An Approach to the Analysis of Clinical Settings for Teacher Education. The Third Florence B. Stratemeyer Lecture.

This paper is intended to begin laying out the organizational specifications for analyzing clinical settings in education (settings in which the activities of teacher development and educational research are carried out in close conjunction with a public school system's instructional program). Seven organizational properties important to understanding the effectiveness of a given clinical training progra m are identified through a comparative analysis of sociological studies of occupational training programs in various professions: (1) the program phase: disruptive or not disruptive; (2) the training environment: restrictive or open; (3) authority relationships: traditional or encouraging inquiry; (4) the setting; focused or diffused; (5) activities: their similarity to the "core tasks" of the occupation; (6) degree of visibility of learner activities; (7) degree of learner interaction with "role models." The criteria are then used in a comparative analysis of (1) traditional teacher internship programs and (2) a proposed clinical program based on that used in undergraduate and graduate training of physicians in teaching hospitals. The final section proposes a design for a "clinical school" (the organizational analogue in education to the teaching hospital) which goes further than present "laboratory schools" in research and development activities and in providing training for personnel from first-year graduate interns to senior doctoral students specializing in some aspect of teacher education. (JS)