Case 3: Cross-Institutional Collaboration for United Voices in Teacher Education Policy

The complex work of teacher educators lives inside and outside PreK–12 classrooms and school buildings, in and out of institutions of higher education or school–university partnerships, and in and outside boundaries of teaching, teacher education, or educational leadership (Burns & Badiali, 2016; Cochran-Smith et al., 2014; Cochran-Smith et al., 2016). In this chapter, we highlight collaboration in and across such boundaries to influence the profession of teaching and inform the work of teacher education as a profession. In our case of collaboration for advocacy and the profession, specific collaboration among teacher educators and other education professionals resulted in administrative rule and laws guiding the profession of teaching and educator preparation for the state. Through this case, we look back across the push–pull of tensions in initiating collaboration among each educator preparation program in the state, State Department of Education officials, State Board of Education representation, policy-makers, and teacher educators and teacher education administrators. Involving this many stakeholders certainly brings the complexity of the work of a teacher educator to the foreground. Over the course of more than a decade, we have established a recognized state partnership of teacher education professionals who influence policy and practice across our state.