The requirements for the continuous improvement initiative call for us as a School to regularly assess our teacher education core and student teaching requirements, including our assessments.  This year a special committee was formed to take a look at our teacher evaluation instrument.  Previously, we used two other iterations of an instrument but in the fall of 2011, the evaluation instrument changed to the Clinical Competency Inventory (CCI).  This evaluation, authored by the faculty at Farleigh Dickenson University, has been adopted by eight universities in the state of New Jersey.  The instrument has been used for a number of years, both by the universities in evaluating teacher candidates and also by several school districts.  At the current time, the Department of Education in New Jersey is piloting a new teacher evaluation instrument that may be mandated for use in the near future. Until that time we used the CCI and tracked the results in order to obtain a larger picture of areas of strengths and needs of teacher candidates across the state.  The CCI insists on candidate self evaluation, something that our Capstone Committee recommended we institute in a more formal way.

Following the recommendations of the NJDOE and special committee comprised of student teacher supervisors, faculty and staff assembled by the Department of Field Placement, we completely changed the instrument we used for summative observations to an instrument based on the Charlotte Danielson Framework.  There are four domains in the framework and one of them assesses classroom environment.  Below are the sub-domain areas for Classroom Environment (Domain 2):

Classroom Environment

We have enclosed the full instrument under Student Teaching and below the midterm data.   The midterm data on Classroom Environment reflect the ratings on our student teachers midway through their student teaching semester this fall. The data compiled are cooperating teachers' and supervisors' combined ratings. Attached is the spreadsheet with the data on all four domains.

As a direct result of our Unit Assessment Reports each year and data collected from principals, the School of Education has dedicated coursework and additional resources to the study of Classroom Management.  Dr. Tracey Garrett, with a background in elementary and early childhood education and a specialization in classroom management, leads the charge toward preparing candidates to be more effective in their classroom management practices.  Below is the 2013 syllabus from Effective Classroom Management: EDE 200 course we have in our offerings for elementary and secondary students, one assignment from the course, and a syllabus from our introductory Contexts of Schooling course, which includes two units on Classroom Management.