This article describes the creation of a First Year Experience learning community in a teacher education program. The First Year Experience model was adopted by the university because of declining enrollment, retention, and graduation rates and has been generally successful in the education department. With little information available for teacher…

Eighth-grade students from three school districts in three small towns in Crosby County, Texas, received academic credit for working together with the biannual Crosby County Pioneer Memorial Museum summer travel education program. Each of the three districts radiate from a small town. They were within one county, and the museum was located in the…

For business schools, AACSB and Middle States' call for more experiential learning is one reason to provide study abroad programs. Universities must attend to the demand for continuous improvement and employ metrics to benchmark and evaluate their relative standing among peer institutions. One such benchmark is the National Survey of Student…

This paper provides a summary of the design, development, and evaluation of a mobile distance supervision system for teacher interns in their field-based teaching experiences. Developed as part of the University of Florida's Restructuring and Improving Teacher Education 325T grant project, the prototype system streams video of teachers in rural…

Extension personnel, agricultural companies, and contract researchers invest a great deal of resources through time, money, and manpower to educate crop consultants, producers, students, and new employees. Creating an in-field, real world, and hands-on learning environment affords an opportunity to engage individuals to learn in ways that cannot…

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the development, implementation and outcome of a field-based learning flow-charting project that was conducted in an accounting information systems (AIS) course. The emphasis for the project was strengthening the students' critical thinking skills. This paper advances AIS education by sharing a field-based…

Twelve universities and one American Indian (AI) tribal college were selected for the National Child Welfare Workforce Institute's 5-year stipend traineeship program. These tribal traineeships were designed to provide social work child welfare education for tribal and nontribal students. Twenty-two AI students and 58 nontribal students completed a…

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…

This article supports the notion of high quality clinical teacher preparation models and lays out an argument for investing in professional education that is organized around more coherent systems for cultivating clinical practice. This article outlines the creation and implementation of a clinically-based teacher preparation program. Project…

Recent reports call for a structural transformation of teacher preparation programs with increased attention to quality field-based learning experiences for pre-service teachers. Ideally, this occurs in the context of robust university-school partnerships. The challenges lie in identifying such school sites and building meaningful, reciprocal…

In October 2010, the University of Southern California School of Social Work entered the online education environment with the launch of the first national web-based MSW program. After an initial enrollment of 80 students, in just 3 years this state-of-the-art MSW, offered in a technology-advanced synchronous and asynchronous format, has generated…

The International Reading Association (2003) has recently established new guidelines for graduate students enrolled in reading and literacy programs. These guidelines require graduate students to maintain direct contact with students during their coursework for advanced degrees. Field experiences support best practices in bridging the gap between…

In this article, we share how a professional development school (PDS) partnership between several elementary school sites within a district and an institution of higher education prepares special education teacher candidates. The following challenges are identified for PDS stakeholders: recruiting qualified special education mentor teachers,…

This article describes an English language arts teacher preparation perspective that considers middle school students as part of the teacher educator team. Based on a recognized gap in the literature about students as powerful partners, the authors undertook a 3-year study to explore the question, "What do preservice middle school teachers…

Due to the rising concern for the improvement of field experiences on the national level and also to the concern raised within the College of Education and Human Services at Clarion University of Pennsylvania, a model was developed and is now being implemented that incorporates a wide variety of innovative ideas on field experiences, research, and…