Field Work
All of your remaining courses in the Secondary Team will include a field component. In all of these courses, Secondary Team personnel make the arrangements for these field placements. We take some of your preferences into account, but we also work within relationships we have established with our partner schools. These relationships are a critical part of our ability to provide you with rich field experiences throughout the program. See the Field Placement Policies page for more information about how these placements are made and about your responsibilities in the process.
Pre-Internship Field Work
To give you "hands-on" learning experiences in secondary schools while you complete your undergraduate degree, we place you in secondary schools around the Lansing area during the pre-internship coursework.
In TE 302, the focus of the field work is on tutoring students, particularly students who struggle to learn content that you might find easy. In this context, you will explore the critical role of literacy in school success in all subjects, and think about your knowledge of learning theory (from TE 150) and of power and opportunity in schools (from TE 250) relate in real ways to helping a particular child learn. TE 302 field placements are two hours per week outside of your TE 302 class meetings. All students from the same section of TE 302 will complete their tutoring field placement at the same placement school. Your TE 302 course instructor will give you more information about your field work requirements in the first week of class.
In TE 407, the focus of the field work is on learning to observe and analyze classroom teaching from the viewpoint of a teacher. Although you have years and years of experience in schools and ideas about what feels like good teaching from the student’s perspective, learning to think about teaching and about student learning from the teacher’s viewpoint is challenging work. TE 407 field placements are twice a week for two hours at each visit, and should be arranged so that you can see the same class periods at both visits each week. You will be placed in a classroom that matches endorsement(s) you intend to earn. We attempt to place you with at least one partner from your TE 407 class, to facilitate both your learning and your transportation to the field placement. Your coordinator will give you more information about the process of arranging your field work in the first week of class. Your course instructor will provide more information about your field work requirements.
In TE 408, the focus of the field work is on learning to design, execute and evaluate a lesson. Some of this work will have begun in TE 407 in both your course and field work, but this becomes a central goal in TE 408. In particular, we work over the course of the semester on learning to differentiate instruction for the range of learners in your classroom. You will keep the same field placement site for TE 408 as you had for TE 407, unless you are a kinesiology or agriscience major. You will again attend your field placement twice a week for two hours at each visit.
Internship Placements
In the internship year, placement options are available in the Lansing, Southeast Michigan, Grand Rapids and Chicago areas – see Internship Areas for more information.
The focus of the internship is to make you a well-started beginning teacher, adept at designing instruction, working with diverse students, creating a learning community, working with other professionals and learning about teaching from studying your own teaching practice. The internship will occupy you fully from the start of the K-12 calendar in late August through the end of the MSU spring semester (approximately May 1). You will be at school from the time your mentor teacher arrives in the morning until s/he leaves in the evening, and like any practicing teacher, you should expect to have planning and grading responsibilities outside the time you are at school. You will be at school five days a week, except for weeks during which the MSU seminar courses meet (approximately 10 Fridays per semester).
Information about your preferences for internship placement will be gathered in November prior to the internship year. You will prepare a placement resume to outline your preparation for the internship to prospective mentors. The procedure and expected timeline for making internship placements varies based on the geographic area you select for internship. See Field Placement Policies for more information, or talk to a coordinator (link to Contact Us).
