Dear Colleagues, Attached please find a copy of the NEW student teaching assessment tool that has been developed over the past 2 years. This assessment has been aligned with all 10 InTASC Standards, as well as all 7 Virginia Teacher Performance Standards. This new assessment has been created through a collaboration of stakeholders, including a team of educators from JMU, EMU, BC, MBC and Harrisonburg City Schools who developed the draft with feedback from many of you. It was piloted in its paper-form with Fall 2015 student teachers with feedback elicited from cooperating teachers and university supervisors throughout Virginia, and revised using their feedback. We are looking forward to implementing it during Fall 2016 student teaching. The form (available online under "Forms" at: http://www.jmu.edu/coe/esc/fieldexperiences/studentteaching.shtml) will be accessed through Tk20 and will be completed as a midterm and final performance evaluation by both cooperating teachers and university supervisors. Please note some differences: number of categories increased from 5 to 7, indicators from 23 to 32, anchor levels change from 3 points to 4 levels. The anchors are the most extreme change with target being "Meets Expectations", NOT "Exceeds Expectations." This will be a major shift in thinking for our teacher education candidates and will help them to be prepared for evaluations as a beginning teacher. Many of you are currently involved in the development of reference guides that will be used in conjunction with this new unit-wide assessment tool. Reference Guides are content and grade specific documents used to assist student teachers, cooperating teachers, and university supervisors in understanding expectations when observing and assessing the performance of student teachers using the new student teaching assessment. These guides encourage a performance-based process for supporting the professional growth of pre-service teachers over time. When using the reference guide for an observation, the guidelines should be interpreted in terms of discrete instructional activities, and therefore depending on the activity it may not address all competencies at that time. When using the reference guide for the midblock and final performance assessments, the guidelines are interpreted more broadly in terms of all instructional activities over time. We anticipate having the new reference guides completed and formatted for distribution and posted online by the end of June 2016. Lastly, we are in the process of planning to work on a new observation form to be used for formal observations during the student teaching experience by university supervisors, as well as clinical faculty and any cooperating teachers who are interested. We will be developing a draft copy in the coming weeks, and then will be eliciting feedback from cooperating teachers and university supervisors in May. If you have any suggestions or input on how the observation form should be crafted, please contact me by April 14th. Please let me know if you have any questions. Warm regards, Dara Dara Hall Admissions and Licensure Coordinator JMU Education Support Center 540-568-2996 ############################ To unsubscribe from the COE-TEACHER-EDUCATION-UNIT-L list: write to: mailto:[log in to unmask] or click the following link: http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=COE-TEACHER-EDUCATION-UNIT-L&A=1