Chapter 3: Professional Learning Community Practices and Characteristics Supporting Teacher Candidate and Student Learning Within Selected Professional Development Schools: Features, Impacts, and Research

Many challenges are facing our public schools, as is evident from local, state, and national media reports. Impoverished job skills; increased public education accountability; continued rigorous state, national, and international assessments; increasingly more diverse student populations; unqualified teachers; and gaps in student achievement are all common lead stories that have gained the attention of national media, popular magazines, educational books, journals and reports, and national, state, and local politicians (Camera, 2015; Darling-Hammond, 2010; Dillon, 2010; Network for Public Education, 2016). These recurring themes cause us to question how we can continually reinvent public school and university collaborative efforts to support the needs of students and faculty and to promote student learning in the context of an ever-changing world and an increasingly more rigorous accountability system.