School–University Partnerships Vol. 3, No. 2 19

The Penn State–State College Elementary

Professional Development School

Collaborative: A ProfileJim NolanBernard BadialiCarla Zembal-SaulRebecca BurnsJacqueline EdmondsonPennsylvania State University

Deirdre BauerDonna QueeneyMarion WhelandState College Area School District

ABSTRACT: The 2009 Professional Development Schools National Conference recognized theprofessional development school partnership between Pennsylvania State University and StateCollege Area School District for its meritorious partnership work over time and so named it oneof the three recipients of the first-ever National Association for Professional DevelopmentSchools Award for Exemplary Professional Development School Achievement. This article de-scribes the work of this renowned school–university partnership as it relates to the nine essen-tials of professional development school work.

The purpose of this article is to present a profileof the elementary professional developmentschool (PDS) collaborative between Penn StateUniversity and the State College Area SchoolDistrict. A comprehensive overview of our PDSwork is beyond the scope of this article, so ourintent is to provide a glimpse of those featuresthat seem to make a difference in the outcomesthat our collaborative produces for a variety ofstakeholders.

Our portrait is divided into five sections:The first provides a brief history of our partner-

ship and articulates the goals that lie at the heartof our collaboration. The second focuses on theday-to-day work of the collaborative in terms ofeducating preservice teachers, providing profes-sional development for veteran teachers andteacher educators, and nurturing innovativepractices. The third describes the various sup-port structures that are necessary to sustain andenhance the core work of the collaborative. Thefourth explains how we evaluate and dissemi-nate our practices. The final section summarizeswhat we see as our proudest accomplishments.

History and Goals

The relationship between Penn State’s Col-lege of Education and the State College AreaSchool District was not very collaborativewhen initial discussions began in 1993 aboutthe development of a partnership. After 5years of planning, working together on smallprojects, and building interpersonal and in-terinstitutional relationships, our PDS part-nership started in earnest in the fall of 1998with 14 interns and mentors in two elemen-tary schools.

The mission of our elementary PDS col-laborative, which encompasses and extendsthe mission of each partner, is expressed by ourfour goals: first, enhance the educational expe-riences of all learners; second, ensure high-quality induction into the profession for newteachers; third, engage in furthering our ownprofessional growth as teachers and teachereducators; and, fourth, educate the next gener-ation of teacher educators.

The Core Work of Our PDS Collaborative

As suggested by our goals, three major fociconstitute the heart of our work as a PDS col-laborative: preparing future teachers, engagingveteran teachers and teacher educators in on-going professional development, and nurtur-ing innovative practices that influence ourwork as well as that of others. In carrying outthese functions, we constantly strive to en-hance the educational experiences of childrenand engage in preparing the next generationof teacher educators.

Preparing Future Educators

Each year, approximately 60 senior-class ele-mentary education majors participate as in-terns in the PDS program. These interns areplaced in 10 elementary and 2 middle schoolsin the State College Area School District. In-terns agree to abandon the Penn State aca-demic calendar and follow the school district

calendar instead. The internship year openswith a 2-week all-day orientation to the in-ternship, called Jumpstart. Interns begin work-ing with their mentor teachers on the first in-service day and continue until the last schoolday for students, in June. During the fall se-mester, interns are enrolled in four methodscourses—science, social studies, math, andclassroom learning environments—as well as afield experience. They spend 4 days a week intheir classrooms; the 5th day is devoted to twomethods classes that are conducted in a schoolsetting. In addition, interns have methodsclass after school each week and spend time ina partner classroom at a different grade level.

During the spring semester, interns spend5 full days per week in their classroom andpartner classroom, attending one or two after-school seminars per week. Each internalso conducts a teacher inquiry project withthe support of her or his mentor and profes-sional development associate (PDA; title forwhat is often called the university supervisor,the intent of which is explained in the sec-tion on innovative roles). In the beginning ofthe year, interns spend time observing theirmentors and other teachers and engaging inindividual and small-group instruction usingplans developed by the mentor teacher. Asthe year progresses, the interns assume full re-sponsibility for planning instruction and en-gage in coteaching with their mentors. OurPDS advocates a coteaching model, as op-posed to individual teaching, for the majorityof instructional time because we believe thatcoteaching reduces the student-to-teacher ra-tio and enhances learning experiences for allstudents (Goal 1).

During the school year, interns fully par-ticipate in all school activities, including Backto School Night; student-led goal-setting con-ferences in the fall and spring; schoolwide fac-ulty meetings; weekly grade-level meetings;periodic unit-planning meetings with men-tors, other teachers, and curriculum supportpersonnel; response-to-intervention activities;all professional development and in-serviceactivities; and individualized education planand instructional support team meetings.They also participate in Parent–Teacher Orga-

20 JIM NOLAN ET AL.

nization meetings and other school commu-nity activities and gatherings.

Each intern contributes in a significantway to the school district as a whole. Throughthe social studies methods course, every interndesigns and films a public service announce-ment that focuses on an issue of importance toelementary children—bullying, makingfriends, not smoking, for example. The internsthen use the announcement with their stu-dents and with other classes within the build-ing to promote awareness of healthy choicesand healthy lifestyles. Another social studiesactivity asks each intern to study a hero and tocreate two examples of extraordinary socialstudies materials for use at a designated gradelevel to help students understand the life andcontributions of this famous individual. Thehero project activities that the interns createare then shared with all elementary and mid-dle school teachers in the district at an in-service day during the spring semester.Through their social studies and science meth-ods courses, all the interns serve as teachers fora field trip to a local state park that was oncethe site of an iron furnace. The interns leadscience activities focusing on the water qualityand health of the local stream, and they facil-itate a simulated archaeological dig under thesupervision of the park ranger, who has expert-ise in archeology. All district fifth-grade stu-dents participate in the field trip.

Finally, many of our interns participate inand even lead special activities at the variousschools, including service learning projects,environmental projects, and a host of all-school assemblies and special events.

Professional Development

Professional development occurs on an ongo-ing basis for mentor teachers, administrators,curriculum support personnel, doctoral stu-dents, and university faculty, in a variety ofways. All professional development activitiesare open to all school personnel. As explainedin the section on collaborative structures, pro-fessional development teams composed ofpreK–12 and university faculty plan, deliver,and evaluate professional development experi-

ences, some of which are offered as graduate-level courses. To date, such courses have beenoffered in science, mathematics, social studies,classroom learning environments, teacher in-quiry, technology, and mentoring. Courses areoffered for variable credit and typically includeclass meetings, readings, journal writing, and afollow-up project that requires application ofideas to the classroom context.

From the inception of our PDS partner-ship, teacher inquiry has stood at the centerof our work, as a form of professional develop-ment and knowledge generation. Each PDSintern conducts a teacher inquiry project andreports on it to the larger community at ourannual Teacher Inquiry Conference. As acondition of becoming a mentor, each mentorteacher agrees to engage in inquiry on an an-nual basis in one of three ways: by conductingone’s own inquiry project, by conducting acollaborative inquiry project with the intern,or by supporting the intern’s inquiry. Mentorteachers who conduct their own inquiries orconduct joint inquiry projects with their in-terns also present their findings at the confer-ence. Inquiry in the PDS is not limited tomentors and interns. Principals, curriculumpersonnel, doctoral students, and universityfaculty also conduct personal inquiry projectseach year and present their findings at theconference. Abstracts of all teacher inquiryprojects and copies of inquiry papers from2004 to the present may be found on our PDSwebsite (http://www.ed.psu.edu/pds). Engag-ing in and supporting teacher inquiry is apowerful form of job-embedded professionaldevelopment.

In 2004, we recognized that we could ex-pand our focus on job-embedded professionaldevelopment by creating opportunities forcritical friends groups. We secured money froma small grant to provide training in such workfor 24 teachers, administrators, doctoral stu-dents, and university faculty. Formation ofcritical friends groups immediately followedthe intensive training, although we use the la-bel conversation-as-inquiry groups given thatcritical friends groups implies an additional formof inquiry-oriented, job-embedded profes-sional development. Conversation-as-inquiry

Penn State–State College Collaborative 21

groups are still functioning within the PDSand so include participants from a variety ofroles within the school district and university.

We regularly engage in job-embedded pro-fessional development through weekly internand PDA meetings and monthly mentor andprincipal meetings. These meetings involveproblem-solving activities focused on identify-ing, collecting data on, thinking through, andtaking action on problems, issues, and ques-tions regarding our day-to-day practice, whichis fraught with complexities and dilemmas.We take those complex dilemmas seriouslyand so provide opportunities to reflect onthem as a community. We share what we learnthrough these meetings with the larger PDScommunity through other collaborative struc-tures, such as SLICE (a committee composedof individuals from a variety of organizationalroles) meetings and PDS retreats (we describethese structures later).

We also provide role-taking opportunitieswith support for various individuals within thePDS community. Each year, three classroomteachers are released from their teaching re-sponsibilities to serve as PDAs. These individ-uals serve in the role for a period of 2 or 3 yearsand then return to their classroom teaching re-sponsibilities. They assume new roles, such assupervising interns, teaching methods courses,supporting teacher inquiry, and facilitatingmentor and intern meetings. Taking on thesenew roles within the supportive context of thePDS community creates a powerful learningopportunity. This potential for powerful profes-sional development was a strong motivator forboth partners in creating a temporary PDArole, as opposed to a permanent one. We seethis role as an opportunity to enhance the lead-ership skills of the classroom teachers who as-sume it. Research studies conducted over thepast 4 years have examined PDAs who have re-turned to their classrooms. These studies indi-cate that time as a PDA not only enhancesone’s teaching skills but also provides a teacherwith a much broader perspective on teachingand learning, thereby serving as powerful moti-vation to assume additional leadership roleswithin the school and district.

Innovative Practices

Many innovative practices mark our PDS ini-tiative, including the use of the responsiveclassroom approach, a strong emphasis onteacher leadership as a tool for improvingpractice, and thematic units that integrate so-cial studies and language arts. Space limita-tions force us to limit our focus to three inno-vative and reflective practices, which are thesignature pedagogies of our PDS work: the useof teacher inquiry as a means to promote thedevelopment of adaptive expertise, the use oftechnology to enhance student learning andpreservice teacher development, and the useof inquiry-oriented science teaching to pro-mote students’ conceptual understanding andscientific reasoning.

From the inception of our partnership,teacher inquiry has been a cornerstone of ourwork. As noted previously, all interns conducta teacher inquiry project each year, as do manymentor teachers and PDAs. The purpose ofconducting teacher inquiry, however, is notsimply to complete a project. Our intention isto promote the development of an inquiry ori-entation toward teaching that will result inthe development of adaptive, as opposed toroutine, expertise (Hammerness, Darling-Hammond, & Bransford, 2005). Teachers whohave an inquiry orientation toward their prac-tice are problem finders and problem solvers:They continually ask questions about theirpractice and its impact on students. They col-lect and analyze data systematically to studythe impact of their practice. They learn fromcolleagues, as well as from the professional lit-erature, and they share what they learn fromtheir systematic inquiry with their colleagues.They are knowledge generators as well asknowledge users. Completing the inquiry proj-ects provides an opportunity for interns andmentors to begin using the inquiry-orientedskills with support. Through teacher inquiry,our entire community focuses on assessing andimproving its impact on learners.

In our PDS, we use technology for twopurposes—supporting the growth and devel-opment of interns as teachers (e.g., electronic

22 JIM NOLAN ET AL.

portfolios, video analysis of teaching) and en-hancing children’s meaningful learning of coresubject matter (e.g., webquests, real-time datacollection devices, concept mapping). For thepast 3 years, the College of Education has pro-vided each PDS intern and PDA with a Macnotebook computer and associated software.PDS faculty reconceptualized assignments andin-class experiences to fully integrate thispowerful digital tool set. Interns’ teaching nowreflects innovative and effective uses of tech-nology, and mentor teachers report the bene-fits of having tech-savvy interns in theirclasses. The positive findings associated withthe pilot laptop initiative in the PDS have re-sulted in the large-scale adoption of the initia-tive within the rest of the elementary teachereducation program.

In addition, interns develop two types ofelectronic portfolios that promote reflectionon their growth as beginning teachers. Onetype asks them to provide evidence that theyhave met or exceeded each performance stan-dard on the Penn State Teacher EducationPerformance Framework, including substan-tive justification. The second type asks themto develop a unique platform of assertionsabout high-quality teaching and to provide ev-idence and justification for the efficacy andappropriateness of each assertion. Interns re-visit each electronic portfolio so that they canreflect on their progress and development. Fi-nally, mentors and interns are now using Stu-diocode, a sophisticated digital video analysistool, to study their teaching and its impact onstudents. Although our partnership is markedby the use of innovative practices across sub-ject areas, science is probably the area forwhich we have the most powerful example ofinnovative practice. From the beginning ofthe partnership, we have focused on engagingstudents in scientific inquiry as a means topromote deeper understanding of science con-cepts. This does not mean simply hands-on ac-tivities. Inquiry-oriented science involves stu-dents’ developing questions and hypotheses,designing and conducting experiments to an-swer questions and test hypotheses, analyzingthe resultant data, and then justifying their

conclusions with appropriate evidence and ar-gumentation. Asking students to justify theirideas with evidence has become the hallmarkof science instruction in our PDS and a normin elementary classrooms. Such inquiry-basedscience teaching strategies, as codeveloped byuniversity faculty and mentor teachers, havebeen published in Science & Children and inte-grated into district science curricula.

Supporting the Core Work:Structures, Roles, and Shared Resources

The process of carrying out the significant en-deavors described in the previous section re-quires a tremendous amount of underlyingstructural and cultural support. The develop-ment of collaborative structures, the creation ofnew roles, and the sharing of resources are im-portant considerations in supporting our work.

Collaborative Structures

In contrast to the designers of most PDS sitesacross the nation, who define each schoolbuilding as a separate PDS, we made a con-scious decision to conceive our PDS as onecommunity—a community of mind that is ge-ographically distributed across buildings. Webelieve that such a collaboration is a powerfulvehicle for innovation, inquiry, and reflection.Because we define ourselves as one commu-nity, we find it important to create a variety ofmechanisms to encourage collaboration acrossbuildings to sustain our single community.These collaborative structures play a tremen-dously powerful role in achieving our fourgoals. The appendix depicts these structures.

We have jointly created three related butseparate types of structures that encourage col-laboration, reflection, and communication.The first type sustains our day-to-day work. Itsstructures include weekly intern meetings,monthly mentor meetings, weekly PDA meet-ings, and monthly principal meetings. All in-terns within each building meet on a weekly

Penn State–State College Collaborative 23

basis with their PDAs to discuss how theirwork is progressing and to address any issues,questions, or concerns. Mentors and PDAswithin each building also meet on a monthlybasis, either before or after school, to addressmentors’ issues and questions as well as in-terns’ progress. During their weekly meeting,all PDAs discuss ongoing PDS activities andaddress any issues at their respective buildings.Finally, monthly principal meetings, attendedby all building principals, focus on issues orquestions that arise about general PDS activi-ties and provide opportunities to foster princi-pals’ professional growth through activitiessuch as common readings and critical friendsgroup protocols.

The second type of collaborative structurein our PDS provides a forum for stepping backto reflect on our current work and develop acoherent vision for future efforts. Collabora-tive structures of this type include PDS re-treats, SLICE group meetings, professional de-velopment teamwork, and our PDS alumnigroup. PDS retreats are held each semester andserve as the forum in which the community asa whole reflects on its work, sets an agenda forthe future, and makes decisions about broadPDS issues. Decision making about the PDS ingeneral resides in this whole-communitymeeting, with all decisions made through con-sensus, as opposed to voting.

The SLICE group, which meets every 6weeks, was formed to help bridge the districtcurriculum and content methods courses, andit includes curriculum personnel, principals,teachers, doctoral students, and university fac-ulty. This group also works each fall to planthe fifth-grade field trip previously described.

Professional development teams were es-tablished in 1999 after the 1st year of PDS im-plementation, when it became apparent thatsimply changing the location of methodscourses from the campus to the school site wasnot sufficient in adapting them to take full ad-vantage of the powerful opportunities thatcould be afforded by school–university collab-oration. Changing the location was symboli-cally important, but the content of the courseshad to be adapted as well. Teams consisting ofuniversity faculty, teachers, principals, and

curriculum support personnel were created toredesign the intern methods courses and tohelp deliver and evaluate the redesignedcourses. In addition, the professional develop-ment teams support interns and mentors inconducting teacher inquiry in the various con-tent areas.

Our PDS alumni network is the final col-laborative structure that provides reflectionand vision. The College of Education at PennState has established an affiliated programgroup for our PDS alumni, which entitlesthem to a seat on the Board of Directors of theCollege of Education Alumni Society andwhich provides funding to support PDSalumni activities. Our alumni have created adedicated space on our PDS website; they pub-lish a PDS alumni newsletter; and they haveconducted two PDS alumni reunions. Theyprovide valuable information to us concerningtheir level of preparation for entry into teach-ing, and they consistently suggest ideas thatwould improve the quality of our program. Inaddition, they act as resources, assisting newinterns in securing teaching positions.

The third type of structure that we havecreated celebrates our PDS work and unitesand strengthens our community. In additionto the annual Teacher Inquiry Conference,three events celebrate and ritualize ourwork—the Community Picnic, the OpeningCeremony, and the Pinning Ceremony. Theyare embedded in our yearly PDS calendar, andparticipants from all levels of our PDS part-nership attend them. Rituals and celebrationsare critical events in the life of any commu-nity and so play an essential role in bindingmembers of the PDS community. The PDSCommunity Picnic occurs every August at alocal park. All members of the community,including mentors, PDAs, principals, teach-ers, and interns, attend the event and enjoypotluck picnic food and an opportunity togreet one another and begin a soft transitioninto the new school year.

During the 1st week of the school year, thewhole community comes together in an open-ing ceremony to welcome the interns to thePDS. Each intern stands with her or his men-tor and pledges to follow the National Educa-

24 JIM NOLAN ET AL.

tion Association’s professional code of ethics.In addition, university and school district ad-ministrators share remarks and articulate theircommitment to and support for the PDS part-nership. Methods PDAs also provide a quickoverview of each methods course.

The final event of the year is our treasuredPinning Ceremony. At this evening dinner,mentors pin their interns with a special PDSpin—specifically, the National Association forthe Education of Young Children’s Circle ofChildren. Remarks are then shared by interns,mentors, administrators from the universityand district, and a member of the Board ofSchool Directors. To commemorate the schoolyear after the formal dinner, school cohortsperform skits and songs, often depicting insidejokes that poke fun at us as a community.

New Roles

Creating a PDS partnership typically re-quires the development of new roles, giventhat the PDS is a hybrid organization thatlives at the intersection of two bureaucraticorganizations—namely, a school district anda university—that have compatible but dif-fering purposes and needs.

As noted earlier, the PDA was one of thenew roles that we created at the beginning ofour partnership. Our intent in using this termwas to communicate that everyone in the PDSis committed to supporting the learning ofpreK–12 students, preservice teachers, veteranteachers, and teacher educators through ongo-ing job-embedded professional development.Some PDAs teach methods courses to interns;others serve as classroom supervisors for men-tors and interns; and a third group teachesmethods courses and supervises in classrooms.Both university and preK–12 faculty play allthree types of PDA roles. By mutual agree-ment (as noted in a memorandum of under-standing between the two partners), threeclassroom teachers are released full-time eachyear to serve in the PDA role, along with doc-toral students and university faculty.

The PDS cofacilitator is the second inno-vative role shared by preK–12 and universityfaculty. In the initial years of the partnership,

the facilitator or director of the PDS was a uni-versity faculty member. As our partnershipmatured and our focus on teacher leadershipstrengthened, we realized that it was impor-tant, both symbolically and operationally, tohave cofacilitators. Since that time in2004–2005, classroom teachers and universityfaculty members have worked collaborativelyas cofacilitators who organize and oversee theday-to-day logistics of the PDS operation.

Shared Resources

The university and the school district share re-sources in a number of ways. Each partnermaintains line items in its budget as they per-tain to the partnership. One of the costs thatthe partners share is that for teacher PDAs,who are released from their classroom duties toengage in full-time PDA work. For two ofthese PDAs, the university pays the cost of re-placing the veteran teachers with beginningteachers (including salary and predictablebenefits). The school district totally absorbsthe cost for releasing the third veteran teacher.Each year, one of the released PDAs serves asPDS cofacilitator.

A second group of shared costs revolvesaround intern selection. Preservice teacherswho wish to become part of the PDS duringtheir senior year experience a two-part appli-cation process. In the first step, they completean online application. Teams comprising fiveindividuals, four teachers/administrators andone university faculty member, rate each ap-plication. The second step of the process con-sists of an after-school interview with a teamof five individuals of similar composition. Theuniversity pays the costs for the developmentand maintenance of the electronic applicationsystem, whereas the school district compen-sates mentor teachers for their after-schooltime during the interview process.

The school district and university alsoshare the financial costs for a variety of eventsthroughout the year. The school board and theState College Area Education Association paythe cost for an induction day professional de-velopment experience, including a luncheonto which new hires within the school district

Penn State–State College Collaborative 25

are invited, as well as PDS interns and allPDAs. In turn, the university provides the fi-nancial support for the annual Teacher InquiryConference, the Opening Ceremony, and thePinning Ceremony.

Disseminating the work of the PDS on astate level and a national level is an importantgoal of our partnership. Universities typicallyprovide funding for faculty members to makepresentations at national conferences, giventhat this is an expected part of the tenure andpromotion process. School districts, however,often have great difficulty in providing the fi-nancial resources to allow staff members tomake presentations at national conferences.Fortunately, the school district and the univer-sity have effectively worked together to sup-port travel to local, state, and national confer-ences. In recognition of the difficulty infinding funds to support teacher presentationsat national conferences, PDS alumni, mentorteachers, administrators, curriculum person-nel, university faculty, and others created aPDS Endowment Fund within the State Col-lege Area School District Community Endow-ment in 2008. The endowment has alreadyreached the minimum level of $25,000 andwill begin supporting teacher travel to na-tional conferences in 2010.

Evaluating and DisseminatingOur Practices

We have developed a variety of mechanisms,internal and external, to examine the impactof our practice. The annual Teacher InquiryConference serves as a powerful mechanism forreporting on approximately 80 teacher inquiryprojects conducted by mentors and interns toexamine the impact of their practices. Oneteacher inquiry, conducted by a pair of mentorteachers, won the 2002 Teacher ResearchAward from the Northeast Educational Re-search Association, whereas a second teacherinquiry, completed by a principal, won the2008 Claudia Ballach Teacher Research Awardfrom the PDS Special Interest Group of theAmerican Educational Research Association.

We also conduct a yearly evaluation of ourPDS efforts. All interns and mentors completea detailed questionnaire that provides forma-tive assessment data about the various aspectsof the PDS. Those data are used to makechanges in the program each year. In addition,on an annual basis, we survey all parentswhose children have been taught by interns.Over the 11 years of the PDS, more than4,000 parents have responded to the survey.Based on a scale of 1 to 5 (with 5 being themost positive), all parental survey items showa mean higher than 4.0, with more than halfthe responses for each item rated as 5. Thisdemonstrates remarkable parental support.

In addition to conducting internal in-quiries and evaluations, preK–12 and univer-sity faculty regularly engage in conducting re-search studies that assess the impact of theirwork. They routinely present the results oftheir studies at state and national conferencesand, as noted earlier, have published thesestudies in a variety of scholarly journals fo-cused on teacher education, including theNAPDS Journal, Action in Teacher Education,the Journal of Teacher Education, Teachers Col-lege Record, and the Journal of Research in Sci-ence Teaching, as well as in state journals, suchas PA Teacher Educator. Since 1999, eight doc-toral students at Penn State have completeddissertations on the PDS and its impact, one ofwhich (Silva, 1999) won the Outstanding Dis-sertation Award from the Association ofTeacher Educators. In addition to disseminat-ing our work through conference presenta-tions, publications, and our PDS website, weregularly support emerging PDS sites as theystruggle through the process of developing ahigh-quality PDS. During the last severalyears, we have hosted visitors from severalschool–university partnerships in Pennsylva-nia so that they might gain a better under-standing of our work; we have also traveled toother sites to provide consultation and sup-port. Finally, we have played a significant rolein the founding and maintenance of the PAPDS Network.

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Penn State–State College Collaborative 27

Proudest Accomplishments

We are proud that we have created a new or-ganism, the PDS: a community of mind thatstrives to operate on a deeply embedded set ofnorms and values, including continuous in-quiry into our practice and its impact, a com-mitment to putting children and their welfareabove all else, ongoing learning and develop-ment for all participants through inquiry,shared decision making, mutual respect, pro-moting and honoring teacher leadership, fo-cusing on people’s strengths and what peoplecan contribute (as opposed to what they can-not), forgiveness when we fail to live up to ourideals, and a strong sense of optimism that al-lows us to persevere and overcome barriers.

We are proud that we have been able tocreate a community whose accomplishmentshave been recognized with three nationalawards and that this recognition has beenshared across all the various roles and func-tions within the community. We are proudthat we have developed a community that hasbeen resilient enough to grow and prosper de-spite the turnover of a number of key individ-uals, including one school superintendent, oneassistant superintendent, three principals, onecollege dean, two college department heads,and two university faculty who served in theroles of PDS director and cofacilitator.

We are proud that we have been able tobuild our PDS community from 14 interns andmentors in 2 elementary schools to 60 interns

and more than 60 mentors in 10 elementaryand 2 middle schools (i.e., sixth grade). Giventhe expansion, we are proud that we havebeen able to maintain the sense of communityand the values that were the original basis forthe PDS community.

Finally, we are immensely proud of the po-tential long-term impact of our PDS prepara-tion program at both the graduate level and theundergraduate level. Alumni who earned theirdoctoral degrees while teaching or supervisingin our PDS are working as teacher educatorswho are involved in PDS work in West Vir-ginia, Ohio, Illinois, New York, Maryland, andIdaho. Our past success in preparing doctoralstudents to do partnership work has stimulatedPenn State’s involvement in the Carnegie Pro-ject on the Education Doctorate, to redesignthe education doctorate (see the CarnegieFoundation’s website: http://cpedinitiative.org/). We are currently creating a new doctoralprogram based on the Carnegie principles thatwill focus on preparing teacher educators forpartnership work.

Alumni who completed their undergradu-ate teacher preparation in our PDS programare currently teaching in a variety of schoolsettings in 22 states and 4 international coun-tries. We estimate that the 509 interns whowere educated through our PDS communityduring the last 11 years will have the potentialto positively affect the lives of more than318,000 children across this nation and theworld. SUP

Appendix. Organizational and Collaborative Structures

References

Hammerness, K., Darling-Hammond, L., & Brans-ford, J. (2005). How teachers learn and de-velop. In L. Darling-Hammond. & J. Brans-ford, J. (Eds.), Preparing teachers for a changingworld: What teachers should know and be able todo (pp. 358–389). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Silva, D. Y. (1999). Telling their stories: Mentorteachers’ ways of being and knowing in a profes-sional development school. Unpublished doc-toral dissertation, Penn State University, Uni-versity Park, PA.

Jim Nolan is the Henry J. Hermanowicz Pro-fessor of Education and Professor in Charge ofField Experiences at Penn State University.His research interests focus on teacher super-vision, professional development, educationalchange, and classroom management.

Bernard Badiali is associate professor in PennState’s College of Education, where he teachescourses in curriculum leadership, supervision,and teacher research. He serves as coordinatorof the nationally recognized Central Pennsyl-vania Holmes Partnership Elementary Profes-sional Development Schools.

Carla Zembal-Saul is associate professor of sci-ence education at Penn State University. Sheholds the Kahn professorship in Science,Technology, Engineering, and MathematicsEducation. Her teaching and research aregrounded in the context of school–universitypartnerships, where she investigates the devel-opment of preservice and practicing elemen-tary teachers' developing knowledge and prac-tices for teaching school science as argument.

Rebecca Burns is a doctoral candidate in cur-riculum and instruction, elementary educa-tion, with an emphasis in educational leader-ship at the Pennsylvania State University. Herresearch interests include teacher education,professional development schools, supervi-sion, and professional development.

Jacqueline Edmondson is associate dean forundergraduate and graduate studies at Penn-sylvania State University. Her research is fo-cused on education policy, rural schools andcommunities, and biography. Her books in-clude America Reads: A Critical Policy Study(2000), Prairie Town: Redefining Rural Life in anAge of Globalization (2003), and Understandingand Applying Critical Policy Study: Reading Edu-cators Advocating for Change (2004).

Deirdre Bauer has been a public school edu-cator for 22 years, serving 17 years as an ele-mentary school principal. Her doctoral studieshave focused on PDS work and differentiatedsupervision. She had given several presenta-tions at the local, state, and national levels onthese two topics.

Donna Queeney recently retired after multipleterms as a member of the State College AreaSchool District Board of School Directors. Dr.Queeney is a lifelong supporter of public edu-cation and a member of many local communityagencies ands service organizations.

Marion Wheland is an instructional supportteacher at Park Forest Elementary School inState College and an instructor of a socialstudies methods course for PDS interns.

30 JIM NOLAN ET AL.