Teaching, Learning, and Leading With Schools and Communities

This chapter reviews the teacher education policy context that shaped the design of Teaching, Learning, and Leading With Schools and Communities (TLLSC) and the challenges faced in implementing and sustaining the model from the perspective of two of the Deans who led the School of Education. Concurrent with the TLLSC redesign, the Chicago Public Schools had implemented school choice through charter school expansion and partnered with alternative teacher preparation programs such as Teach For America. As Kumashiro pointed out, the Chicago Public Schools contracted with alternative preparation programs, providing their teacher candidates with guaranteed employment after program completion. In terms of course design, TLLSC was organized into semester-long sequences comprised of 3- to 8-week long modules. Because the majority of Loyola’s courses are on a semester calendar of course meetings over 15 weeks, the registrar needed to develop new policy to accommodate the individual modules for each sequence.