School Observations and Classroom Experience

Abstract

This chapter describes the clinical experiences of four teacher candidates while they were completing student teaching in a program with a heavy emphasis on help seeking and delay of gratification as two self-regulated learning strategies and it describes a set of classroom observations. The institution’s core values influence every aspect of teacher preparation including how student teaching placements are selected. Teacher candidates should be able to thrive in learning environments with diverse populations in urban settings, but in addition, be challenged to work with parents and educators whose backgrounds and life experiences are unfamiliar. Both public and private school settings provided venues for clinical experiences and the completion of the Teacher Work Sample. In addition, teacher candidates were observed in these settings using reliable instruments constructed to measure help seeking before, during, and after a lesson was planned and delivered. The findings across all teacher candidates evidence behaviors during their individual clinical experiences that can be attributed to self-regulatory practices. Engagement in self-monitoring and self-evaluation enabled teacher candidates to attribute success and failure to specific areas of weakness or strength.

In our attempt to give underprepared minority teacher candidates the opportunity to become certified teachers, we must look for indicators of future success. Measurement of the important self-regulatory strategy of help seeking is one way to predetermine if an aspiring teacher will use the resources made available by teacher education programs and other supportive groups to assist them in passing a test of basic skills. It is suggested that the scales can be used by teacher education programs to evaluate aspiring teachers’ potential to pass the teacher certification exams by accounting for his/her disposition to use appropriate means to when preparing for state certification exams.

White (2011, p. 15).