Paula Lancaster is the Dean of Education and Human Services at Central Michigan University. She works closely with many P-12 teachers and administrators who serve in the role of mentors and co-teachers for teacher candidates and a month other things, serves as co-lead in CEEDAR Center Topical Action Group on high-leverage practices. She was a high school special education teacher and building level administrator for eight years in Illinois. She completed her PhD in Special Education in 1999 at the University of Kansas, where she was a doctoral leadership fellow at the Center for Research on Learning. She collaborated with Jean Schumaker on three multi-year grants from the National Institutes of Health in which her research focused on effective instruction and instructional technology for adolescents with high incidence disabilities. More recently, Paula’s work is centered on the development and implementation of practice-based approaches to teacher preparation with a particular interest in collaborations between university-based preparation programs and P-12 school environments.