Marilyn Johnston-Parsons – författare

Examines Professional Development Schools, or "teaching schools," and the myriad complex issues, from policy to personnel, that surround their operation.This book discusses a ten-year process of teacher education reform at a major public research university (The Ohio State University) and the challenges that ensued. The thirteen Professional Development Schools (PDSs) described are diverse, yet they share a focus on school/university collaboration, reform in teacher education, professional developments, and inquiry. The authors speak frankly about their history, outcomes, and hopes for the future. The message is that school/university collaboration is a potentially rich approach to reform, yet fraught with challenges, demands, and an uncertain future.Contributors include Cynthia Dickens, Rhonda Dailey-Dickinson, Don Cramer, Marilyn Johnston, Patricia Enciso, Becky Kirschner, Theresa Rogers, Barbara Seidl, Francee Eldredge, Kathleen Ibom, Lisa Maloney, Mike Thomas, Patricia Brosnan, Diana Erchick, Holly Thronton, Sue Chase, Merry Merryfield, Steven Miller, Stanley Ray, Tim Dove, Todd Kenreich, Barbara Levak, Dan Hoffman, Anna Soter, Beth Carnate, George Newell, Steven Hoffman, Rachel Moots, Barbara Thomson, Eugenie Maxwell, Lizbeth Kelley, William Gathergood, Keith Hall, Michael Parsons, Sandra Stroot, Mary O'Sullivan, Deborah Tannehill, Deborah Wilburn Robinson, Gwendolyn Cartledge, John Cooper, Ralph Gardner III, Timothy Heron, William Heward, Richard Howell, Diana Sainato. Foreword by Nancy Zimpher and Introduction by Marilyn Johnston. Conclusion by Patti Brosnan, Don Cramer, Tim Dove, and Marilyn Johnston.

This book tells stories of life in a “failing” school. These are insider stories of the daily lives of children and educators in an urban school during a time when accountability weighs heavy on both teachers and students. Most educators are in favor of accountability. The kind and amount of testing associated with the current accountability movement, however, influence teachers’ and students’ lives in a way not often apparent to parents and politicians.

This book tells stories of life in a “failing” school. These are insider stories of the daily lives of children and educators in an urban school during a time when accountability weighs heavy on both teachers and students. Most educators are in favor of accountability. The kind and amount of testing associated with the current accountability movement, however, influence teachers’ and students’ lives in a way not often apparent to parents and politicians.

This book is a longitudinal study of a 10-year experimental teacher education program. Follow-up studies and writing continued for 6 years after the program closed. This case study describes a search for effective and socially just practices within a long-term reform initiative intended to prepare teachers for urban schools. The program was run through a Professional Development School--a collaboration between a university program and a diverse group of practicing teachers; and the book was written collaboratively by many of the participants—faculty, mentor teachers, doctoral students, and teacher candidates/graduates. There are few longitudinal studies of teacher education programs, especially ones that focus on what was learned and told by those who did the learning.The narratives here are rich, diverse, and multivocal. They capture the complexity of a reform initiative conducted within a democratic context. It’s difficult, messy and as varied as is democracy itself. The program was framed by a sociocultural perspective and the focus was on learning through difference. Dialogue across difference, which is more than just talk, was both the method for doing research and the means for learning.The program described here began in the ferment of teacher education reform in the early 1990s, responding to the critics of the mid-1980s; and this account of it is finished at a time when teacher education is again under attack from a different direction. Criticized earlier for being too progressive, teacher education is now seen as too conservative. The longitudinal results of this program show high retention rates and ground the argument that quality teacher preparation programs for teaching in urban schools may well be cost effective, as well as provide increased student learning. This is counter to the current move to shorten teacher preparation programs, at a time of low teacher retention in our under resourced urban schools. The book does not advocate a model for teacher education, but it aims to provide principles for practice that include school/university collaboration, democratic dialogue across differences, and inquiry as a way to guide reform.