President's Awards

The School Partnership and Field Experience (SPFE) Team is dedicated to the shared mission of supporting the learning and growth of student-teachers in their exploratory journey towards becoming well-qualified novice teachers. The team believes that education occurs when a mind inspires a mind, a heart touches a heart, and a life influences a life.

The SPFE Team (Team) believes that teacher education is about teacher educators inspiring the minds, touching the hearts and influencing the lives of future and serving teachers. Just as teachers should be good role models for their students, teacher educators should be good role models for student-teachers. This is how learners and educators evolve and grow together as a community, and contribute beyond their own classroom and generation.

The team believes that student-teachers develop teaching competencies through experiential learning and reflective practices, with the support and guidance of teacher educators and school teachers. This process of co-construction of teaching competencies by the student-teachers, teacher educators and teachers in schools allows all the parties to learn and grow together to continually move the education field forward for the benefit of all school students. This is the main goal of education. In an era of constant and rapid change, the SPFE team has made every effort to model this organic and dynamic process of co-constructive teaching and learning at each level of the Field Experience (FE) curriculum.

To achieve this mission and vision, over the past five years, the team has been committed to developing an outcome-, reflection-, evidence- and technology-based FE curriculum, taking into consideration local school contexts and contemporary international practices. The team has developed a set of well-defined and coherent FE intended learning outcomes, multiple assessment modes, evidence-based assessment rubrics and reflective learning activities guides to support student-teachers’ FE learning. To complement their experiential learning during their school practice, the student-teachers produce an e-Portfolio to showcase their learning experiences and reflections with evidence from their experience. The e-link enables easy sharing of their work with trusted persons of their choice, in addition to their supervisors. This experience sharing encourages students to build connections throughout their process of professional development. The FE e-Portfolio is an example of assessment-as-learning in action. The team is also committed to the ongoing refinement of the curriculum using feedback collected from student-teachers, supervisors and school teachers.

Understanding that education involves people connecting with people, which works best in a collegial community, the team makes an extra effort to connect with their educational colleagues in the University, in schools and beyond throughout the design, piloting, implementation and review stages of the FE curriculum-development process. By building a close partnership among all the stakeholders, the team has successfully developed a learning community to effectively support our student-teachers’ FE learning.