During the COVID-19 impact, many aspects of student life have come to a grinding halt. To help address an acute shortage of accredited teachers, even under these extraordinary circumstances, Alliant University’s California School of Education (CSOE) has been forming partnerships to appropriately provide alternative approaches for teacher candidates to meet clinical practice, field experience, and performance assessment requirements. In collaboration with these partners, our instructors and leaders have been working to develop tools and best practices to not just meet but exceed requirements.
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Even before the crisis, Alliant’s teaching credential programs were composed of online coursework paired with hands-on practice. Teacher candidates took courses online, received support online, and utilized video-based observations and feedback. Our students, although teaching in traditional classroom settings, would capture their lessons on video and then use ADVANCEfeedback® to receive feedback from peers and mentor teachers.
With school buildings closed, we are particularly concerned about ensuring that all teacher candidates complete coursework and field-based learning experiences, then demonstrate the adopted performance expectations in order to stay on their pathways for becoming credentialed teachers.
Kristy Pruitt is the dean of California School of Education at Alliant International University. She can be reached at kristy.pruitt@alliant.edu.
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