Ackerley Partner School Network

Formed in 2004 with a gift from the Ginger and Barry Ackerley Foundation, The Ackerley Partner School Network supports the University of Washington College of Education's efforts to build and sustain partnerships between “high-needs schools” and UW teacher education programs. We've had significant impact on the college’s teacher education programming, including:

• Increased collaboration between general education and special education teacher education programs
• Creation of two new teacher education programs, the Seattle Teacher Residency and the U-ACT
• Partnering with leading teacher education scholars across the nation to exchange ideas
• Building a research agenda around the work of specifying mentoring practices
• Supporting mentors' development in these practices

Did you know? When first created, the Ackerley Network served 130 teacher candidates in 30 Seattle-area schools. We now support more than 250 teacher candidates in hundreds of schools across Washington state!

Commitment to equity

We are grounded in a commitment to advance equity within Washington’s schools and aim to:

• Facilitate cross-College teacher education program learning experiences focused on improving the work of pre-service teacher education.
• Build collective, local capacity for advancing teacher education, specifically in the classrooms, departments, schools, districts and community-based organizations that partner with the College.
• Advance a system of supports for teacher education, including mentor teachers, principals, school-based coaches and others who help educate novice teachers.

Our partners are not only individual schools, but also individuals, departments, districts and community-based organizations who partner with UW's teacher preparation programs.

Our work

The Ackerley Network is uniquely situated to help tackle persistent issues of teacher education.

• Piloting a series of Mentorship Design Labs, which bring together UW teacher educators and mentor teachers to develop routines and learning experiences that support the development of mentorship practices to, in turn, support novice teacher learning. Supporting mentors is a step towards building out a system of professional education that attends to the professional learning needs of both novice teachers and the teacher educators who support them.
• Leveraging the UW-created online community Teacher Education by Design to make mentorship materials and representations (e.g., protocols for high-leverage mentor activities; video-recordings of expert mentor practice). These resources have been developed and refined in the context of the Mentorship Design Labs and are being made available to the UW’s teacher preparation programs and to the broader field.