For field instructors, 2006-2007
DAET info | Field instruction | Evaluating interns | TE Dept Policies | Program Requirements | MSU policies
DAET Information
DAET/MSU Calendar
This calendar includes all of the important dates that DAET sets, and attempts to include many other dates important to teacher candidates, interns, mentor teachers, and instructors.
DAET Personnel
This contact list provides names, email addresses, telephones, and offices (if any) for all DAET personnel.
Field Instructor Mileage Claims
This page provides information and forms.
Instructor support
A list of information about matters like making copies, claiming mileage reimbursements, or getting supplies for classes. Report gaps and confusions in this information to daet@msu.edu.
What the internship IS and IS NOT
What interns get from the internship is likely to depend, in some part, on how they think about the internship. This table tries to indicate thinking that will help interns to gain the most from the year.
Intern year roles and responsibilities
A successful internship is a partnership among the intern, the mentor teacher, and the field instructor. This page describes each one's responsibilities.
Field instruction, field instructor lore, and summaries of useful literature
TE 501-2 Syllabus (11 September 2006, 80KB, Rich Text Format
Vignettes from field instruction
Here's a start on a page in which we could record short vignettes of what field instructors do, and so share the craft of field instruction among us. To add vignettes, email them to tombird@msu.edu.
Getting down to work with interns
This short piece tells two stories about learning to teach: (1) formally studying the repertoire of teaching, in order to learn how to help your students meet the standards they must meet these days. (2) Acting, as an automomous moral being, on the intention to make teaching your life's work. The piece ends with questions for connecting with the latter story.
What do interns bring to the internship?
To work with them effectively, one needs to consider what interns bring with them to the internship. This short piece tries to summarize some habits of studenting, some ways of thinking about learning to teach, and what interns are trying to do.
Starting the year in a classroom
We've discussed how we might help interns learn most from observing and participating in the important and complex task of starting the year in the internship. The result is shared project.
Unit and lesson planning
Planning, teaching, and assessing units and lessons, and learning from that, are central activities in teaching and learning to teach. The page offers a set of questions too stimulate that process, and two common models of teaching that might be employed.
Internship support and problem-solving
All interns deserve systematic support. Some will need particular assistance. A few will come into peril of failing the internship. The page describes the Team norms for consultation among instructors and for documentation of performances by all involved.
Evaluating interns
Assessing intern performance
As the program progresses, teacher candidates work on learning to think like a teacher, then to learning to know like a teacher, and then to acting as a teacher in a classroom, mainly in the intern year. At different occasions, several instruments are used to assess the intern's peformance.
Grading in the intern year
In the intern year, there arise some special issues and procedures, most owing to the fact the fall courses are prerequisites for the spring courses.
Grades and grading
Grading is both an important element of course design and a potentially vexing topic for instructors as well as for teacher candidates and interns. Both strategic advice and specific examples are provided.
TE Department policies
Professional Teaching Standards (revised 4/25/2006)
These standards apply to interns’ performances in the intern year, and so should guide much of the work in earlier stages in the program. There are eight groups of standards: practicing a liberal education, teaching subject matter, engaging and responding to students, organizing a class, using an equipped school room, joining a faculty and school, engaging parents and guardians, and growing professionally. Each group has four to eight standards statements.
How course and field instructors should handle discussion of activities in mentor teachers’ classrooms
Activities in mentor teachers' classrooms are staple material in teacher education courses. Necessarily, we work with teacher candidates and interns to describe, interpret, and assess what they observe, and thereby to construct their own practice. Mentor teachers, who are colleagues and partners in the program, provide the material for all these discussions; instructors owe them an account of how those discussions will be handled.
Professional Conduct Policy
In addition to meeting academic and testing requirements, teacher candidates and interns also must meet standards for their professional conduct. This policy states the main expectations. Standard 4 of the Professional Teaching Standards for interns also addresses professional conduct.
Procedures for handling disputes between students and instructors
In case of a dispute between a student and instructor, you need to know that the TE Department has approved procedures for handling disputes. Two important parts: A few acts by teacher candidates or interns so serious that instructors should report them immediately to the Team Leader, TE Department Chair, and Associate Dean for Student affairs. In most cases, the first step of the procedure calls for the student and instructor to work it out between them in a collegial and timely way. If an instructor cannot achieve that immediately, s/he should call in the team coordinator. We do not let trouble fester. Get the procedures at http://ed-web3.educ.msu.edu/te/teacherprep/HandleDispPol.htm.
Substitute Teaching by Interns
This policy regulates substitute teaching by interns, for their collaborating teachers. Field instructors will need to know the policy early in the fall semester. Consultation among intern, mentor, and field instructor is required before the intern begins to substitute teach, and forms must be completed to record the decision and to report the substitute teaching.
Elementary Education Requirements
Instructors should be generally informed about these requirements, but are not expected to know them in detail or to interpret them authoritatively. For authoritative interpretations, teacher candidates and interns should refer to the Student Affairs Office (SAO) in 134 Erickson Hall.
COE Office of Student Affairs
SAO offers the web pages describing elementary education requirements, and provides the detailed and authoritative interpretation of those requirements. Teacher preparation instructors should be generally informed about these requirements, but are not expected to know them in detail or to interpret them authoritatively.
Elementary education requirements
These pages attempt to provide relatively complete information about requirements that apply to elementary education. Scanning the left menu of the elementary program pages will provide you a sense of what is included in them, and enable you to allocate your time in skimming them.
Summary of the requirements
This page summarizes the main requirements of the program and provides links to the variouis parts of the requirements.
Criteria for Progression to the Internship
Note in this page that, to progress to the internship, teacher candidates must meet both academic and professional conduct requirements. In addition to filing grades, TE course instructors also file reports with DAET on the professional conduct of the members of their sections.
MSU policies and facilities
Code of teaching responsibility
All MSU instructors--faculty and doctoral students--are bound by MSU's Code of Teaching Responsibility, which is an important basis for interaction between students and instructors. The Code also is available from the MSU Ombudsman's web site.
Academic Freedom for Students at MSU
This is the University's statement on the rights and responsibilities of MSU students. AFR also is available from the MSU Ombudsman's web site.The TE Department's Procedures for Handling Disputes between Students and Instructors conforms to the “AFR” and is more specific for the teacher preparation program.
Final examination policy
This policy requires that all sections of all courses should meet during finals week--whether or not a final exam will be given--for a set of purposes named in the policy. The Final Exam schedule provides the meeting times for these sessions. In practical terms, this policy provides for having a normal working session in the last regular meeting of a course, and then up to two more hours, in the following week, to collect final assignments, summarize the course, and evaluate it.
Religious Observance Policy | Provost's Supplementary Letter
" The faculty and staff should be sensitive to the observance of these holidays so that students who absent themselves from class on these days are not seriously disadvantaged...."
Angel
is MSU’s course management software, by which instructors can publish syllabi, upload materials for download by members of classes, keep grades, administer tests and quizzes, etc.
Registrar’s web page
This page is a trove of information for students and instructors. Also, of facilities for instructors: You can look up your class meeting place in the schedule of courses, get your class list, file grades, send emails to your class (Angel also provides that affordance). The page is so useful that a link to it has been included in the left-side menu for all elementary teams pages.
Selected MSU services for students
This selective list also is available from the left menu in elementary teams pages. MSU's list of services for students is much more extensive.