Thank you for your service: a boson of school–university partnerships

In the field of network science, betweenness centrality (BC) is one of the measures used to identify nodes (individuals or organizations) that serve as critical intermediaries or play an important role in ensuring overall connectivity in the network. In the case of organizational networks where nationwide universities and PK-12 educators work mutually together, there is a case to be made that NASUP has established itself as a node with a high BC score. Similarly, on a local (district or state) level, many individuals step up to play this critical role. They are not only the nodes with the highest BC scores but also the bosons of school-university partnerships in their respective local networks. One of these people is Dr Robin E. Hands, who is featured in this piece. Robin's trailblazing work as the Director of Clinical Practice has positioned her as a central player in her local organizational network, which includes two colleges, Farrington College of Education and Human Development and the College of Arts and Sciences at Sacred Heart University, and their surrounding Connecticut school districts such as Bridgeport, Trumbull, Fairfield, Norwalk and Stamford.Robin joined the Farrington College of Education and Human Development at Sacred Heart University in 2020 as the Director of Clinical Practice. Kudos to the program's new leadership team at the time, which took an interest in her and welcomed her vision and skills as an experienced practitioner in the field. The first order of business for Robin was to redesign the Teacher Education Program by making it more clinically rich, which included increasing the required clinical hours from 15 to 60 hours per semester and building partnerships with school districts in the area. It is worth noting that this is déjà vu for Robin. In fact, she had just left a similar position at the University of Connecticut, where she had successfully worked as a team member in the redesign of a similar program. Needless to say, the leadership team at Sacred Heart University knew that they were in good “hands”.Robin's impact on the program was almost immediate. Operating under self-imposed guiding principles deeply rooted in the National Network for Education Renewal (NNER) tripartite model (Bellamy & Goodlad, 2008), Robin quickly put together a continuously evolving organizational network. As prescribed by the NNER tripartite model, member organizations include the three parts of the education profession that have typically worked with quite different institutional pressures and constraints but that, in the end, are dependent on one another: PK-12 schools, her university college of education and college of arts and sciences (Bellamy & Goodlad, 2008). The partnering or interaction strategies between pairs of institutions that Robin initiated and activated are mainly based on reciprocity, also known as mutual bonding in network analysis. That is, a relationship that is mutually beneficial to the pair of interacting partners. However, Robin has continuously served as a conduit that facilitates cooperation between partnering organizations, hence the comparison to a node with the highest BC score in the network. For example, Robin has worked together with the math department at Sacred Heart to have math club members provide after-school math enrichment programing at partnering schools. Also, according to Robin, “the goal for these partnerships is ‘simultaneous renewal’ (Bellamy & Goodlad, 2008; Guillaume & Hands, 2024). By putting a critical mass of our students in the classrooms, our teacher candidates bring energy, enthusiasm, and new methodologies while benefiting from the seasoned teachers' experiences, knowledge, and modeling.” Note that on average, and with the assistance of administrative support both at the university and in the school districts, Robin manages to place approximately 240 teacher candidates in partnering schools every semester. She also creates seminar classes that dovetail with the clinical experience teacher candidates are having, while personally inviting seasoned educators at partnering schools to contribute their ideas and expertise to improve the efficacy of the Teacher Education Program. In her words, “the voice of the practitioner must be represented in any effective Teacher Preparation Program. As a result of clinic teacher feedback, we have emphasized that these clinical experiences are not meant to be passive but MUST be active. Candidates cannot spend two semesters observing in a classroom, they need to be engaged in practice. So, we started to require teacher candidates to plan, prepare and teach more lessons. They do this with help from their mentor teachers, their methods instructors, and their seminar leaders.” Not to mention she also repurposes and reconceptualizes the NNER tripartite model as a recruitment tool to include interactions at the student level (Guillaume & Hands, 2024).Robin attributes her ability to build a partnership network to her years of experience as a practitioner. The following are Robin's exact words: “Because I was a practitioner for 30+ years, I am able to empathize and understand the people who are doing the difficult but gratifying work of educating children and adolescents and garner their trust. The school partners know that they can count on me for support to help mitigate any issues that arises with teacher candidates, including conversations, action plans, and dismissals,” hence the comparison to a boson [source of force that governs how particles (organizations) interact with each other] that keeps the entire network structure together.Having pretty much worked at every echelon of our education system – 14 years as an elementary school teacher, five years as an enrichment program director, 11 years as a school administrator and 15+ years as a university professor – Dr Robin E. Hands has amassed valuable insights on how and where important players such as PK-12 schools, university colleges of education and university colleges of arts and sciences can work together to better serve their communities and optimize available resources. In particular, she has found ways for them to interact (in other words, act as a boson) and has created processes for continuous renewal in public schools, universities and their communities. Moreover, she is willing to continuously serve as an intermediary (which leads to a high BC score node) between organizations to facilitate cooperation. This kind of work and effort occurring at the grassroots level may not always get the recognition and the financial backing it deserves. Yet, especially in times of crises and when under assault, the work is crucial to the success of these organizations, the students and communities they serve, and the teacher candidates being prepared as the next generation of educators.