Indications are that NCATE is moving to a more clinically-based model. What this means for us is that we will be expected to develop relationships with schools so that our students can benefit from more field work in those schools. Of course, if our students are involved in more field work, that likely means additional faculty supervision and that has implications for credit hours for our students and faculty load.
Add to this "mix" our current status with REPA and it becomes a difficult issue to address too deeply.
But it does need to be in the fore of our thoughts.
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As you discuss this it would probably be helpful to review the rubric in the NCATE standards book that everyone received in August 2008. We have also had some discussions about making Standard 3, Field Experiences, the one that we would try to receive a target rating on in the new Continuous Improvement Model that NCATE will be using for our next visit.
ReplyDeleteKaren
Before we even consider how to add field, I am interested in looking to partner with a group of specific schools so that we could have more continuity of experiences for our students. It would be very helpful to have one consistent group of highly diverse schools, for example, for F202 field for both elementary and secondary. Then we could have our own separate "chain" for content methods and student teaching, so that students could feed from a middle school in methods, for example, into a high school in the same corporation for student teaching. That would allow them to know more about the corporation and "hit the ground running" for student teaching. We could have several corporations we work with to represent diversity of corporation size and studnet population as well as geographic location. For example, we could look at SBCSC, Elkhart, Goshen, LaVille, LaPorte . . . that type of spread. This would work best if we could partner with Bethel, Goshen and St. Mary's to avoid total duplication of districts. It would also change the way the Field/Student Teaching Coordinator works and I think make the job much more doable.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Sara. If we put together a committee to look into setting up these partnerships, I would like to be on it.
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