How It Works: Inside a School-College Collaboration

How It Works: Inside a School-College Collaboration, by Sidney Trubowitz and Paul Longo. New York: Teachers College Press, 1997. 192 Pp. $29.95 ($18.95) Why would educators enter a school-college collaboration? Who benefits, what payoffs result? The educational change, leadership, and professional development school literatures (see, for example, Goodlad, 1994; Fullan & Hargreaves, 1996; Fullan & Siegelbauer, 1991; Clark, 1999; Wiseman & Cooner, 1996) promise that collaboration can increase learning for students while changing and improving work environments for teachers. The benefits and payoffs are hard won. Formal collaborations take more time and demand higher energy levels. Collaborations tax negotiating and listening skills and reconfigure conventional views of the modern, twentieth-century school's place, space, and temporal features. Formidable barriers like the ones listed above make Sidney Trubowitz and Paul Longo's account of a 20--year collaboration by Queens College and Louis Armstrong Middle School (LAMS) worth examining. How It Works: Inside a School-College Collaboration presents the story of an inner city collaboration. The purpose of the book is to depict how the collaboration was created and maintained. It is one of 15 books in a Teachers College Press series on school reform edited by Patricia A. Wasley, Ann Lieberman, and Joseph P. McDonald. The authors of How It Works, both former school principals, explore this collaboration from a position of experience and empathy. They detail context and genesis, explain how the collaboration works, share what collaborators learned, and overview the collaboration's broader implications. The Queens/LAMS collaboration emerged from the politics of school integration and policymaking in a complex school district. A judge's ruling mandated integration to reflect the borough of Queens' then 55% minority, 45% non-minority population. Educators conceived the school-college collaboration in order to make the middle school more attractive to parents and students as a magnet school. The purpose of the collaboration was up front: "To improve the ways in which the education of our early adolescent population was conducted" (p.3). Student achievement placing LAMS in the top 10% of New York City middle schools offers one clear improvement. A consistent level of achievement, in confluence with four benefits unlikely to have occurred without the collaboration, underscores the success of the school. A collaboration's most obvious benefit puts additional adults in the building, adults who add value to learning. Learners can be the big winners when teacher-student ratios are reduced, but classroom teachers benefit as well. The authors quote a mathematics education professor who explains this twofold benefit. "For the most part, I became an extra pair of hands, working more like a student teacher or an assistant teacher than as a college professor, but I didn't mind. Gradually, after several months, I felt comfortable suggesting that we try something a little different--introducing a nontraditional, nonroutine 'problem-of-the-week' that we would assign to the students and ask them to work on for a week before discussing it. This proved to be very successful, and the problems found their way into other teachers' classrooms" (p. 92). The quote illustrates trust and relationship building between school and college educators, the bridge linking congenial interactions to collegial work. The placement of graduate interns (teacher candidates) in the middle school offers a second benefit. The teacher candidates provide yet more pairs of hands at the same time that they learn to become teachers. The payoff benefits teacher candidates as well as the college whose responsibility it is to prepare teachers and whose credibility with middle school teachers increases. Important to the success of the collaboration, Trubowitz and Longo explain, is that LAMS teachers participate in the selection process of the teacher candidates. …