Chapter 7: Professional Development Sites and Student Teaching Placements

Whether or not all pre-service teachers should remain at Professional Development School (PDS) sites for student teaching is a question that involves political as well as educational and practical considerations. One field-based teacher education program at a large urban university grappled with this question, eventually arriving at the decision to implement an innovative policy wherein students could decide this issue for themselves. In this chapter, the policy is evaluated by analyzing the decision-making processes of elementary level pre-service teachers (N = 225) who chose whether or not to leave their PDSs for student teaching. A questionnaire measured the extent to which the subjects considered eight independent variables when making this decision. Using descriptive statistics, the priorities of those who chose to stay at PDSs (N = 125) were compared to those who chose to change sites (N = 100). Those choosing to stay at their sites gave significantly more thought to the quality of their pre-service education than did the others. Political and program ramifications of this finding are discussed.