Student Teacher to Master Teacher A Practical Guide for Educating Students With Special Needs

Our basic purpose in preparing the third edition ofStudent Teacher to Master Teacherwas to provide a reflective guide for use during supervised special education student teaching experiences or graduate field experience. We believe that field experiences are often the single most important component of a preservice level teacher development program. The approach used in our guide is based on two interrelated assumptions. First, we believe that student teaching and initial field experiences should be rigorous and as realistic as possible. They should be developed to ensure that the preservice-level teacher enters the professional job market with the skills needed for both immediate survival and continued success. Few teacher educators would question this view, and many may regard it as an obvious, somewhat pious, statement of fact. Interpretation and actual implementation of this view appear to vary considerably, however, affecting the validity of the basic assumption in reference to specific teacher-training programs. In the absence of structured and purposeful activities or requirements, there may be no valid criteria for assessing easily delineated teaching skills across varied settings. In fact, the apparent discrepancy between theory and successful application may significantly reduce program credibility. Second, special education field experiences should incorporate a variety of structured requirements and activities that collectively "bridge the gap" between methods and/or laboratory courses and actual independent, professional teaching. We recognize the need for more structured, reality-based, and relevant preservice experiences. When observing, supervising, managing, and evaluating preservice and beginning teachers, we found a critical need to link preservice training and field experience requirements to real teaching skills and actual on-the-job requirements. Topics and activities in this guide were chosen because we believe they represent many of the most pertinent issues that new teachers will face when they begin their field experiences or when they manage their first classrooms on their own. Through our own experiences as classroom teachers and supervisors of developing teachers, we also realized the needs of college supervisors. We believe that individuals involved with the supervision of student teachers and field-experience students often are the forgotten souls, desperately trying to promote best practices in the face of problems of logistics, timing, and realities of modern schools. Often, these are individuals who must face experienced teachers' claims to novice teachers that "it can't be done like that" or "theory is only relevant in textbooks and it will never work here." To the university instructors' calls for "increased best practices" in the classrooms, we believe that college supervisors will welcome a commercially prepared resource to aid them in their roles. This guide was developed to reduce the amount of time needed by supervisory faculty and staff in the review and possible remediation of key concepts associated with successful teaching. We hope the use of this guide will allow more time for the important job of observing and providing feedback to preservice teachers and for supervisors' liaisons to classroom teachers and administrators, university faculty, and preservice teachers. In summary, throughout this guide we provide tips and insights to preservice and beginning teachers to help them grow professionally with their chosen career over time, starting during their initial field experiences and continuing through their beginning years in teaching. We recognize the enormous amount of information that teachers new to special education must obtain and be able to demonstrate during their initial work with students with mild to moderate disabilities. This guide is meant to help new teachers make the transition from the role of student at the preservice level to thRosenberg, Michael J. is the author of 'Student Teacher to Master Teacher A Practical Guide for Educating Students With Special Needs', published 2001 under ISBN 9780130413727 and ISBN 0130413720.