The Research Of University-Administration-Schools Collaboration In School Improvement

Since the 1980s, the university-schools collaboration has become a hot research topic in Britain and America. The re-construction thoughts made people have a new understanding of the complexity of education reform, and found that using the old independent operation mode is difficult to solve many problems. So people hoped we can deal with education reform by means of participation and collaboration, and then we can improve the quality of teacher education and school education. Affected by this, school improvement around the world began to call for collaboration,"Promote improvement by collaboration"was becoming a consensus. Nowadays, in China"promote balanced compulsory education within the region"will be a strategic task in the next decade, the participation of administrative power is being closely watched.This paper concentrates on the topic that"University (U)– Administration (A)– Schools (S) Collaboration in School Improvement", and uses the methods of literature review, theoretical analysis, interviews, observation and case studies to research the relevant content. Based on defining the concept of"U-A-S"collaboration, we did a discussion and analysis about the research topics from five areas: the interests which the collaborative agents each pursue, the relationship patterns between them; the roles of them; the conflicts in the process of collaboration, and the solving strategies.The results show that,"U-A-S"collaboration which originates from"U-S"collaboration can be described as a new way of school improvement, and which is unique for the administration participated. University, administration and schools are drived by their own interests to come together, and they collaborate for the common goals. In the process of collaboration, symbolic flow, material flow and emotional flow move irregularly between the collaborative agents who influence and restrict each other. It makes a more complicated relationship between the collaborative agents. And then the complicated relationship also have some influence on the collaborative agents'roles. Although the roles of university and schools are not changed too much, but there are still some difference due to the administration participated.According to the practice research, this paper summarizes two kinds of problems in"U-A-S"collaboration. One is inherent, no matter we discover or not, they can only be alleviated but not be eliminated. Another is the problems that may arise in the process of collaboration. This kind of problem can be solved if we make great efforts to improve. In the end, some advices are given to solve these problems: we should have a full understanding of the inherent drawbacks, and try to reduce them intentionally; we should know the ideal roles of the collaborative agents, and strive to perform our respective duties; we also should construct exchange, incentives, evaluation and some other related mechanisms harder. Besides, I'm looking forward to have an in-depth look at"U-A-S"collaboration. Meanwhile we can promote the collaboration project effectively and make good profits from the collaboration.