Professional Development Schools are complex and comprehensive school university partnerships focusing on professional development of new teachers and veteran teachers while providing high quality education to P-12 students. The chapters of this book contain the stories of 8 highly successful and nationally recognized professional development schools. Each story provides the reader with practical ideas, procedures and policies that can be implemented by the reader to begin new partnerships or help improve and sustain existing partnerships. Each chapter discusses the rich clinical preparation combined with progressive experiences in PDSs that have made the partnership successful.

How the Professional Development School and Community School strategy might benefit from an integrated perspective serves as the guiding framework for this volume of Research in Professional Development Schools. This book advocates for blending these two approaches to address the needs of P-20 settings and their communities. Because we recognize the inherent strengths in both models, we encouraged chapters that had as a primary focus one or both models as they sought to support teacher preparation and K-12 partners. 

Ferrara and Jacobson go inside community schools across the country to explore the different roles that make this collaborative education reform work. This book provides practitioners, policymakers, family members, youth, and local leaders a greater understanding of the different roles that make up a community school and tools for action.