Backtalk: Minority-Serving Institutions: Leaders in teacher education innovation

The clinical experience is one of the most important parts of teacher education, but many teacher candidates have little field experience before becoming teachers or have field experience that it reserved for the end of their program and is disconnected from their coursework. Alice E. Ginsberg, Marybeth Gasman, and Andrés Castro Samayoa share how Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs) are developing teacher education models that enable candidates to spend more time in preK-12 classrooms throughout their education and to see how their university-level coursework connects to classroom practice. Because MSIs prioritize connecting to the community, instead of focusing primarily on research and publishing, teacher educators are able to spend more time at school sites, solidifying the connection between teacher education and the preK-12 classroom.