The CEC Initial “Field Experience and Clinical Practice” Standard and elements do not specify that a program must include a course or experience labelled as “student teaching/internship” but it is expected that the field experiences are structured and varied and that the experiences are developmentally sequenced. Field experiences are expected to “provide rich, scaffolded, developmental, and graduated experiences with increasing responsibilities for prospective special educators.” Also, field experiences must be “across the preparation program and connected and sufficiently extensive and intensive for candidates to develop and demonstrate proficiencies in the professional roles for which they are preparing.”
As part of the programmatic assessments an assessment designed to summatively assess each candidate across time in a field experience is required. In an Option A (1) program report this assessment must be the #4 assessment. The field experience in which the candidate’s performance is assessed by this assessment must be across sufficient time for the candidates to demonstrate the proficiencies required for safe and practice in the professional roles for which they are preparing.