Fostering powerful partnerships: getting to the core of collaboration between educational counterparts

The current relationship between early college high school and community college faculty reflects a lack of communication and collaboration in common content areas. In this disquisition, we examined the partnership of public high school and community college faculty, and how increasing opportunities for collegial feedback and focused collaborative practices positively impacted instruction and weekly classroom tasks. Through organized communities of practice within common instructional content areas, early college high school and community college faculty focused on increased opportunities to meet face-to-face and virtually, to share best practices in the classroom. These designated meetings spaces allowed instructors the opportunity to discuss classroom experiences and gain knowledge that shaped classroom instruction. Through the use of improvement science methods, one team of humanities faculty from early college high school and community college, and one team of STEM faculty from early college high school and community college underwent a series of evaluations through the use of a Plan, Do, Study, Act cycle to determine if the methods researched held true that a collaborative partnership would increase communication between the two entities