ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how one university’s elementary education professional development school (PDS) program strives to break down traditional barriers between university-based teacher preparation and K–12 schools and focus on creating critical, project-based (CPB) experiences embedded in clinical practice. Specifically, we describe how teacher educators, teachers, and school administrators worked together to create hybrid spaces in which everyone’s theories, practices, and perspectives were valued through CPB clinical experiences across six university courses. We describe the benefits to our teacher candidates, the PDS sites, and ourselves as teacher educators that came from implementing these CPB clinical experiences. We also describe some of the logistical challenges and how we overcame those. Our goal in this chapter is to push teacher educators to consider how they can leverage PDS relationships to systematically implement CPB clinical experiences across their coursework to ensure the greatest benefits for schools, school- and university-based teacher educators, teacher candidates, and K–12 students.
