Remote University Supervision of Student Teachers: Lessons and Recommendations

Introduction

One key part – perhaps the key part – of pre-service teacher education in the United States is student teaching. During student teaching, which in the United States involves tens of thousands of pre-service teachers every year, student teachers (also known in the literature as “teacher candidates”) serve as apprentices in K-12 classrooms with day-to-day mentoring and guidance from certified mentor teachers (K-12 classroom teachers in schools, also known as “cooperating teachers”) (Pomerance & Walsh, 2020; U.S. Department of Education, 2016). University-based teacher education programs provide additional mentoring via faculty members (“university supervisors”) who typically drive out to schools, observe teacher candidates, and provide feedback. The apprenticeship of student teaching is deeply important for student teacher development because, as Goldhaber, Krieg, and Theobald (2017) comment, “(f)or most prospective teachers, the student teaching requirement is the single prolonged experience they will have in an actual classroom before the management and learning of students becomes their primary responsibility” (p. 326).

The global COVID-19 pandemic disrupted student teaching cycles in 2020 and 2021. Student teachers and mentor teachers reinvented or abandoned longstanding practices, university supervisors weren’t able to visit schools or complete in-person observations, and role reversals (such as student teachers supporting their own mentors in using new technologies) became commonplace.

The objectives of this chapter include:

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  Exploration of how one based university-based teacher preparation program (at SUNY Brockport, a public master’s level university in western New York State, USA) shifted from in-person to fully remote supervision of student teachers during the global COVID-19 pandemic;

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  Identification of strengths and challenges in remote university supervision; &

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  Recommendations for university teacher education programs shifting (or considering a shift) to remote university supervision.

Background

Student teaching represents the most substantial in-school component of teacher preparation programs nationwide; student teachers in the United States spend an average of 525 hours on site in K-12 classrooms as part of their preparation to teach (U.S. Department of Education, 2016, 6). It is clear that student teaching experiences influence eventual teacher effectiveness (Goldhaber, Krieg & Theobald, 2020; Goldhaber, Krieg, Naito, & Theobold, 2020; Pomerance & Walsh, 2020). Although the mechanisms are not yet well understood, student teachers’ learning in schools shapes, in a real sense, the teachers they become (Schmidt et al., 2020; Ronfelt, 2015).

Student teaching, it should be noted, is not any single experience in the context of U.S. schools; the experience of student teaching depends heavily on partnerships with K-12 schools that themselves are variable on a wide range of metrics (Drake, Ellis, Moorer, & Walsh, 2021). Teacher preparation programs cannot – with the exception of a modest number of university-based ‘laboratory’ schools (Wilcox-Herzog & McLaren, 2012) – offer student teaching experiences by themselves. Rather, universities send student teachers into schools they do not operate, under a range of conditions they cannot control. One complicating factor in the United States is the structure of U.S. public education; the roughly 100,000 public schools in the U.S. (NCES, 2021) all operate with explicit state and local control over features such as funding, teacher licensure, student learning and graduation standards, adopted curriculum and expected pedagogy, class sizes, and other features that define the experiences of students and teachers each day. ¹ Schools and school districts in the United States are patchy; the author institution’s home county (Monroe County, NY) includes some of the highest- and lowest-performing schools in New York State (data.nysed.gov), and perhaps the nation (U.S. News and World Report, 2021) – some on the same street just a few miles apart.