Year 1
The Clinical Practice (CP) working group first meet in January 2017. At that initial meeting, we agreed that the CAEP Clinical Practice standards and OSPI Induction standards provided a useful, broad framework to focus our initial work, and we organized these standards into four key components with corresponding research questions to guide our literature reviews in each area. After sharing what we had learned from our literature reviews with each other, we created a diagram to represent our research-based framework for Clinical Practice. We also identified a structure for an institutional self-assessment rubric, based on the indicator structure from PULSE rubrics and column headings from NCATE framework. We anticipate that teacher education programs could use this tool to: a) Analyze the extent to which their teacher education programs reflect research-based components of effective clinically-oriented, practice-based teacher preparation, and b) Plan where they would like to be with respect to each component and indicator of clinical practice. We call our two tools the: 1) CP research-based framework (see Figure1 below), and 2) Self-Assessment Rubric for Clinically-oriented, Practice-based Teacher Preparation (Figure 2 below).
In our first year, we learned two important things about our working processes. One, we determined that our working group only had the capacity to address "induction" from a higher education perspective of helping teacher candidates understand pk-12 students and school contexts, and we found out that an existing state organization, the OSPI Beginning Educator Support Team (BEST), was working with 80% of the school districts in the state on supporting beginning teachers. Second, we learned to intentionally vary the size of the working group to best align with the purpose of the meeting/tasks. The whole group was helpful when initially generating ideas and goals, while a smaller group was more conducive to completing discrete tasks or creating products. Then the larger group was helpful for giving feedback on products developed by the smaller sub-group. Group members also seemed to appreciate monthly updates about the broader NextGen project and the timeline/direction of the project as a whole.
Year 2
In our second year, we shared the CP self-assessment rubric with broader audiences and completed our final revisions to the instrument. Then, we developed a plan for what professional development with partnering implementation teams might look like to help them analyze and improve their STEM teacher preparation programs in light of the research on effective clinically-oriented, practice-based teacher preparation. The whole working group met though video conferencing and a sub-group met in person to develop a draft plan for the content and structure of prospective PD with implementation teams in Year 3. This process included literature reviews in four CP areas: 1) Principles of Teaching and Teacher Preparation, 2) Teacher Education Pedagogies, 3) Core Practices, and 4) P12-Higher Ed Partnerships. The CP sub-group decided to focus the PD in Year 3 on Teacher Education Pedagogies, specifically the cycle of learning to teach framework (McDonald et al, 2013) that is grounded in Core Practices and practice-based teacher education pedagogies. Then, the PD in Year 4 will focus on key components of high-quality P12-HE Clinical Partnerships, and will engage participants with models and criteria for what makes each component effective.
Year 3
We began our third year by recruiting interested implementation teams, who will participate in a day-long professional development in March/April 2019 and a 2-hour follow-up meeting in Jun 2019. Implementation teams representing seven higher education institutions in Washington State have expressed interest in participating in the CP professional development.
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