Student Teaching

Student teaching at Swarthmore is a two-credit, fourteen-week experience that helps students integrate prior theoretical and practical work in Educational Studies and their discipline. It is an opportunity to work cooperatively with practitioners, to assume a range of teaching responsibilities in a classroom and school, and to reflect on processes involved in teaching, learning, and schooling.

Except in unusual circumstances which require special approval, students practice teach in their Senior year or a 9th Semester. Student teachers must have the approval and recommendation of their major department, approval of all of the Educational Studies faculty with whom they have worked, and positive recommendations from teachers in whose classrooms they have done field placements. All students who want to student teach interview with the Chair of the Department of Educational Studies, who then approves them for student teaching and arranges the school placement for student teaching.

Student teaching is a demanding, full time experience that requires a great deal of commitment and energy. We recommend whenever possible that students reduce or eliminate other responsibilities (course requirements, work, co-curricular commitments) during their student teaching semester.  In no case are students permitted to take more than one additional course during the semester in which they practice teach.