The Year-Long Internship:

Experiential learning is fundamental to the Spark teacher education program. Spark students engage as teaching interns in the everyday experience of a public school classroom four days a week for an entire school year, August to June.  Interns observe, participate and teach under a mentor who is at once a teacher and a colleague. 

The mentor teacher shares methodologies in her/his classroom with the intern, collaborates to help the intern understand the curriculum and organization of the classroom, shifts responsibility to the intern in a careful and responsible manner, and allows the intern to learn in a safe environment.

The interns participate in all aspects of school life including teacher meetings, team meetings, extracurricular activities, and other teacher duties and become integral members of the teaching staff at their placement sites. As the intern gains experience in the classroom and leads activities, mentor teachers observe and provide feedback.  Faculty advisors visit student classrooms to observe their teaching and to communicate with mentor teachers, principals and others in the school community. This immersion in the life of the school provides a context for theory and allows interns to connect graduate coursework with examination and development of classroom practice.

In addition to the year-long internship, other key components of the program include: 

Summer Institute:

Students begin the year-long program in May with a one-day orientation seminar, followed by a summer of independent readings and written reflections providing the foundation for graduate level pedagogical inquiry. The summer institute in mid-August completes the preparation for an internship in a public school setting.

Seminars:   

Every week during the academic year, there will be one or two day-long seminars.  Using texts, films, discussions, group work and projects, students develop critical questions and answers about historical content and the pedagogy of creating democratic communities. Each semester culminates in an Exhibition, with presentations by the students on curricular projects, research topics and critical reflections.

Content Area Tutorials: 

Students seeking secondary certification have undergraduate degrees in their subject areas.  They gain competence in teaching their subjects through the advice and feedback of their mentor teachers, by observing, reading, reflecting, writing lesson plans and especially by teaching.

In addition, the program provides subject area tutorials for the interns, each subject-specific group meeting four times a year.  Interns come to these formal tutorials with questions and with contributions from their classrooms such as lesson plans and student work.  The tutorial instructors lead discussions about questions and issues and present innovative and state-of-the-art teaching practices in the content area.  Interns prepare a summary of each tutorial session, to be incorporated into the portfolio.

Support Teams:

The Support Team for the intern includes a program faculty member, an on-site field advisor, and a mentor teacher. The Support Team assists the intern in the design and implementation of the Individualized Learning Plan (ILP) and evaluation of learning. Each intern’s Support Team meets three or four times during the year (and more if needed) for planning and ongoing feedback and support.  The interns meet on a daily basis with their mentor teachers, and weekly with the program faculty in on-campus seminars.

Individualized Learning Plans:

Each student works with his or her Support Team to formulate an Individualized Learning Plan (ILP) for meeting program expectations, which include developing teaching competencies consistent with state standards for teacher certification. 

Action Research: 

This research is a vital part of the link between theory and practice.  Students learn to investigate questions relating to their practice, such as the economic and political context of the school and community, integrating cultural knowledge with subject matter, and assessment of teaching methods.  Each student designs and completes a field-based action research project.

Costs:

Tuition: $13,750 (for 2009)