Empowering Innovations: Adding Value to University-School Partnerships

This article discusses results from a study on beginning teachers who developed university interns as a focus of their induction program at their schools. For 13-weeks, four novice physical educators (who were considered highly skilled pedagogically) received support from prior university faculty as interns worked with them twice weekly. Results showed that they effectively developed interns while feeling renewed themselves. Interactions with interns and university mentors reignited their commitments to best practices and recently learned pedagogical values. Most took steps toward professional advancement and all received positive responses from colleagues. Researchers' concerns of burnout from overload did not occur. Instead, the novices deeply regretted losing interns when the program ended. Since this research identified similar positive impacts on participants in a prior study, perhaps future research could examine the efficacy of this approach in other content areas.