Project approach allows early childhood teachers to use both child-initiated and teacher-facilitated instructional methods. This article describes what we learned from a study focused on project approach professional development for early childhood teachers who later served as mentor teachers during a field experience for an introductory methods…

To grow and sustain field placement experiences, a group of elementary education university faculty members from a small private liberal arts university, examined strategies for teacher recruitment, retention, and recognition. Faculty members compiled and categorized data from cooperating teacher exit surveys, intern exit surveys, field…

How can universities support their students in pursuing civil rights activism? In doing so, how can universities prioritize students from marginalized communities who are most affected by justice issues? This paper will explore lessons learned from the nation's first civil rights clinic at the undergraduate level. Responding to the urgency of our…

Providing adequate supervision for pre-service teachers enrolled in special education field placements is a challenge. Rural placements often exacerbate this challenge due to the large geographical areas in which these placements are located. The purpose of this article is to describe one approach to early field supervision in rural settings that…

Graduate counseling programs in the United States have increased their population of international students. However, limited studies have addressed the challenges of international students, specifically in school counseling programs. Considering the cultural disparities that exist for international school counseling students and the challenges…

After a tumultuous end to the 2019-2020 school year, it is more important than ever to cultivate new teachers in the field of education. Combining the experience of veteran teachers with the eagerness and adaptability of students in clinical practice (student teaching) a new form of co-teaching may emerge for the fall semester that covers both in…

Ohio recognizes that high-quality teachers come from high-quality teacher preparation programs. To help improve the quality of educator preparation programs in Ohio, H.B. 1 of the 128th General Assembly directed the Chancellor of the Ohio Department of Higher Education to develop a system for evaluating Ohio's educator preparation programs (ORC…

As the intersection between theory and practice, clinical experiences are the shared home through which school and university constituents examine effective pedagogies. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, our teacher preparation programs had built meaningful, face-to-face, partnership-based clinical experiences. The abrupt shift to virtual instruction…

This chapter describes a field-based experience based on Native American best mentoring practices that brings together traditional ecological knowledge and Western science to build relationships and understanding between Native students and faculty mentors.

Faced with school closures in the spring of 2020 due to COVID-19, middle level teacher candidates were left with no way to finish their field experiences. The challenge continued into the fall with many schools providing only virtual learning and some not allowing visitors on campus. This article describes the steps one university middle level…

Concerned in particular about the misconceptions regarding literacy teacher preparation and recognizing the importance of educating teachers entering the profession, the International Literacy Association (ILA) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) brought together a task force charged to review and analyze the research on teacher…

Not every teacher should serve as a mentor teacher (MT), and there are certainly those who are considered excellent teachers who did not find success in that role, often struggling to turn over aspects of classroom instruction to their mentees. With the current testing and accountability regime, some teachers are reluctant to leave their test…

In this introduction to the special issue on evolving changes in our field, we have intentionally chosen to use the power of a vastly different metaphor to promote deep reflection. Specifically, we will introduce the notion of selection pressures and its impact on an evolutionary process, illustrating how special education teacher education has…

Professional development that scaffolds and supports supervisors is critical for quality field experiences and is our responsibility as teacher educators. The literature supports this statement and two ideas that conceptually frame our work: (1) quality field experiences are a critical component of preservice programs and (2) training and support…

Physical education teacher candidates (PETCs) often, as part of their curricular requirements, engage in early field experiences that prepare them for student teaching. Matching the PETC's developmental level with the mentor's supervision style enhances this experience. The situational supervision model, based on the situational leadership model,…