; Young et al., 2002). Many of these partnerships are focused on the preparation and development of educators’ preservice experiences, and there is a growing body of literature about these partnerships. However, there is limited research on school/university partnerships that provide support to in-service educators, particularly school leaders. This chapter describes one such university/district partnership model. The partnership, implemented in a Western urban district, used design thinking (DT) (Kelley & Kelley, 2013) and improvement science (IS) (Bryk et al., 2015) to enhance the capacity of school leaders to engage in quick cycles of improvement to build new patterns of behavior and alter the trajectory of low-performing schools.