At the Crossroads of Clinical Practice and Teacher Leadership: A Changing Paradigm for Professional Practice

This paper examines the endemic separation between K-12 schools and colleges of education in teacher preparation. Specifically, we examine a new approach related to the promise of clinical practice--a clinical practice program that overlaps a public high school, a graduate-level teacher preparation program, and a professional practice doctoral program. In this program, clinical practitioners are public high school teachers as well as instructors in a teacher preparation program and doctoral students at the same university. In order to examine easily overlooked aspects of this arrangement, we draw from third-space theory to examine cultural practices within this program from the perspectives of the teaching interns and the clinical practitioners. We operationalized these phenomena by examining creativity in thinking, transformations in practice, and reflection/reflexivity. The clinical practitioners benefited from creating a laboratory of practice within which they learned from the teaching interns, the students preparing to become teachers. The interns benefited from a growth in adaptive expertise within a laboratory of practice and development of teacher professionalism grounded in practice.