The Supporting Literacy and Learners with Special Needs course and accompanying tutoring placement provides teacher candidates with a unique opportunity to develop and apply knowledge and skills regarding literacy instruction. The tutoring experience enables teacher candidates to understand how to respond to learner diversity by planning and implementing individualized literacy programs for two primary students twice a week for two months.
Primary / Junior
Teacher candidates learn how to use observational skills, knowledge of learning and additional assessment tools and strategies to design literacy instruction that is responsive to the assets, interests and needs of their two learners. The Supporting Young Learners Tutoring Program Guide, which is provided, has been specifically created to support teacher candidates throughout the tutoring experience.
The tutoring placement has been recognized as exemplary by teachers, parents and the learners involved. It is one of the distinctive features of the Trent School of Education Consecutive Bachelor of Education program.
Intermediate / Senior
The Supporting Literacy and Learners with Special Needs component of the program combines course work with a tutoring placement in order to equip Teacher Candidates to become literacy leaders in their future careers. The course that bolsters the placement includes the following components:
- Introduction to Special Needs/Exceptionalities
- Using YL Literature to engage and understand marginalized youth
- Building trusting relationships with students
- Exploring community literacies
- Integrating gaming and literature into lessons
- Connecting literacy to social justice
- Literacy across the curriculum
- Tutoring and/as teaching
- Strategies to be successful on the OSSLT (Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test)
- Technology as a tool for tutoring and teaching
The tutoring placement affords candidates the opportunity to work one-on-one with two students. This enables an in-depth and close-up view of students who struggle with school-based literacies so that, as candidates move from tutoring to teaching, they have an awareness of, and ability to reach, unmotivated learners. Our candidates often tell us that the tutoring placement provided them some of the deepest learning, as well as the opportunity to truly make a difference in the lives of students.