By Russell T. Osguthorpe
From its inception, the BYU–Public School Partnership has been a risky venture. After all, public schools and universities vary widely in their organizational culture and institutional goals. However, because of impressive amounts of good will and a genuine interest in the idea itself, university faculty and public school teachers have found ways to renew one another. This type of simultaneous renewal was one of the original commitments of the partnership.
In 1998, Bob Patterson (a former dean of the McKay School) and I wrote a book entitled Balancing the Tensions of Change. The main premise of the book is that tensions accompany any kind of meaningful collaboration. Some may feel left out, others may feel undervalued. Collaboration is not easy. Because the lives of a public school teacher and a university faculty member differ in so many ways, each must come to appreciate the other.
In the early days of the partnership when teachers and faculty were learning how to work more closely together, one high school English teacher described how collaboration had changed her view of the university:
“I thought I understood the university and what it was all about. But after working inside the place this past year, I realized that my understanding was very limited. I saw the university only as a student sees it because that was my experience. Now I see the faculty role differently than I did before. I don’t just see the knowledge or the authority the faculty possess, but I see the challenges they face in meeting all the expectations placed on them.”
This teacher’s comment shows how the partnership has always been and will continue to be about the quality of relationships that develop among all participants. The boundaries between public schools and the university blur. Mutual understanding grows, collaboration increases, and solutions to previously unsolvable problems emerge—all because of the quality of the relationships among teachers, faculty, administrators, and students. So the more we nurture relationships of trust, respect, and appreciation, the more we will experience the simultaneous renewal envisioned 40 years ago by those who created the BYU–Public School Partnership.
Russell Osguthorpe was the director of the Center for Teaching and Learning and a professor in the McKay School’s Department of Instructional Psychology and Technology. Besides being a lifelong educator himself, Osguthorpe is the husband of an educator, Lolly, and the father of several educators. He served as Sunday School general president, president of the Bismarck North Dakota Temple, and president of the South Dakota Rapid City Mission. A father of five and grandfather of 21, he and Lolly began their latest service in January as senior missionaries in Tahiti.