St. Mary of the Assumption, a parochial, PreK – Grade 8 school in Northern Baltimore’s Govans neighborhood, has been named a Professional Development School for Loyola College in Maryland’s soon-to-be-inaugurated School of Education. 

While Loyola’s School of Education has not yet been formally announced, Founding Dean Peter Murrell, Jr., and the Loyola Education faculty have already begun the concentrated partnership work. St. Mary’s faculty will participate in regular workshops led by Loyola Education professors focused on high literacy achievement among African American children in the school system, and Loyola Education students will participate as well.

“Our students and teachers will benefit enormously by being a part of a superior educational environment shaped by the most innovative approaches in the field,” said Elizabeth Phelan, principal at St. Mary’s, which has been educating students in Northern Baltimore for 134 years. 

Universities with Education programs often establish Professional Development School relationships with area elementary and secondary schools in order to provide their students with unique student-teaching laboratories, and to create opportunities for the students and faculty at the neighboring schools to benefit from state-of-the-art teaching techniques and resources. This new relationship between Loyola and St. Mary’s builds on an existing partnership that began in 2006 and has grown from a simple homework help initiative to a large-scale collaboration that includes fundraisers, marketing support, art workshops, field trips and other opportunities for interaction between the two institutions. 

The new professional school approach of this PDS partnership, based on the idea of deep collaboration, scholarship of practice, and commitment to social justice is being advanced under the leadership of Loyola’s Founding Dean of Education, Peter Murrell, Jr. Murrell is a specialist in urban education and the author of four books, including 2007’s Race, Culture, and Schooling: Identities of Achievement in Multicultural Urban Schools. 

“This expanded partnership between Loyola and St. Mary’s will have a tremendous impact on learning opportunities for students and faculty at both schools,” he said. “Perhaps more importantly, the learning program we develop together can become a model for effective teaching methods at urban schools throughout Baltimore and across the country.”