ABSTRACT
Shaking her head in disbelief, Dr. Watson felt a surge of anger and frustration sweep over her as she made her way to leave a university-wide secondary teacher education advisory board meeting. As a first year assistant professor, Dr. Watson had been invited to participate on the university-wide board. The board had just adopted a new clinical experience requirement in secondary teacher preparation. It was not the new requirement that elicited such negative feelings from Dr. Watson, as she believed strongly in the importance of practical teaching experiences prior to student teaching. It was her passionate disagreement with the advisory board’s recommendation concerning how clinical experiences would be implemented and evaluated that brought on her anger; especially since the university had a large teacher education component and was already inundating the public schools with preservice teachers. Typical of many postsecondary advisory board practices, this board had voted that each methods course instructor at the university would be required to place students into a public school clinical experience. This, of course, was without any forethought regarding who would structure the experience, provide feed back and goal-setting information, or evaluate the experience in any ongoing way. Therefore, what would more than likely happen would 60be that all of these responsibilities would be dumped on to the public school teachers with whom clinical experience students are placed.
