Advancing high-quality clinical experiences: supporting school–university partnerships through clinical education training

UNF is a regional, public university serving the city of Jacksonville, Florida and surrounding areas across northeast Florida, with approximately 17,000 students enrolled. In the Silverfield College of Education and Human Services (SCOEHS), we have two departments with one department housing the teacher certification programs: the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Curriculum. There are five teacher certification programs across the two departments: (1) Exceptional Student Education, (2) Deaf Education, (3) Secondary Education (with concentrations in English, Mathematics, Science and Social Studies), (4) Middle Grades Education in Science or Math and (5) Elementary Education. A sixth certification program, Music Education, receives support for faculty development and clinical placements from the College of Arts and Sciences, but is housed in SCOEHS. Across these programs, we have about 1,400 students from our general university population who are majoring in education programs that require placements in school partnerships with certified mentor teachers.

Among the three directors who support teacher certification, as the Director of Clinical Practice and Educational Partnerships, I, Wendy Baker, am responsible for liaising with districts to develop and sustain partnerships, overseeing clinical placements and assessments, and faculty development in clinical pedagogy and teacher education. We are assisted by Resident Clinical Faculty (RCFs) and Faculty in Residence (FIRs). The allocation of RCFs depends on the needs of the partnering districts. The RCFs are district employees (teachers) whose salaries are jointly funded by the district and university. They remain district employees while sharing responsibilities across both institutions. The RCFs provide support in supervising, coaching and/or mentoring, facilitating and/or co-facilitating professional learning and teaching, engaging in professional learning and collaborating with university and district stakeholders. A FIR, such as I, Raven Robinson-Wilson, is a boundary-spanning role between UNF and a partnering school/district. FIRs are UNF faculty members who have expertise in an area of interest to the partner school or district. The FIRs' responsibilities include designing and facilitating professional learning, coaching, participating in meetings and serving as a liaison between the school/district and UNF. The FIRs engage in collaborative research and dissemination activities, working with school leadership, teaching university-based coursework, supervising and providing mentor teachers support.

To build mentor teacher capacity, we collaborate with our district partners to provide CET. During partnership communications throughout the year, intentional discussions occur around building mentor teacher capacity. It is in these conversations that a mutual design for the training is established. Together, we design contextual training to not only meet state stipulations on CET. We focus on the needs of the specific district. The alignment of the state and district needs is critical to providing training that is relevant and purposeful for the participants. Moreover, the alignment is not the only adjustment; the delivery method is also considered based on the needs of the participants.

As facilitators of clinical educator trainings, our backgrounds continue to guide our decision-making process for developing each session as we collaborate with our partnership schools.

Prior to moving into higher education, I was a classroom teacher in urban, Title I and Renaissance schools across early childhood and elementary grades, with experience in secondary-level contexts. I was accustomed to working in co-teaching classroom contexts to support the diverse needs of our student population. While pursuing my master's degree and certifications that were geared toward leadership and clinical practice, I was able to serve in several capacities as a mentor teacher and leader of professional development in several teaching contexts. This led to my full-time commitment to earning my doctoral degree that allowed me to further develop my passion for supporting school–university partnerships. Currently, as an Assistant Professor of Teacher Education, I serve as a clinical university supervisor and FIR by facilitating professional learning while teaching foundational courses at undergraduate and graduate levels. As informed by my research, I converge the fields of teacher education and educational psychology to support mentor teachers' beliefs and practices.

I began my career in education 30 years ago as an elementary self-contained classroom teacher. I taught second through fifth grade in the first 19 years of my teaching career. In addition to teaching in a self-contained classroom, I experienced co-teaching and departmentalization in urban and rural settings, teaching to diverse populations. At this time, I transitioned to teacher education as a liaison between school and university for mentor teachers and teacher candidates, and a mentor teacher for teacher candidates at various levels in their program. I left the classroom to become a Partnership Resource Teacher, boundary spanning between district and university, teaching undergraduate courses and supervising the same teacher candidates while concluding my master's and beginning my doctorate studies. After completion of my doctorate, I transitioned to roles in higher education ingrained in clinical practice at first as a Clinical Program Manager and then the Director Clinical Practice & Educational Partnerships, where I continued to supervise teacher candidates.

We share a deep passion for partnering with schools and supporting mentor teachers to host teacher candidates. We believe that our teacher candidates need high-quality clinical placements with mentor teachers who are well-versed in the necessary skills to teach PK-12 students. We are committed to creating spaces where mentor teachers can ask questions, explore concepts and take ownership of their professional growth. This includes cultivating a sense of ongoing wonder, reflection and ability to enact their learning with their teacher candidates. We emphasize the importance of understanding the unique context of each school to tailor each training, based on partnership schools' needs. Our goal is to retain mentor teachers who can sustain these vital partnerships and create a lasting impact on both teacher candidates and the broader educational community. By fostering these collaborative relationships, we aim to support the overall quality of education and ensure the success of future educators.

As a state requirement, each CET session must be based on four core skills (Figure 1). We focus on intentionally interweaving and threading skills – not isolated – as they inform each other throughout CET sessions. In alignment with ensuring coverage of these skills, we collaborate with partnership schools to consider the preferred modalities to host the CETs, which consist of face-to-face and online, synchronous sessions that range from a full-day training or segmented into several days.

We intentionally plan each skill with the communicated needs and desires of mentor teachers and school administrators. Our goal is to facilitate a comprehensive professional learning experience for developing the necessary skills to support the development of mentor teachers. Based on various iterations of organizing and facilitating these CET sessions with our partnership schools, we share the purpose of each skill and unpack the associated tasks that encompass the professional learning experience.

This skill is the foundation for the CET as we establish the type of mindset that all mentor teachers should possess to host a teacher candidate. We focus on the need to develop a growth mindset and apply it to their work with developing educators. This skill is based on Dweck's (2008) Growth Mindset Theory that deals with differentiating between two mindsets or theories of intelligence. The first type of mindset is a fixed mindset – meaning that someone may think that they will not get smarter no matter how hard they work. Thus, forming their own belief that their ability is a stable construct – or will always be the deciding factor of their abilities to perform a task. The second mindset is the growth mindset, which is based on the belief that intelligence can grow. It is the opposite of the fixed mindset. For example, a student will think they can get smarter if they work harder. In the context of clinical education, growth mindset suggests that mentor teachers and teacher candidates can strengthen their pedagogical knowledge and skills through effort, reflection and practice. Within this skill, we maintain a focus on how mentor teachers can become equipped with knowledge that all teacher candidates vary in needs by operationalizing the role of growth mindset.

As mentor teachers from our partnering school districts have had many professional development sessions where they have been introduced to growth mindset, we often begin by reiterating the definition of growth mindset and have an open discussion about a time they faced a challenge. During this time, we ask, how did you overcome that challenge? What factors can contribute to a growth mindset? What factors can contribute to a fixed mindset? We allow time for mentor teachers to share their perceptions because it establishes our goal of using an asset-based approach to value their lived experiences (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Feiman-Nemser, 2001). This allows us to draw from their experiences throughout the session as we conclude this segment by reviewing a handout, Seven Common Growth Mindset Scenarios and Responses (MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership, n.d.). Mentor teachers can use this resource to encourage and reinforce a growth mindset during conversations with their teacher candidate and responses to working with PK-12 students. This exercise has implications for how mentor teachers can communicate and model teaching practices. Mentor teachers identify responses that they believe are beneficial, uncomfortable with saying and share additional ideas that may not be mentioned within the resource. This set of activities underscores the importance and choice in how mentor teachers can navigate and build experiences with their teacher candidates through a research-based approach.

Building on the resources from the state, we decided to include additional research that we learned during our matriculation in our doctoral programs, which further extends the application of a growth mindset. We begin by presenting how Fuller (1969) conceptualized the development of teachers through Stages of Concern for Teacher Candidates, which consists of four stages: Stage 1 (pre-teaching concerns), Stage 2 (concerns about survival), Stage 3 (teaching situations concerns) and Stage 4 (concerns about pupils). Mentor teachers work in groups to fill out a graphic organizer (see Figure 2) based on an overarching question, “How will knowing about the Stages of Concern for Teacher Candidates and Growth Mindset impact how you support the teacher candidate?” that supports mentor teachers' ability to identify, synthesize and analyze how knowing what stage their teacher candidate is in will influence how they support their teacher candidates.

We compound this activity with an exploration of Burden's (1982) Teachers' Perceptions of their Professional Characteristics to help mentor teachers identify stages they may be in as in-service teachers. Among the three stages (survival, adjustment and mature), we discuss how mentor teachers' years of experience, characteristics (job skills, knowledge and behaviors), and attitudes and outcomes can impact their approaches to support teacher candidates. This resource guides mentor teachers' practice of being introspective about where they believe they are and have been in their career, which remains linked to teacher candidates' beliefs and attitudes about the quality of their clinical experience (Burns, Byrd, & McIntyre, 2025; Hudson, 2013). We ask, “How do you know? What are the contributing factors? Mentor teachers can have open dialogue to reflect on their teaching experiences, which led to them becoming the educators they are today.

These activities naturally lead us into a discussion about the relationship between having a growth mindset, teacher candidates' concerns and professional characteristics which inform mentor teachers' facilitation of the clinical experience. As repeated at the end of each CET skill segment, mentor teachers share aloud new insights, ideas and lingering questions. Our aim is to ensure mentor teachers have a safe space to express their thoughts and ideas as we build on our collective professional expertise to establish a community of trust and support for maintaining school–university partnerships (Goodwin, Madalińska-Michalak, & Flores, 2023; Larsen, Jensen-Clayton, Curtis, Loughland, & Nguyen, 2025).

In skill two, mentor teachers develop an understanding of elements of content planning conferences, coaching strategies and necessary resources to conduct a productive conference with teacher candidates. The purpose of skill two is to understand how to conduct a content planning conference.

We focused on three of the most considerable factors for mentor teachers: time, guided conversation and process. When serving as a mentor teacher, the role can be demanding due to considerable commitment to support ongoing planning and reflection with tools that help support decision-making (Byth, 2025; Hunskaar et al., 2025). These factors are based on feedback conversations and surveys from mentor teachers and our district partners. As outlined in Figure 3, we decided on three tools that would provide a scaffolded process to assist mentor teachers with a targeted focus to streamline the conference to maximize time, guide conversation and provide a process. The three tools' intentionality is centered on understanding that mentor teachers' time is limited.

The first tool is Planning: Determining the Alignment of Objectives and Action (Research for Better Teaching, Inc., 2012) that outlines a process of identifying the intended objective and aligning it to the standard. The second tool is the How to Conduct a Planning Conference that Focuses on Content (Research for Better Teaching, Inc., 2012), using a nine-step process with guided questions that gives the mentor teacher language that creates a conference structure. The tool also has a section for ‘Dos and Don'ts.’ The third tool, Content Planning Conference Feedback Tool (Research for Better Teaching, Inc., 2012), intentionally lays out the steps for mentor teachers so they can focus on the feedback. We provide the three tools as a scaffolded process to support understanding for engaging in a conference planning session as we integrate authentic teacher candidate lesson plans. We are purposeful in our selection of lesson plans to provide robust discussion during the role-play exercise.

We pair up the mentor teachers to engage in practical role play using one of the provided lesson plans and scaffolding tools. This gives them the opportunity to learn through low-stakes practice, which supports teachers' self-efficacy by developing confidence to accomplish the skill (Hussain, Khan, & Bidar, 2022; Reich, 2022). As connected to skill one, we prompt mentor teachers to consider how their mindset and professional characteristics could impact the decisions they make during the content planning conference while also factoring in the mindset and stages of concern of the teacher candidate. The coupling of tools designed by the Florida Department of Education with the addition of authentic teacher candidates' lesson plans is used as the foundation of skill two. The role play provides an opportunity for the pairs to “act” as a teacher candidate and mentor teacher to conduct a content planning conference. The shift in thinking through the two roles with a different lens infuses perspective from both roles.

The overall goal of skill two is to “tryout” a conference with the three tools, lesson plan and enactment of the potential conversation that could be unearthed during the actual conference. The debrief discussion after the role play situates the mentor teachers in a space to share thoughts on the experience. We know from research that mentoring is a socially constructed practice, situated in student teaching experiences (Butler & Cuenca, 2012).

We focus on guiding mentor teachers to become expert observers and diagnosticians of teaching and learning. The key components include identifying key components in planning observations, evidence-based data collection tools to observe teacher candidates and techniques to create data collection tools to support feedback conversations with teacher candidates. The purpose of skill three is for the mentor teacher to observe and diagnose their teacher candidate's teaching.

We begin skill three by introducing our university's coaching cycle process (Figure 4) and an accompanying coaching cycle log to explain the method they will be expected to use with teacher candidates throughout clinical experiences. We review the Florida Educator Accomplished Practices (FEAPs; Florida State Board of Education, 2023) because teacher candidates select one FEAPs indicator as the focus of observation and data collection. A variety of rich data can include paper-based formal assessments, photographs of student engagement and instructional resources that the teacher candidate used when teaching a lesson as influenced by the classroom context (Jones & Worrall, 2025). Not only does this assist in providing a focus for the mentor and teacher candidates, but it also prompts discussion on determining a mutual understanding of the data to be collected.

We provide mentor teachers with time to read the Talking Points article (Adams, Ross, Burns, & Gibbs, 2015), which describes data collection tools and displays with rationales around using them when observing. This provides the mentors with background knowledge and language to use when talking with teacher candidates about their teaching observation. They can recognize the complexity of engaging in observation while thinking about how gathering evidence of learning can take several forms to support a critical analysis of a lesson (Goldshaft, 2024). After independently reading, we facilitate discussion through the Three Levels of Text Protocol (CLEE, n.d.) for mentors to identify key concepts relevant to them. We have a whole-group discussion to listen to our takeaways from the article, which initiates deeper conversation that unearths understanding around concepts that need clarification. We also discuss sample data displays from several programs to allocate time for mentor teachers to ask any remaining questions on creating data displays.

Mentor teachers work in groups to create a data collection tool based on FEAP 3a (delivering engaging and challenging lessons), so we have a common focus to prepare for the application of the tool in skill four. Each group shares their definition of engagement, the tool they created, along with their thought process. The debrief discussion after all data displays are shared demonstrates variation in how to gather data during an observation. Mentor teachers hear from other mentor teachers their thoughts on why they constructed their data displays. We emphasize the importance of drawing upon what we learned in skill one and skill two as those factors directly impact the decisions that are made when creating data displays.

The concluding skill of the CET session focuses on supporting mentor teachers' capacities to provide targeted feedback to teacher candidates through various tools, resources and conversations related to their teaching practices. This skill is necessary at the fourth stage of the coaching cycle, which follows the observation and data collection process.

Targeted feedback is characterized by two key terms: noticing and wondering. Noticing is the ability to provide specific evidence-based, nonevaluative data related to teaching and learning gathered during an observation (Costa & Garmston, 2016; Good & Brophy, 2008). Wondering is based on what is seen and heard with curiosity about wanting to know more about teacher candidates' thinking or decision-making (Costa & Garmston, 2016; Schön, 1983). We facilitate a whole-group discussion based on a set of thinking stems with mentor teachers in relation to what noticing and wondering sound and look like when working alongside teacher candidates.

These stems help us consider various scenarios that mentor teachers could expect to encounter based on the observation and collected data (see Figure 5). In small groups, we reviewed common example statements by mentor teachers to determine if they meet the guidelines for being appropriate noticing and wondering. If statements are appropriate, we identify parts of the statements that make them appropriate. If statements are not appropriate, we revise them to be aligned with the guidelines for an appropriate wondering. We encourage mentor teachers to practice creating their own statements to challenge each other and elicit feedback, building their self-efficacy to implement practices (Hattie, 2012; Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001). We debrief this segment with the reading, Learning to See, Unlearning to Judge (City, Elmore, Fiarman, & Teitel, 2009) to guide our collective thinking around what it means to be descriptive, examples of being judgmental and nonjudgemental language, and deciphering between large-grained and fine-grained evidence.

During this segment, mentor teachers watch a video connected to FEAP 3a (delivering engaging and challenging lessons), which reinforces previous learning discussions from skill three and skill four. Mentor teachers use the data collection tool they created, along with their definition of “engagement” to observe a pre-recorded lesson focused on student engagement. It is important to provide mentor teachers with the opportunity to implement their learning in real time through collaboration and feedback in a safe space for developing teacher efficacy in clinical practice (Vescio, Ross, & Adams, 2008). As mentor teachers watch the video, they take notes on what they notice. In alignment with their notes, they also give targeted feedback by writing statements or questions (wonderings) they would ask the teacher candidate based on the data they collected. By focusing on one lesson, mentor teachers can have a shared experience and engage in calibration to aid each other in their thought process.

We recognize that school–university partnerships are at the forefront of creating CET sessions for mentor teachers. As co-facilitators, we understand the needs of our school-based partners through continued conversations and data collection that factored into the construction of the skills. We customize the four skills identified by the state as underpinnings that guide the content, tasks and research of each skill. The state's foundation of CET is a gateway to expand the knowledge base of each skill for mentor teachers and create opportunities to disrupt mentor teacher's socialization of mentoring. Throughout each CET session, we couple the authentic practical experience of facilitating CET with survey responses by mentor teachers, feedback from administrators on selection of mentor teachers and research to guide CET sessions.

Among the NASUP Nine Essentials, Reflection and Innovation (NASUP, 2021) leads our next steps in the facilitation of CET sessions as we acknowledge the importance of innovating because our school-based partners have mentioned that one CET session is not enough. For example, we learned that it is best to begin with state requirements as a starting point rather than an endpoint, ground CET content in the expressed needs of partners and incorporate feedback from mentor teachers and administrators to inform ongoing sessions. Building on our experiences, we are reimagining our CET sessions to become an ongoing professional learning process where we expand the content, tasks, and research and co-lead sessions with mentor teachers as thought leaders. The following questions guide our thinking:

1. How can CET extend beyond a single session to support sustained mentor teacher learning?

2. How do mentor teachers apply the four CET skills when they host teacher candidates? How could mentor teachers' beliefs and practices be impacted by sustained CET participation?

3. How can mentor teachers be positioned as thought leaders in shaping future CET content and activities?

Our first innovation is constructing a Conceptual Framework of Attributes/Practices of Effective Mentor Teachers. The purpose is to demonstrate the complexity of mentoring to school and university-based partners with the intention to advocate time, space and support for ongoing professional learning. Our second innovation is building a space for mentor teachers to become thought leaders in co-construction of the ongoing professional learning CET sessions. To evaluate the framework and long-term effectiveness of the CET framework, longitudinal, mixed-methods approaches would provide us with the best insight on multiple levels. We can conduct classroom observations, engage in artifact-based interviews and administer surveys to dive deeper into the beliefs and practices of applying the learned skills. We believe that effective mentoring practices embrace a range of roles, skills and responsibilities, which is why including mentors with the development of ongoing professional learning for mentoring is critical (Orsdemir & Yildirim, 2020). We also want to explore how mentor teachers can continue their learning through formats such as school-based, hybrid or asynchronous sessions. This work is particularly important because evidence on effective mentoring programs remains limited, and many existing programs use a top-down approach (Parker, Zenkov, & Glaser, 2021).