Practicum 2: Information for the NLU Supervisor

Thank you for agreeing to serve as a supervisor for NLU’s MAT Secondary Program.

The teacher candidate has already completed 30 field experience hours of observation. This quarter the candidate is expected to spend a minimum of 30 clock hours in the linked p2/student teaching placement.

This semester the candidate is enrolled in a methods course for their content area, and will have specific assignments from their content methods professor for their practicum 2 (p2) experience. Each candidate is responsible for reading the methods course syllabus carefully and knowing which assignments from their content-specific methods course will require student participation, or collecting data from or about the students. However, there are some experiences all instructors would like the teacher candidates to have. We hope you can help facilitate the following experiences for our teacher candidate:

1)Observations;

2)Data collection for a context for learning assignment. These assignments may differ depending on the instructor, but they involve collecting data about the community, school, and classroom environments in order to determine how these environments impact teaching and learning;

3)Teaching individual students and small groups;

4)Teaching a series of lessons. We expect our teacher candidate to teach a minimum of 3-5 lessons during their p2 experience. We strongly suggest that at least two of these lessons be taught sequentially over at least two days

5)Design and implementation of a pre-assessment and a post-assessment that precede and follow the series of lessons.

What you can expect from our teacher candidates and the Secondary Education Program is:

1)Our teacher candidate will use a lesson plan format that is aligned to edTPA Illinois’ teaching licensure exam which is their major high stakes licensure test.

2)As the NLU supervisor, we are asking you set up a meeting with you, the candidate, and the cooperating teacher to introduce yourself to our teacher candidate and the cooperating teacher. At this meeting please develop a tentative schedule for when the teacher candidate will teach the series of lessons.

3)As the supervisor, we are asking you to observe at least two of these lessons and meet with you and the candidate to discuss areas of strength and areas that our teacher candidate needs to work on in student teaching.

4)In addition, there will be a p2 competency appraisal (an online assessment) that you, our teacher candidate and the cooperating teacher will need to fill out before student teaching begins. Please arrange a meeting where the three of you will review the results of this p2 competency appraisal and set up a schedule for takeover of classes for student teaching during the following quarter*.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact the following Secondary Education faculty: Jack Denny , Vito M. Dipinto or Aleks Veselovsky

For Winter/Spring

*NOTE: Depending on when your school year ends, some of our teacher candidates, who are doing spring student teaching, may still be in their methods course. The consequence of this is that they will need to do their teaching and assignments for p2 before the third week in February in order to have enough time to complete their student teaching.