Clinical Rounds Modules

Pre-Interns

Student Study
The Student Study Module highlights the importance of gathering information about students and using this information to aid instruction. Pre-interns interview a student one-on-one and gather information on their literacy practices using the Content Reading Inventory and the Literacy Motivation Questionnaire.  The information gathered informs the pre-intern about the student’s literacy and disciplinary interests, her/his reading skills and content knowledge, and her/his generic and disciplinary writing skills.

Text Study
The Text Study Module gives pre-interns a chance to practice planning for instruction.  Many people think that teacher planning is about timing and activities; certainly both are important.  But really proficient planning—the kind that actually results in student learning—considers the larger concept being taught, student learning objectives, what might be the best texts of instruction, the purpose for reading (or producing) these texts, and the students’ abilities, interests, and needs.

Lesson Planning
In the Lesson Planning Module, pre-interns work collaboratively with their attending teachers to develop two brief lessons. Pre-interns begin planning by analyzing the classroom and the students, and also the content expectations and texts they will incorporate into the lessons. Using this information they craft a lesson with their attending teacher that includes an appropriate intellectual problem, concepts, objectives, texts, tasks, and assessments.

Interns

Concept Formation
The Concept Formation Module engages teaching interns in the practice of creating a concept formation lesson, which is then enacted in the classroom.  This module combines utilizing knowledge about students and instructional context, basing lessons on intellectual problems and key concepts, and selecting and using appropriate texts and resources in order to create a lesson plan they will implement in the field.  Interns practice assessing students’ achievement after the lesson and critiquing their own teaching practices.

Designing and Using Assessments
The Designing and Using Assessments Module engages interns in thoughtfully considering their content, standards, assessments, materials, teaching methods, the context of instruction and, of course, their students.  It involves:

• identifying the instructional problems teachers face in teaching particular content to particular students in a particular setting,
• establishing clear and rigorous instructional goals and objectives,
• devising ways to assess student learning,
• creating, enacting and modifying instructional activities and lessons to help students master the instructional goals, and
• analyzing their own teaching and their students’ learning.

Student Teaching Residents

Case Conferences
Almost all professional fields have some version of the “case conference,” where a practitioner defines, prepares and then presents a “problem of practice” to colleagues and peers for discussion, analysis and evaluation.  Doctors, lawyers, architects, nurses, and psychiatrists use a form of this practice to help manage the problems they encounter in their work and to sharpen their skills in recognizing, thinking about and developing responses to situations.  Case conferences have two goals: (1) to work collectively on a problem or problems professionals face, and (2) to deepen everyone’s thinking about and skills in managing similar problems or challenges.  In Clinical Rounds we hold regular formal and informal case conferences during the student teaching semester.  These case conferences allow our student teaching residents to:

• identify, think about, and work on specific problems or challenges they are facing in teaching,
• expand student teaching residents’ responses to challenges that emerge in teaching and learning,
• participate in regular cycles of planning and instructional design where student teaching residents frame an issue, think about possible responses, and then select one or two to try and evaluate, and
• practice applying and modifying approaches to instruction highlighted in the first two semesters of Clinical Rounds.