After meeting with their major advisor in the fall to review their progress toward meeting the internship criteria, the advisors in College of Education Student Affairs Office reviews the notes and comments from this meeting and monitors students’ progress toward completing the remaining requirements. Students with concerns, such as GPA problems or missing coursework, will be notified via email and will have copies of this notification placed in their Electronic Student Advising Folder (ESAF). SAO advisors will monitor students’ progress throughout the spring and summer, as students complete the remaining requirements. Final clearance for the internship can be granted in many cases after the end of the spring semester. For students taking summer courses or tests, records will be reviewed when final grades or test results are available. Students who do not meet the criteria are of primary concern and are notified as soon as possible. Final clearance information will be available for all students once summer term grades are recorded and reviewed – typically by the last week of August.
Students who do not meet the criteria for progression by the start of the fall semester are not eligible for the internship and must request a new internship year in order to remain in the program. See Criteria for Progression for additional information.
Each year, a few students will not have an internship placement by the end of the K-12 school year in June, due to circumstances in the placement schools beyond our control. Coordinators continue to work through the summer on placements, but school offices are typically closed in July and early August. As school offices reopen in August, placement efforts can resume in earnest and most students without placements can be placed shortly thereafter. In rare instances, interns may not have been placed (or may need to be re-placed) after the start of the fall semester, but experience has shown that interns can “catch up” quickly in the early stages of the internship.
It depends. You must have been fingerprinted using the LiveScan digital fingerprinting process, and the agency that took your fingerprints must have archived them on your behalf. Contact the agency that took your prints to determine whether they have saved them in an archive and whether they can forward them (with your permission) to your internship placement school.
Field instructors will be introduced at the Opening Day Institutes in August. See calendar for the date of this event.
Field instructors are a good source of support for negotiating the relationships between mentor teachers and interns. Subject area leaders oversee the work of field instructors and course instructors and are a good place to start if you are having difficulty with one of these people. Team coordinators are also available to help with resolving conflicts among members of the intern’s support network. See Secondary Team Intern Year Personnel.
Reports from past interns and mentors suggest that abrupt transitions between the intern’s lead teaching responsibilities and the mentor’s teaching responsibilities are not in the best interest of the intern, the mentor or the students they are teaching. All parties benefit from collaborative responsibilities for the education of the students in the classroom across the year. Even when the intern is not taking the lead in instruction, he or she should still have a presence and responsibility in the classroom for all but one of the mentor teacher’s class periods. The intern can work with individuals or small groups engage in demonstrations/dialogues/debates with the mentor teacher to illustrate concepts to students, manage routines and deal with standard interruptions to the class (admitting late students, finding make-up work for students who were absent, answering the door or phone, etc.). Interns should also participate in collaborative planning of these classes with their mentor and collaborative assessment/grading of student work. Likewise, while the intern is teaching, the mentor can collaborate with and provide support to the intern in a variety of ways, as appropriate for the stage of the year and the lessons being presented.
First – do not panic. This happens regularly. There is some flexibility in the start and end dates of these periods for interns so that they can align well with schedules in the placement schools. However, remember that interns must attend all MSU classes, even if these occur during the intern’s primary teaching responsibilities. Significant deviations from the schedules in the calendar can upset the balance of school-based work and seminar-based work for interns. Talk with your field instructor about the best way to balance the demands of the school and the seminar, and to design a manageable teaching schedule for the intern that is in the spirit of the model described in the handbook.
Interns with two mentors should have regular and consistent planning time with each mentor. Interns will still have one focus class and will follow the model described in Stages of the Internship Year for their total teaching load at each stage. Early in the year, and then again prior to each transition of teaching responsibility, the intern and both mentors should meet to discuss the intern’s teaching responsibilities and other responsibilities for the upcoming stage.