From the research, we know that providing student teachers with an opportunity to work in schools is essential. This component of the program is referred to differently: field experience, practice teaching, school experience, internship, and student teaching. To ease communication, we will use the term field experience to refer to any time that students are placed in schools. We refer to the schools where students are placed for field experience as partner schools.

Field Experience occurs four times in the MT program: two field experience sessions in each year of the program and each session is 4 to 5 weeks in length. For each field experience session, students are placed in a school with one teacher supervising each student. This experienced teacher is called the Associate Teacher. Like field experience, the experienced teacher can be called by different terms: host teacher, cooperating teacher, mentor teacher, or teacher educator. To ease communication we will use the term Associate Teacher. Wherever possible we try to cluster student teachers in a school for field experience (e.g., 4-6 student teachers are placed in one partner school with 4-6 Associate Teachers).

During field experience, students will be involved in a wide-range of activities: observing the Associate Teacher, teaching the whole class, working with small groups of students, and working one-on-one with a pupil. Associate Teachers inform and assess the student teachers in all aspects of their work: planning, teaching, assessing, classroom management, and so on. The Associate Teachers complete two evaluation forms per practice teaching session: Formative Assessment and Summative Assessment.

 During field experience, students observe their Associate Teachers and gradually increase their teaching responsibilities. They begin with just a few lessons and ease into fuller responsibilities over the placement.

Our Field Experience Coordinator, Joe Hogan, works tirelessly, always looking to recruit exemplary teachers to be Associate Teachers. He has an extremely strong roster of partner schools and Associate Teachers.

OISE has a system in place where student teachers from the different programs (e.g., B. Ed. Cohorts) work with specific schools. The schools and school districts that are partnered with the MT program are listed below. These are the ONLY schools where we can place student teachers. Student teachers are not required to find their own placements.