Department of Teacher Education / Team 2 /The Internship: Assessment of Intern Progress - A Discussion Tool, Standard 2: Working with Students

The intern treats all students as capable of learning, focuses on their capacities and strengths rather than on their deficits and weaknesses, and strives to create conditions in which they can learn.
The intern interacts and communicates clearly with students, making students feel cared for and listened to.
The intern seeks ways to encourage all students to participate in the activities of the class.
The intern understands how children learn and develop, and organizes activities that support their intellectual, social, and personal development..
The intern discovers relevant differences among students and their approaches to learning, accommodates those differences or uses them as resources in the classroom, and modifies the task or environment as needed to support students' continuous intellectual, social, and physical development.
The intern learns about students' interests, strengths, and cultural backgrounds in order to connect class topics and activities to students' experiences and interact with them effectively.
The intern effectively uses outside resources (home, school, community) to support students' learning and to deal with their problems.

The intern promotes active learning and thoughtfulness.

For Example:

The intern teaches coherent lessons that are organized about some framework, have a clear aim and focus, proceed reasonably from a thoughtful beginning to a thoughtful ending, and keep all students involved.
The intern leads class discussions that explore problems and ideas, that elicit diverse responses from many students, and that get students to think critically.
The intern helps the students to make connections between new content and prior learning.
The intern asks appropriate and stimulating questions, listens carefully, and responds thoughtfully to student's ideas, comments, and questions.
The intern understands how to motivate students to learn and how to maintain students' interest even in the face of temporary failure.

The intern builds on students' interests, strengths, and cultural backgrounds.

For Example:

The intern adjusts or adapts lessons to accommodate students' individual needs and abilities and to include all students in class activities.
The intern adapts her own role to the activity that s/he is trying to produce among students, e.g., tries to figure out when to talk and when to listen in a class discussion.
The intern monitors and checks for students' understanding (prior knowledge, throughout lesson) and flexibly adjust her or his plans in response to students' actions and other contingencies.
The intern seeks and uses information about students' prior knowledge in planning. The intern builds on information about student understanding gained from such tasks for further planning.

The intern treats all students as capable of learning.

For Example:

The intern values and respects each student's thinking and actively elicits and considers students' thinking in planning and teaching.
The intern demonstrates curiosity about what students already know, what they are thinking, and how they understand or make sense of what they are learning.
The intern understands and uses a variety of approaches to encourage students' development of critical thinking, problem solving, and performance skills.
The intern continually elicits and responds to student ideas in order to shape and challenge student understanding. The intern thinks about: How are students making sense of this? How are they going astray?

Narrative Comments about Ratings for Standard 2:

FALL

SPRING