The Altered Role of Experienced Teachers in Professional Development Schools: The Present and Its Possibilities.

In the last fifteen years, since the report of The Holmes Group (1990), professional development school (PDS) has become a popular reform movement which aims to achieve school-university collaborative relationships with the dual function of improving the field experience of prospective teachers and facilitating the professional development of experienced teachers. Numerous descriptive studies document the process of developing a school-university partnership (see Antonek, Matthews, & Levin, 2005; Miller & Silvernail, 1994), and most empirical research focuses on how participating in a PDS affects the development of prospective teachers (Conaway & Mitchell, 2004; Ridley, Hurwitz, Hacket, & Miller, 2005). With a few exceptions (see Cooner & Tochterman, 2004; Yendol-Silva & Dana, 2004), not many studies focus on how the role of experienced1 teachers changes as a result of participating in a PDS. Evidence suggests that student teaching is one of the most influential components of a teacher education program (Richardson-Koehler, 1988), and the cooperating teacher exerts the greatest influence on a student teacher (Koerner, 1992). Therefore, it is vital to understand how the role of experienced teachers is affected by the implementation of a PDS as these individuals assume greater responsibility in the education of prospective teachers and in their own professional development. This