School Experience Toolkit: Supporting School Experience Supervisors

Welcome to the School Experience Toolkit

School Experience Co-ordinators or lecturers visiting student teachers during their school experience are the primary audience for this Toolkit.

It contains resources that are beneficial to the experience of student teachers and aims to support you in using TESSA materials, which can encourage the use of active learning approaches.

Please note: this Toolkit is not intended to be a module, a procedural document or a book which you read and work through from cover to cover.

It is intended as a collection of tools to use to tackle the challenges of school experience supervision.

Throughout this resource, you will find activities which you can complete individually or in a group of supervisors. You are encouraged to assess your own needs and identify the resources in the Toolkit which can best address them. It is suggested that first you skim through the items, selecting relevant tools where necessary.

It is suggested you use a notebook to engage with the activities in this resource.

The Toolkit can also be used as a resource material when you are working with student teachers, preparing them for school experience. In addition, it can be used as part of training for mentors, school inspectors, head teachers and other educationalists.

This version was written with a group of educators from Zambian Colleges of Education, the Ministry of General Education and The Open University (UK) at workshops in Kabwe during 2018–19. All Government colleges of education, including Chalimbana University, participated in the development of this Toolkit.

Our goal

Our goal is to introduce all those involved in school experience (e.g. the student teacher, School Experience Co-ordinator, visiting lecturer and cooperating school) to the active pedagogy exemplified in the TESSA materials and to support effective school experience preparation, supervision and execution using this active pedagogy.

Toolkit objectives

  • to serve as a guide for lecturers visiting students during school experience supervision and mentoring of the student teacher
  • to make the school experience interesting, collaborative and successful for the student teacher, visiting lecturer and cooperating school
  • to move the school experience monitoring role towards mentoring, supporting and assisting the student teacher (a more learner-centred approach), rather than merely assessment
  • to support standardised high-quality supervision
  • to provide a set of tools (published under an open licence) to support the above, which can be adapted and used in different environments and contexts.

Other useful resources

At the end of this Toolkit is a list of further reading and resources on the topic. It is not essential reading but may help you to enhance your understanding of your role and active learning pedagogy.

Tool 1: The School Experience Supervisor