Weighing Gains and Losses in Embedded Clinical Experience

April Showers from the Methods Classroom Each April, I feel an overwhelming need to examine the school year and my role within it.  Were the curricular decisions I made last April and May fruitful? Were there more gains than losses? How might I make adjustments based on the performance and feedback of the students I […]

Leaning In to Learn Vulnerability in Partnerships

How is professional collaboration on the individual level connected to large-scale partnerships between organizations?  Indeed, how are they not connected?  Collaborative partnerships vary, but what I have experienced can be captured in two buckets: proximity partnerships and purposeful partnerships. Experiences as a teacher and a student revealed an evolution in my thinking about what these types […]

Next Steps

Finding a Space for Teaching When the partnership began, it was more of an agreement for teaching space.  After a semester of using a high school classroom and engaging in a few opportunities that being in a high school presented, the division chair and I planned more intentional experiences for the candidates and mentor teachers. […]

When Weather Hits

Partnership Placements Our district-university partnership for teacher preparation presents me the opportunity to teach my spring English methods course in a local high school every Tuesday.  The embedded field experience hours (practice) interplay with the theoretical readings and other assignments (praxis) to better prepare candidates as practitioners.  This clinical model depends on the high school […]

School Partnership Beginnings

Persistently Reaching Out Since November of 2017, the director of educator preparation and I had been working to find spring placements for my five secondary English education candidates in one school setting. In previous semesters, candidates had been scattered across area school districts that were demographically, culturally, and often pedagogically different from one another. With […]