Student Teaching & Clinical Practice
The need to increase the diversity of the 21st century teaching force has been well-documented (Grant, 1994; Villegas & Lucas, 2002), and the TLC is committed to recruiting, preparing, and retaining teachers of color. The teacher education curricula in both general and special education have recently been revised with an increased emphasis on issues of culturally responsive pedagogy and social justice. Members of the Coalition have experienced the haphazard and often idiosyncratic nature of field experience that Darling-Hammond (2009) identifies as a barrier to the preparation of effective teachers and improved student learning. The TLC is developing a set of policies and procedures to simplify the field placement process.
The clinical practice provides future teachers the foundation for their classroom practices. It is imperative that we collaborate in this area where teacher candidates are literally in both the school-world and the university-world. During this experience, teacher candidates should be able to make connections between their coursework and their practice in order to cultivate the necessary skills and dispositions to become successful teachers for every child they teach.
In order to develop a set of professional skills and dispositions, teacher candidates need extensive, meaningful, and coherent experiences in the field. PSU’s existing professional preparation programs include field experiences across the entire school year and candidates spend many more hours in schools than is currently required by Oregon Administrative Rules. Candidates will have many opportunities to learn the craft of teaching in the field with effective practitioners through a set of graduated experiences that offer them the full range of teaching responsibilities across an entire school year (Darling-Hammond, 2009; Zeichner, 2010).
In an effort to promote increased collaboration, communication and support among all stakeholders, teacher candidates will be placed in partner schools in teams of four to six. This will create a school-based learning teams which supports both their professional preparation and district professional development. As the cooperating teacher and teacher candidate collaborate at the classroom level, they will utilize co-teaching techniques, which positively impacts PreK-12 student success as well as teacher candidate learning.
One of the most promising models of collaboration, co-teaching, dramatically shifts the traditional notion of ‘solo’ teaching, preservice teacher candidates in a classroom on their own as a test of their professional competence to one of a team of professionals, e.g., classroom teacher, special education teacher, and teacher candidate, working together to engage in curriculum planning, differentiate instruction, and use multiple forms of assessment to monitor student learning and provide feedback.
The clinical practice provides future teachers the foundation for their classroom practices. It is imperative that we collaborate in this area where teacher candidates are literally in both the school-world and the university-world. During this experience, teacher candidates should be able to make connections between their coursework and their practice in order to cultivate the necessary skills and dispositions to become successful teachers for every child they teach.
In order to develop a set of professional skills and dispositions, teacher candidates need extensive, meaningful, and coherent experiences in the field. PSU’s existing professional preparation programs include field experiences across the entire school year and candidates spend many more hours in schools than is currently required by Oregon Administrative Rules. Candidates will have many opportunities to learn the craft of teaching in the field with effective practitioners through a set of graduated experiences that offer them the full range of teaching responsibilities across an entire school year (Darling-Hammond, 2009; Zeichner, 2010).
In an effort to promote increased collaboration, communication and support among all stakeholders, teacher candidates will be placed in partner schools in teams of four to six. This will create a school-based learning teams which supports both their professional preparation and district professional development. As the cooperating teacher and teacher candidate collaborate at the classroom level, they will utilize co-teaching techniques, which positively impacts PreK-12 student success as well as teacher candidate learning.
One of the most promising models of collaboration, co-teaching, dramatically shifts the traditional notion of ‘solo’ teaching, preservice teacher candidates in a classroom on their own as a test of their professional competence to one of a team of professionals, e.g., classroom teacher, special education teacher, and teacher candidate, working together to engage in curriculum planning, differentiate instruction, and use multiple forms of assessment to monitor student learning and provide feedback.