Tenney-Muirhead and Shaughnessy share how teacher ed programs build stronger school district partnerships
Course instructor Meghan Shaughnessy (now Assistant Professor at Boston University) and Meri Tenney-Muirhead, Managing Director of the Elementary Teacher Education program, presented with Edthena on the use of video to initiate and advance clinical partnerships. They discussed how the SOE implements video to strengthen partner relationships and align goals and visions around the program. Shaughnessy and Tenney-Muirhead also addressed how video supports interns to learn from video models and to further promote their own self-reflective habits.
Interns in the teacher preparation program at the University of Michigan engage in field experiences with preK-12 clinical partners each semester that they are enrolled in the program. In their fieldwork, interns document their practices with video.
As the team of field instructors, course instructors, and mentor teachers support interns through their journey, Shaughnessy and Tenney-Muirhead recognize the importance of developing a shared vision to ensure goals are aligned across the teacher preparation program.
“We’re really thinking about, talking about, and looking at a particular instance of teaching and developing a shared vision and a set of language around how we talk about and think about assessing interns as they move through the program,” said Tenney-Muirhead.
Using video to support a shared vision within district partnerships promotes an understanding and alignment of the expectations around observing, giving feedback, and assessing program interns.
“We can really co-develop feedback practices together in lots of different ways using the platform as a method to share the ways in which [we] talk about teaching, the ways in which a university field instructor talks about teaching, the course instructor, and then it becomes a shared experience for a mentor teacher,” Tenney-Muirhead said.
The ability to provide real-life teaching models to interns allows them to see how practices are implemented in the classroom. Alternatively, recording video intern field experiences gives interns, mentor teachers, and instructors an essential vantage to reflect and drive collaboration.
“Videos can do amazing things when we are able to use them in flexible ways like interacting and gathering data from video,” Shaughnessy stated.
Watching video and decomposing practices into its working parts has provided significant learning opportunities for University of Michigan’s Teacher Preparation Program. Instructors can guide interns through analyzing parts of practices such as discussions and small groups to understand how each piece works together to be effectively used in the classroom.
Tenney-Muirhead also mentioned the benefit of field instructors being able to model intern feedback for program partners through the Edthena platform. Instructors can show different approaches to feedback that address the main requirements of the work.
