A Guide to Building Education Partnerships: Navigating Diverse Cultural Contexts to Turn Challenge into Promise
"Useful artifacts in the book help make this a true guide to the work of partnership. There is a glossary, because shared language is an important aspect. There are schematics that communicate the complexity of new developing relationships. Bibliographic references are also helpful and could point to additional experts and resources.""This book is helpful for any leader involved in designing or managing a partnership with an outside group. The book’s mini-summaries, partnership action points, core ideas and bibliographic notes in each chapter highlight useful points and provide resources for further research."“New forms of public, private and university partnerships will serve as the foundation for improving teaching and learning in schools.  This book presents the key challenges in building successful partnerships, with practical examples that show how the real work is done. It is a must read for leaders interested in building the next generation of schools.”“Partnerships spanning K-12 and higher education institutions represent one approach to marshalling the intellectual capacity and resources necessary for effective education reform. The authors draw from their experiences as evaluators of one large partnership and extensively from the research and applied literature on partnerships to offer detailed and practical advice on the do's and the don'ts. They have produced a very pragmatic and practical book that should be valuable to those in K-12 and higher education considering entering into new partnerships for school improvement. It will also be of interest to people who have been in such partnerships but aren't currently, helping them to figure out what they did right and wrong.”“Meeting the need for productive and engaged citizens has become a national imperative requiring the re-design of our public k-12 and higher education systems.  This redesign work requires effective partnerships among the many existing organizational cultures within these systems. Hora and Millar’s book,A Guide to Building Education Partnerships, provides a coherent framework for building these essential partnerships. They integrate findings on the successes and failures of a very complex “real world” partnership and key points from research in multiple disciplines into their foundational concepts of partnership to provide a coherent and readily accessible structure for use by practitioners across multiple educational cultures. Most importantly, this work recognizes that every partnership will be unique.  Rather than a “how-to” cookbook approach, they provide practitioners a sound set of principles to help design, implement, evaluate and refine partnerships across fundamentally different organizational cultures. I believe this book is an essential tool for creating successful partnerships across multiple educational organizations.”"I am pleased to endorse this book after using it in my course on entrepreneurship. It proved to be an invaluable resource that offered school administrators great insights into their roles in planning, developing, and implementing education partnerships, and understanding all of the dimensions of nurturing successful partnerships. I will definitely use the book in future courses as it's an excellent teaching tool, as well as an invaluable resource for educational leaders."From the Foreword:“The conceptual framework offered in this book was exactly what we needed. We talked about the individual psychology and cultures of each major participant (institutes of higher education, the Minnesota Department of Education, school districts, the Minnesota Board of Teaching, and the teachers’ union), as well as the educators, staff members, administrators, parents, and communities who create the settings in which our reform efforts play out. We discussed not only how we think about our work but also the places in which we do that work. We explored how we might build what the authors call the ‘3rd space of partnership,’ where people come together to invent the relationships and deploy the ideas and tools that make the most sense for them. We began to create a 3rd space in which we could work together differently and identify, manage, and reconcile ‘competing interests, perspectives, and opinions,’ all of which deserve attention and all of which may offer much-needed insights.What makes this Guide so helpful is that it brings together all the components of research, evaluation, and practice into a practical and well-grounded guide to creating and learning in a collaborative mode.”