Massachusetts School and District Profiles

Smith College
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2025
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Annual Goals

This report lists the annual improvement goals reported to ESE in the educator preparation program provider’s state annual report. Providers may report up to three goals for the upcoming year and are asked to report on progress made toward the prior year’s goals. Annual goals are reported in May of the academic year listed.

Data last updated May 14, 2026.

Annual Goals - 2025
Educator preparation program improvement goals for the upcoming program year
Goal #1 We have established a departmental sub-committee to examine our field-based experiences and develop systems for better supporting teacher candidates throughout the program, not just in their final year.
Goal #2 We are expanding our connections with partner school districts not only through the literacy grant but also through some partnerships for employment for graduate students. We are formalizing our outreach to partner districts with one-to-one meetings to reflect on our work together.
Goal #3 Especially in the area of literacy instruction, we are reviewing and revising courses to align with the early literacy frameworks. Having introduced a new course on the science of reading this year, we are going to be looking closely at how other courses align with this new requirement.

Annual Goals - 2024
Educator preparation program improvement goals from the prior year
Goal #1 In order to improve alignment, we began weekly meetings as a department during the spring of 2024 to examine what is being taught in our courses and how this meets the DESE expectations of the Instruction Domain. We will continue to strengthen the coherence of our program through increased communication within our department about what teacher candidates need to be able to practice and demonstrate over the course of their time in our Educator Preparation Program.
Goal #2 As noted in last year's Goal #3, we are committed to strengthening our connections with partner districts, especially Northampton Public Schools. This includes structuring placements so that more than one teacher candidate is placed in a school (whenever possible) and increasing our points of contact with the school, including through the literacy grant that we are doing with Northampton Public Schools and Frontier Regional School District.
Goal #3 We are reviewing the continuum of field-based experiences over the course of our program, not limited to the pre-practicum and practicum. This includes piloting hiring a field-based experiences coordinator who can more consistently support students in some courses (like the SEI endorsement course and the literacy pedagogy course) to bridge the theory and practice gap between college coursework and field-based experiences.

Annual Goals - 2023
Educator preparation program improvement goals from the prior year
Goal #1 In order to better support students as they transition through our program, we are developing more structured systems of support for students as they move into the Pre-Practicum experience with a more structured orientation experience focused on preparing them to enter their Pre-Practicum placement with more supports in place.
Goal #2 To strengthen the integration of the field-based experience of the Pre-Practicum with coursework, the department faculty will review and revise the Gateway Tasks component of the Pre-Practicum. This will entail aligning the Gateway Tasks with course content in the courses that accompany the Pre-Practicum, such as the Methods courses and the 1-credit Student Teaching Lab. Through this process of review and alignment, the team will develop Gateway Tasks that target specific skills and competencies connected to the CAP for teacher candidates to develop and hone through their field-based experiences.
Goal #3 This past year we developed and piloted a monthly seminar to provide support and guidance to the supervising practitioners. The program, called Mentor Meetup, was piloted at the Campus School of Smith College, a K-6 lab school on the campus of the college. This coming year we want to expand this model to include mentor teachers from our other partner schools, strengthening these connections and supports for our supervising practitioners across districts. We also plan to enhance the networking and collaboration with administrators in schools with whom we partner by expanding our communication with these school leaders to better understand their needs and how our program can work with them more effectively.