EDSP 450: Student Teaching Early Childhood Special Education
Prerequisites: IDEC major, accepted into Teacher Education Program, minimum 2.5 GPA.
Credit Hours: (9)
This course provides students with a supervised experience at the early childhood
level in a school-based setting. It is a one-semester, full-time placement in which
the student teacher is placed in an early childhood special education setting under
the direction of a qualified teacher.
Note(s): Applied Learning designated course. This is a graded A-F course.
This course is a required professional education course for the early childhood special
education teaching licensure option.
Detailed Description of Course
- Use technology and multimedia effectively to assist instruction.
- Incorporate knowledge and techniques from multiple disciplines and integrate goals
from Individualized Education Programs (IEP) into daily learning activities and routines.
- Assess children’s behavior using formal and informal assessment strategies and utilize
data to enhance instructional planning for children.
- Apply knowledge of diversity of socio-cultural and family contexts and work effectively
with children from diverse social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds and diverse
family systems.
- Establish and maintain positive, collaborative relationships with students, colleagues,
other professionals and families, and work effectively as a member of a professional
team to ensure learner growth and to advance the profession.
- Reflect upon practices, articulate a philosophy and rationale for decisions, demonstrate
professional-level writing and research skills, and continually engage in self-assessment
and professional improvement and development.
- Assess children’s skills and use research-based instructional strategies to embed
intervention in daily routines and activities, tracking progress with data collection
methods appropriate to the instruction.
Detailed Description of Conduct of Course
Conduct of course may include, but is not limited to:
- seminar
- student teaching
- action research
- lesson planning
- reflections
- professional development
Student Goals and Objectives of the Course
Goals, objectives, and assignments address the Virginia Department of Education regulations
for preparing educators, the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium
(INTASC), the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) standards,
and the Virginia’s Early Learning and Development Standards.
Teacher candidates successfully completing this course will demonstrate their knowledge,
skills, and dispositions to use technology and multimedia effectively to assist instruction.
- Incorporate knowledge and techniques from multiple disciplines into the design of
intervention strategies.
- Conduct an action research project, identifying evidence-based practices from the
scholarly literature and incorporating progress monitoring of outcomes.
- Integrate instruction of goals from IEPs into daily learning activities and routines
within the Virginia Early Learning and Development Standards.
- Provide a curriculum that facilitates the learning goals in content areas of the Virginia
Early Learning and Development Standards.
- Provide opportunities for students to acquire concepts and skills that are precursors
to academic content taught in elementary school.
- Use formal and informal assessment strategies to evaluate and ensure the continuous
intellectual, social/emotional, and physical development of each child.
- Assess students' skills in the Virginia Early Learning and Development Standards and
utilize data to enhance instructional planning for students.
- Apply knowledge of the diversity of socio-cultural and political contexts and working
effectively with students from varied social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds
and diverse family systems to support knowledge acquisition of the Virginia Early
Learning and
- Development Standards.
- Involve families in assessing and planning for their children.
- Establish and maintain positive, collaborative relationships with students, colleagues,
other professionals, and families, and work effectively as a member of a professional
team.
- Reflect upon practices, articulating a philosophy and rationale for decisions, and
continually engaging in self-assessment and professional improvement and development.
- Demonstrate appropriate professional writing skills including organization, clarity,
spelling, and grammar (e.g. punctuation, sentence and paragraph construction, etc.).
- Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of adapting tasks/interactions to maximize
language development, conceptual understanding, and skill competencies while considering
each child’s zone of proximal development.
Assessment Measures
Assessment measures may include, but are not limited to:
- University Supervisor’s Evaluation on Final Evaluation
- University supervisor’s evaluation of Professional Characteristics and Dispositions
- Timely completion of all syllabus requirements
- 3 Formal Lesson Plans/Structured Observations & Lesson Delivery Reflections
- Action Research
- A professional presentation highlighting personal Action Research
Other Course Information
This course is a required professional education course for the early childhood special
education teaching licensure option.
Review and Approval
March 9, 2017
August 2020
March 01, 2021
March 14, 2024