MEES Observation
DESE requires all teacher candidates in the state of Missouri to be evaluated using the MEES Teacher Candidate Assessment Rubric by their university clinical educator as well as by their K-12 clinical teacher. The university requires clinical teachers and clinical educators evaluate their teacher candidates 2 times each per semester: 1 formatively and 1 summatively. The clinical teacher and the clinical educator's summative MEES evaluation scores will be added together, and must meet a minimum composite score of 42 in order for the university to recommend a teacher candidate for certification.
Clinical teachers are required review UMSL's Online MEES Training.
The Clinical Teachers in the studio schools model will provide important and timely mentorship and coaching to the teacher candidates. The clinical teacher should help scaffold the teacher candidate’s ability to plan lessons and to identify evidence of student learning, including how to use data to inform instruction. Clinical teachers should provide regular feedback to their teacher candidates on their lesson planning, teaching, classroom management, and data-driven instruction.
The Clinical Teacher should provide routine feedback to the teacher candidates, and the following Clinical Teacher-lead questions can guide the discussions:
Prebriefing with Teacher Candidates.
- What is your lesson objective? With regards to your lesson, what do you plan to explore in your content today? What do you plan to explore in instructional strategies and pedagogy today?
- How do you envision your lesson unfolding? What will happen first, second and third as you teach your lesson today?
- What is the one thing you want your students to learn and know at the conclusion of your lesson, and how will you know and what evidence will you have?
- How will you activate students' prior knowledge?
- How do you plan to use examples and non-examples in your lesson?
- What critical thinking questions questions do you have prepared for your class today?
- Can you predict where students might have challenges and make errors during your lesson?
- How is the instruction you are planning responsive to support the needs of ALL learners? Multilingual learners? Learners with varied abilities? Culturally diverse learners?
Debriefing with Teacher Candidates.
- How did your use of examples and non-examples strenghten the deep meaning of your lesson?
- Discuss your use of ciritical thinking questions and your student responses.
- Discuss your students' mastery of the lesson objective. How do you know if it was achieved?
- Discuss any classroom management challenges or successes.
- Discuss any data review or reteaching.
Clinical Teacher should use these Look-For’s as a guide for mentoring, and discussion points:
- Teacher candidate is prepared to teach and engaged in the class.
- Teacher candidate interacts with students in a responsive manner as they enter the classroom.
- Teacher candidate identifies needs of students and implements responsive strategies based on information about the students.
- Teacher candidate demonstrates a confident and effective teaching presence.
- Teacher candidate is aware and responsive to behavior in the entire classroom.
- Teacher candidate waits until students are listening and attentive before giving directions or providing instruction.
For daily matters, please see your clinical educator, or contact Stephanie Koscielski, Senior Director of Clinical Experience and School Partnerships at koscielskis@umsl.edu.
The College of Education thanks you for your dedication to mentoring the future education leaders!
