Pathmakers: Developing school–university partnerships

Education is crucial for breaking the cycle of poverty for students at under-resourced schools all over Indiana. Through strategic partnerships with public schools, IU’s Center for P–16 Research and Collaboration is poised to improve education in the P–16 pipeline so that more students, especially traditionally under-served students, are prepared for and pursue a postsecondary education.

“Pathmakers: developing a school-university partnership” describes the center’s partnership with the Gary Community School Corporation, the center’s first and most fully formed partnership to date. After a year of conversation between the school corporation and the university, two K–6 gender-based academies were identified for the partnership: Dr. Bernard C. Watson Academy for Boys and Frankie W. McCullough Academy for Girls. Initially, the role of the center was to provide the schools with the material resources necessary to support their new initiatives, but through a long process of relationship building, expanded into an effort embedded in a multi-year program of professional development.

A small group of Indiana University (IU) School of Education (SOE) faculty, staff, and students are busy cleaning up the remnants of a full day of bookmaking as the final bell sounds at Dr. Bernard C. Watson Academy for Boys. One person pours Styrofoam bowls of grayish water, created by a mishmash of watercolor paints, down the drain while others gather scraps of paper and scrape glue from the tables.

They’ve spent the day assisting a bookbinding artist from New Hampshire teach students, ranging from kindergartners through 6^th graders, how to create books that showcase their poems, pictures, and short stories. This intense day of cutting, folding, gluing, and painting was a culminating experience for over 80 students, who for the past year, have worked with SOE faculty and graduate students on a variety of literacy activities.

Mid-way through the clean-up process, a sixth grader appears at the door and asks, “Can I see my book again?” Everyone looks up from their work and says, “Yes!”

For over three years, IU has developed a partnership with the Gary Community School Corporation (GCSC), and these signs of success, like a student fully engaged in a literacy project, are the reward.

This type of literacy support is an example of the resources, both material and scholarly, that IU brings to partnerships with K–12 schools in Indiana. Making and maintaining these partnerships is the role of the SOE’s Center for P–16 Research and Collaboration. Established in 2006 and charged with facilitating the collaboration with GCSC and other high need school districts throughout the state, the center provides the infrastructure for school-university partnerships that lead to improvement in education in the pre-kindergarten through postsecondary education (P–16) pipeline.

“The center’s goal is to establish long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships,” explains Ada Simmons, director. “Schools benefit because a successful partnership supports their teachers and facilitates improved student performance. The university benefits because its mission is enhanced by the scholarship of engagement and the knowledge generated by research situated in authentic settings. Both benefit when a partnership increases college access and opportunity for all students.”

As one of the center’s first school-university partnerships, the GCSC and IU collaboration became an opportunity for the center to explore how partnerships form and function. The goal was clearly defined – to establish a mutually beneficial partnership. However, how to achieve that goal was, in 2006, largely unknown. Now two years later, both partners, unified by a commitment to the students, better understand the ever-evolving process of a school-university partnership.

Establishing the partnership

“We’ve had a lot of projects come through our district,” says Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction Myrtle Campbell. “In urban districts, there’s always something coming. Everybody is going to save the world, and we’re going to be the lab that they experiment in. So the teachers take the attitude of ‘Well, here’s another one coming. We’ll just wait this one out; it will go away.’ But they saw the viability of this partnership.”

At the urging of the Indiana Black Legislative Caucus, IU administrators and then members of the center began meeting with GCSC administrators to discuss how IU could support the Gary schools. After a year of meetings, GCSC and IU identified two K–6 schools located in high-poverty areas as potential partners: Dr. Bernard C. Watson Academy for Boys and Frankie Woods–McCullough Academy for Girls.

When the partnership began, McCullough Academy and Watson Academy, whose student enrollments are 96-98% African American and over 80% free-lunch eligible, had both just re-opened as gender-based academies serving grades K–6 following the closure of the district’s two lowest achieving elementary schools. In 2006-07, only 26% of the students at Watson Academy passed the language and mathematics sections of the Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress-Plus (ISTEP+), the state’s standardized test, and at McCullough Academy, 47% passed both sections.

When the schools became gender-based academies, Watson focused their curriculum on literacy, and McCullough chose science and math. The schools requested that the center help them redesign and equip existing school space to provide for a Science Lab in McCullough Academy and a literacy-focused facility, called the Writers House, in Watson Academy.

Initially, the center envisioned embedding the requested material resources in intensive professional development that focused on updating literacy and science instruction. However, as the partnership progressed, the center realized how much the schools valued having an outside source provide tangible resources for their school. For many schools, the laborious process of finding funding for capital projects and materials often waylays good ideas. Before introducing professional development initiatives, the center had to meet the schools’ request for money and material, a response that ultimately laid the foundation for a long-term partnership.

As the center began bringing equipment to the schools and the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new facilities drew closer, the schools were ready to discuss professional development. The center then was able to recruit Associate Professor in Science Education Gayle Buck and Assistant Professor Gerald Campano in Language Education, both interested in urban education.

Buck and Campano began making the three-hour trip to Gary at least once a month to exchange ideas with the teachers and administrators. “Relationships are everything in a collaboration,” explained Campano. “You have to build trust. You have to build mutual respect. You have to be genuine. If it’s a really democratic approach, there has to be dialogue.”

The dialogue, according to Campbell, engaged the teachers in the partnership. “The teachers didn’t feel like IU was coming in and telling them what to do,” said Campbell. “They felt it was a true collaboration.”

Maintaining the partnership

For the first phase of Campano’s collaboration with Watson, he and doctoral student Lenny Sanchez taught a foundations literacy course for the Watson teachers that focused on reading comprehension, vocabulary development, and technology. The course laid the groundwork for the next phase of the professional development, which involved working directly with teachers and students on literacy lessons during class time and facilitating professional development conversations with the teachers after school.

The “real time” approach, explains Sanchez, distinguishes this program from traditional professional development and sustains the momentum of the partnership. “In many ways, this approach validated the commitment and knowledge we had to offer, while also informing us on how to build upon the brilliant work the teachers and students were already doing.”

It also gave Campano and Sanchez the flexibility to adjust the activities to accommodate new interests and issues. For example, while Campano was meeting with the Watson teachers to incorporate their feedback and ideas into a grant he was writing, one of the teachers expressed an interest in literacy across the content areas. “That’s when I decided to get in contact with some of my colleagues in other areas, like archeology, to try and incorporate that,” says Campano. “I didn’t have that idea before, but when I heard the teacher’s voice about really wanting to emphasize that aspect, I thought ‘I could make that happen.’”

Like Campano, Buck also tailored her efforts to the needs of the educators. According to Antonia Rodriguez, a McCullough kindergarten teacher who participated in the professional development for the Science Lab, some of the teachers who chose not to participate in the course did not “buy-in” to the Science Lab. In response, Buck gave a presentation to all the educators at McCullough on how to incorporate the lab into the science curriculum.

With the support of the center, Buck was also awarded an Improving Teacher Quality Partnership Program grant from the Indiana Commission for Higher Education in 2007 to extend the professional development in science instruction to other GCSC elementary and middle schools. Titled “Power Up for Science,” Buck’s project involved a series of seminars at IU Northwest that focused on project-based learning and other instructional strategies for urban youth.

While the faculty developed their relationships with their respective schools, the center maintained a dialogue with GCSC, a difficult task with the tight schedules of school officials. “They are so busy all the time, it was clear that we weren’t always the priority we wanted to be because they had more pressing concerns,” explains Catherine Gray, who headed the partnership from 2006 to 2008. To sustain the partnership, faculty and staff also frequently made the long drive to Gary to meet with teachers and administrators face-to-face, the preferred mode of communication for the school district.

Meeting the Goal of a Mutually Beneficial Partnership

When Campano and Sanchez arrive at Watson, second grade teacher Dorothy Walden says, “I’m just as enthused as the kids. I’m grinning when they get there too.”

Comments like these let the center know they’re on the right path.

After the first two years, the center began to informally assess the partnership. The area where the center saw the most success, due to an initial focus on relationship building, was teachers’ attitudes towards the professional development and new learning spaces.

At McCullough, the Science Lab for the upper-grades elementary students was such a success that the primary teachers requested and received their own lab. According to kindergarten teacher Rodriguez, the new Science Lab was a “big deal.” “The students feel very important that they’re going to the science lab to be scientists,” she says.

For Yvonne Lukas, McCullough special education teacher and participant in the Science Lab professional development, the best part of the collaboration was the infusion of new ideas. “A lot of us had a narrow focus because we never branched out,” says Lukas. “What [IU] Bloomington is doing is making us really think about how to make it bigger, how to take that same focus, open up our mind, and see science in a bigger picture.”

Lukas points out too that there’s more work to be done. The focus of the McCullough professional development was creating inquiry-based activities that culminated in student presentations, a goal the teachers were unable to realize this year while they focused on getting the lab up and running. “When we are actually able to see the students do a full inquiry on their own, we will see success,” says Lukas.

For many of the GCSC teachers and administrators, the success of the partnership with IU will be gauged by student performance, and as in most school districts, this is typically measured by test scores. At Watson and McCullough, ISTEP scores have increased steadily since the 2005-2006 school year, and the partnership with IU is just one of many factors, such as experienced teachers and strong school leadership, that may have contributed to this improvement.

Campbell knows that although test scores are an important performance indicator, other aspects of achievement also matter. “It doesn’t always have to be paper and pencil tests. It can also be a change in the students’ attitudes and how they approach learning. You can also look at changes in teachers’ attitudes and how they are restructuring their classrooms and using new strategies when working with children,” says Campbell.

For the university side of the partnership, Buck and Campano continue to make headway on their research. They are conducting participatory action research to examine how to strengthen professional development efforts, especially in the context of urban education, and ways to foster inquiry-based teaching and learning.

“We view all participants in the project – teacher researchers, IU faculty, graduate students, administrators, and students – as knowledge producers who have profound experiences and insights to share as we collectively engage in inquiry,” explains Campano. This consensus model of research, which differs from a traditional hierarchical model where knowledge is “transmitted” to teachers, establishes equitable professional relationships that in turn, sustain the partnership.

Campano and Buck will expand their projects in the Gary schools for the next two years with Pathways Initiative funding. These funds, made available by University Dean Gerardo Gonzalez and administered by the center, support projects that forge partnerships with under-resourced schools and strengthen the pathway to college for all students.