Department of English Structured Field Experience Description

Structured field experiences are designed to provide students seeking professional certification through either the M.A. or M.S. in Education 7-12 program with an opportunity to apply the concepts, approaches, and content of core coursework in Fredonia’s graduate program to a secondary or middle school classroom.

ENGL 554, Teaching Writing in the Secondary School, will provide one of the required field experiences. Students will complete another structured field experience in conjunction with one of their core courses for the program (i.e., ENGL 510, 512, 514, 516, 518, 600, or 665), modifying the teaching unit to fit the nature of the coursework.

To ensure that students satisfy the two structured field experiences requirement, M.A. and M.S.Ed. candidates seeking permanent certification will be required to submit units and papers documenting their field experiences as porfolio entries. As an extra measure of insurance, a faculty member will hold at least one meeting for M.A. and M.S. Ed candidates seeking permanent certification to assist them with portfolio completion. Ultimately, however, individual advisors will be responsible for checking to see that all portfolio requirements have been met.

Guidelines

Select a text or concept from your course and develop a realistic and workable short unit for teaching that concept or text in a secondary or middle school classroom.

Consider carefully what information or vocabulary you will need to introduce before you teach your lesson(s). As in all good planning, you should consider how diversity will impact your teaching (diverse learners, diverse backgrounds etc.), consider the role technology might play in the unit, and you should develop an assessment that will tell you whether or to what extent your students met your objectives. You can and should draw on class discussions, expand on questions, and target your own students.  Then, you will teach your plan in your classroom (or a classroom of a colleague if you don’t have one of your own). Take good notes during the experience, and reflect carefully on what works according to plan and where you may need to make some changes before teaching this material again.

For your graduate class, you will document the experience by turning in your unit plan, evidence of learning outcomes, and a short paper in which you reflect on the field experience, your ability to adapt the course content to an appropriate classroom setting, the pedagogical and critical concerns that arose while developing and teaching the lesson, and what the students learned from the lesson or unit, with supporting data. The paper (or a supplementary assessment document, which you can attach to the paper) should demonstrate that the students learned the central concept(s) outlined in the lesson.

The assignment will be graded based upon the attached structured field experience rubric. The unit, paper, and any additional supporting materials are due one week after you complete the field experience.