Rationale: Full-time student teaching
Student teaching is the capstone experience for professional preparation for teaching. It should be a full-time commitment. Even though programs often structure such experiences with required coursework that they see as relevant to the experience (e.g., a classroom management course), the practice is ill advised. Requiring coursework and student teaching simultaneously does a disservice to both by either reducing the amount of reading and number of assignments that can be associated with the course(s) or reducing the time and attention the teacher candidate can devote to what should be a challenging classroom experience.
A seminar designed to accompany the student teaching experience is, however, acceptable since it serves as the mechanism for essential debriefings on classroom experiences and the means of making connections to material covered in earlier coursework.
