EDE 4941 Level 1 Field Experience
DE 4941: Level 1 Field Experience (Fall 2012, Fall 2013)
This course is the residents’ first field experience. It is designed to help residents integrate concepts, theories, and ideas from their coursework into their field experience. Since we advocate inquiry as a signature pedagogy, course assignments and experiences are geared towards scaffolding residents’ development of a stance towards inquiry. I co-taught this course with three Partnership Resource Teachers (PRTs). Co-teaching involves intensive planning to ensure that all instructors understand the concepts, the big picture, and the current lesson in order to meet the students needs. To accomplish this task, I met weekly with the PRTs to plan for our weekly seminar. I have attached a sample of one of our lesson plans from 2012 and one from 2013 as an illustration of the weekly plans we generated. Due to the dynamic nature of the field experience, lesson plans are continuously constructed - no same lesson plan can be taught each year given the context of the Urban Teacher Residency Partnership Program and the extensive duration our students spend in the field (almost 2000 hours upon graduation).
My work included on site coaching to residents, leading a weekly seminar, providing mentoring and peer coaching to the PRTs as co-teachers, and managing logistical details of this cohort under the guidance of Dr. Danielle Dennis. Instructional strategies included the integration of inquiry, book study, and critical friends groups, which are forms of differentiated professional development (Nolan & Hoover, 2011).
In Fall 2013, my teaching load was conceptualized as a .125 for this course and a .125 for EDE 4940 so that I could continue to facilitate the relationships needed to maintain this kind of robust school-university partnership, provide professional development to PRTs for program coherence, co-teach the weekly seminar for both levels (EDE 4941 and EDE 4940), and provide onsite coaching to residents.
Attached below are the syllabi for both the 2012 and 2013 fall semesters. As this was the residents first experience with teacher inquiry, we needed to scaffold the process for them through their Individual Learner Inquiry. I have attached examples of instructional materials that we used to support this process. This assignment is not only transformative for our residents, but in this email, a resident shares how her first grader made significant gains in reading as a result of this assignment. (You must login to see this entry - only authorized individuals with login information and password may see this artifact).
I care tremendously about differentiated professional development, and I wanted my students to learn the skills and dispositions necessary to be passionate, lifelong learners. That belief translated into practice in this course through book studies where I, along with my co-teachers, asked residents to read a book together and discuss the book under the facilitation of one of the course instructors, and then select a second book to organize, read, and facilitate with a group of peers. The required text for the fall was Nickel and Dimed. At the conclusion of the book, we asked them to write a summary of the main part of the book, respond to one of the questions in the back of the book, comment on 2-3 peers' responses, and then revise their entry using hyperlinks to demonstrate how reading others' blogs influenced their learing. I thought this example by Nicole Leonick was an exemplar of the quality of work that these residents can produce.
Other student work samples can be found by accessing their individual web sites by clicking here: Teacher Residents' Web Spaces.