This study is the first in a series of evaluation reports on the developmental stages of Teacher Corps programs. It focuses on program planning and initial implementation activities in relation to two components required by the Teacher Corps in the inservice programs: multicultural education and collaboration among various educational institutions. An ethnographic case study method was used to collect data in four low-income school sites. Analysis of the collected data focused on forces that facilitated or impeded project implementation and on processes of collaborative planning and multicultural education program development. The introduction to this volume supplies background information on the Teacher Corps. A section on the study design and methodology deals with ethnography and the techniques used in data collection and organization. In the third section, characteristics of each of the four study sites are compared and analyzed in relation to multicultural education. The conclusions reached on Teacher Corps collaboration, discussed in Section IV, concerned the use of community councils, policy boards, and planning groups. Section V, general conclusions and recommendations, involved: (1) creating locally based commitments to multicultural education; (2) increasing Teacher Corps Washington leadership in multicultural education; (3) using team leaders and interns as inhouse multicultural resources; (4) more intellectual leadership from project leaders; and (5) integration of multicultural education throughout program components. Appendices presented examples of a topical index, protocol, analysis and interpretation, and a cross-site index file card used in the study. (FG)