The University of North Carolina Wilmington Professional Development System (PDS) collaboration will positively affect public school reform and broaden professional development efforts within the region.
The Professional Development System (PDS) will improve student learning by enhancing the quality of teaching and school leadership to ensure that student work is challenging, engaging, and relevant.
We understand that our partnership work occurs in and may be affected by broader political, social, and economic contexts. In shaping our district partnership agreements, we referred to the nine essential standards of the National Professional Development Organization. Six goals will be served by this PDS agreement.
These goals reflect our understanding that concurrent reforms in teacher preparation and school transformation can best be brought about when schools and universities work together in partnerships. Based on this knowledge, PDS goals focus on redesigning and integrating roles, aligning resources, and establishing collaborative structures for solving problems in the university and partnership schools.
Unlike some professional development school initiatives detailed in the literature which may impact a single school and a narrow subset of teachers, students, and university faculty, the Watson College's PDS represents a more comprehensive approach to partnership. It has become broad-based and powerful enough to include the entire teacher education faculty, representatives from departments in the College of Science and Engineering (CSE), the College of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts (CHSSA), and the College of Health & Human Services (CHHS), over 2100 trained partners, and more than 500 public school educators each year.