This year our training for supervisors (Supershops) was focused on developing new leadership, aligning our work with district partners’ work, and promoting the use of better tools to assure candidates’ professional development and skill growth. The Supershop series met on six Friday mornings through the fall and into the winter for a total of 18 hours of ongoing professional development and support.

The topics included an overview of job responsibilities and specific skill and knowledge building in observation and documentation of performance, mentoring, dealing with common dilemmas, supporting the edTPA, and providing career services and launching new teachers into their practice.

We drew in different expertise this year, using trainers from Minneapolis public schools (Paul Hegerle, SOEI trainer), experienced district mentors (Tiffany Moore and Marjorie Nadler), and members of our own faculty and staff who had not previously been in college-wide training roles (Barbara Billington, SciEd; Amy Jo Lundell, CI Dept, and Deb Peterson, MCRR and state edTPA steering committee).

Our added emphasis was on coaching practice to build skills around our new observation de-briefing outline, and developing practice with our new formative assessment for clinical practice.

We also spent time organizing supervision to support better (and more) co-teaching in classrooms. One traditional difficulty in the university supervisors’ role is clarifying how the supervisor can support the teaching candidate, cooperating teacher relationship. We shared materials and did simulations to help the supervisor in problem identification and supporting problem solving for the co-teaching practice.

Submitted by Bob Utke, Clinical Learning Coordinator