Clinical Practice Action Guide

Using program approval to strengthen clinical practice

States have several levers available to influence clinical practice, including funding, setting standards or guidelines, and evaluating programs against those standards or guidelines using program approval.

Numerous states have begun incorporating a review of programs’ clinical practice approaches into their program approval process.

Iowa 

Iowa requires that programs provide regular feedback (with observations by the program supervisor every two weeks), including a midterm and final evaluation of all candidates in clinical placements. During program approval visits, observers look for evidence that the program regularly evaluates candidates’ progress at key checkpoints throughout the program, that they are providing an equitable number of observations for each student teacher, and that their placement locations are diverse (i.e., candidates are placed in multiple settings that allow them to identify and meet the needs of all learners, including students from diverse ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic backgrounds; students with disabilities; students who are struggling with literacy; students who are gifted and talented; English learners; and students who may be at risk of not succeeding in school), among other criteria.

Massachusetts 

Massachusetts offers guidelines for program approval related to how prep programs develop partnerships with school districts, the criteria for selecting cooperating teachers, and the type of field experiences candidates must have.

Michigan 

The state programs undergo accreditation every seven years. Leaders from the state education agency attend these site visits and layer their own expectations and requirements on top of what the accreditors look for. The state listens to interviews with partners and reviews program materials such as training resources for cooperating teachers without burdening prep programs with a separate review process.

Tennessee 

Tennessee is a “joint review” state that requires CAEP accreditation of its institutions and also conducts its own review to evaluate individual prep programs. Starting this year, the state will review prep programs for their alignment to new requirements around high-quality instructional materials (HQIM), which seek to familiarize candidates with HQIM before they encounter those materials in clinical practice. This addition to the program approval process will include meeting with literacy faculty separately from the rest of the review, as well as requiring that prep programs annotate their syllabi to indicate where they are teaching about HQIM. In future reviews, programs will have to provide more detailed information about how they are teaching about HQIM, such as by providing lecture notes or assignment descriptions.