Physical education teacher education (PETE) programs require authentic, quality field experiences for their preservice teachers. Faculty often seek alternative experiences to public-school placements due to limited space, class size, location, and overwhelmed local schools. One opportunity in the surrounding community of many universities is the…

Social work has clear expertise in efforts to secure economic and social justice. The addition of environmental justice is an opportunity to extend these same skills into a new justice realm. Social workers not only need to learn about environmental issues but also claim their niche in the environmental crisis and ensure that poor and marginalized…

Much of what makes geography exciting and relevant is the fact that the "field" surrounds us: Our homes, neighborhoods, cities, states, and world each provide spaces, places, and landscapes to read and analyze. The space around us offers a multitude of opportunities to "do" geography. Fieldwork is arguably a cornerstone of the…

Faculty in an Educator Preparation Provider developed a system of instruction and assessment of professional dispositions that spans the teacher candidate's academic career. The system includes a quantifiable rubric to measure professional dispositions, with actionable behavior indicators for candidates and their supervisors to follow. This system…

In education, the Rounds model provides opportunities for engaging educators as communities of learners who examine instructional issues for purposes of understanding and improving them. Over the past 10 years, Rounds have been implemented in school-based experiences in teacher preparation programs across the nation. Yet despite recent interest,…

Over the past few years an increasing number of schools and community organizations have developed transformative learning spaces referred to as "MakerSpaces" for research and training purposes. MakerSpaces are organizations in which members sharing similar interests in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) gather to work on…

The Distance Clinical Connecting Candidates and Children (DC4) is an innovative new model for providing a clinical experience in a reading methods course. Pre-service teachers used this model to implement assessments and lessons via SKYPE with local elementary students. I designed this model to provide a clinical experience when faced with…

The Bradley PDS Partnership, about which we report in this article, was established in 1995 to promote academic and professional development for P-12 students, pre-professionals, practitioners, and professors. For twenty years, the partnership has been generously funded by the William T. Kemper Foundation-Commerce Bank, Trustee. In a grant…

Teacher preparation programs (TPP) rely on school-based mentor teachers and university mentors to assist their teacher candidates with bridging the information presented in courses to the "real world" of teaching. Given the important role that the clinical components of teacher preparation provide in terms of candidate development, the…

Field research gives graduate students a direct experience in appreciating the differences between doing research and reporting it. This paper reports the field experience provided in a doctoral program at the School of Education at Syracuse University. With the support and assistance of faculty consultants, a structured problem approach was used.…

A description is given of a group interview process used with candidates for a nine month, field-based teacher training program. Five candidates were interviewed together by several faculty observers in a forty-five minute session. Faculty observed and noted leadership skills, verbalization and sharing of ideas, ability to convince others,…

The Mentor Teacher Project, initiated in 1985, involved the development and implementation of a new field component into the Academic Learning Teacher Education Program at Michigan State University. The field component, piloted with the Academic Learning students in the class of 1987, was subsequently revised and its impact on the class of 1988…

One of the components of the international program at Michigan Technological University is an internship in Germany where students work for 3 months in companies or university research institutes. These paid internships offer students (mostly engineering and science majors) a unique opportunity to improve their communication skills and cultural…

The adaptation of experimental learning modes to the situation of the working adult student is examined. Special situations or problems unique to this group are illustrated, and methods of designing learning objectives and student reports are presented. Educational objectives and evaluation sheets are appended. (Author/MLW)

Since its beginning in 1975 at the West Charlotte High School in North Carolina, the Academic Internship Program has joined over 6,000 high school students in partnerships with more than 600 sponsors from the business community. The program is intended to: (1) provide opportunities for high school students to explore areas of academic, career, or…