A school-university partnership : a commitment to collaboration and professional renewal

This chapter outlines how two practitioners collaborated on a project to develop a school-based professional development program. Barbara was the leading teacher (equivalent to assistant principal) from a comprehensive girls high school in Sydney, Australia, and Les was the university colleague from a neighbouring university. The project encouraged teachers to critically reflect on their teaching and learning practice and enabled us to understand and cultivate our collaborative partnership over five years. Our focus in this chapter is to describe how our collaborative partnership developed and demonstrate how other educators can facilitate collaboration and professional renewal in their schools or institutions. The first section of this chapter briefly describes the impetus for the project and outlines our roles within the project. The next section describes a model for collaboration between school and university colleagues. The final section examines some of the issues and concerns we faced in developing our collaborative partnership and how we resolved them.