Placement Management Tool

NOTE: The information in this article pertains to the original version of Placement Management. Click here to access articles for the new Placement Management

Overview

Watermark Placement Management is a tool designed to help Field Placement Coordinators easily create and manage student field placements. While Student Learning & Licensure (SL&L) already provides a way of creating student placements, that process requires significant working knowledge of SL&L’s administrative interface. The Placement Management Tool is designed for placement coordinators to create and manage placements with little or no knowledge of the SL&L admin interface.

There’s a lot for both field placement and assessment coordinators to love about the new module:

• a direct connection to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) database that allows coordinators to set up their partner sites and districts in a matter of minutes,

• an integrated placement request student survey that gives coordinators the information they need, when they need it, so that they can make better placement decisions,

• a hub for coordinators to keep track of information about all the mentor teachers your students work with, including current content and grade level information, contact information, and site associations,

• a seamless integration that loads the resulting placements into SL&L for you, making it easy to launch your assessments of field experiences without having to worry about loading or entering placement data, and

• access to yearly site details and site demographics, so coordinators and administrators can report on placements and site details - like Title 1 status - together.

Get a quick look at some of these features in action here, or catch up on this webinar for a deeper overview of this module.

This module is included in your SL&L license for your educator preparation programs, and you can turn it on at any time. To get started, please reach out to your Client Success Manager.

Differences between traditional placement creation and the Placement Management Tool

In SL&L, a placement is created by aligning a student with a partner site, an external mentor, and an internal University supervisor. While this concept is the same for both traditional, SL&L admin-based placements and the Placement Management tool, there are some advantages to using the PM tool. A few of the advantages are:

The Placement Management tool has a survey that can be sent to students which gathers important information such as their address, their preferred school districts, and conflicts with a particular school. The survey responses can be used to select the right sites for student placements.

Also, the Placement Management tool facilitates managing partner sites by accessing the database provided by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). This partnership not only helps create a list of sites faster and more accurately, but also provides site information such as demographics and Title I status.

External mentors can be created as needed. Traditionally, mentors needed to be added as Users through an admin-level import, then added to individual internships before mentors could be aligned to students. With Placement Management, mentors can be added on-screen and immediately aligned to an appropriate student.