In Practice

I did my student teaching thirteen years ago. On the whole, it was a good experience. I would hope, however, that the process of student teaching has improved in that time. For the last seven years I’ve been working with ‘student teachers’ from a local university. I put the term in quotes because they are called interns. I will admit that I don’t know if this is a new term used widely or if it is specific to certain types of programs. Regardless, I’m jealous of the internship these pre-services teachers have.

My student teaching experience was twelve or so weeks long, split between two different classrooms. In both classrooms I took over for a couple of weeks and taught independently. That was good. There was one other student teacher in the same school, but I don’t remember seeing her often, if at all. A supervisor from the college came out several times to observe and meet with me, but I had not known her before this.

The interns I work with now are in our building from day one. They spend the first semester in one classroom everyday, with the exception of Tuesdays when they are at the university for classes. They take over in that room for up to three weeks, depending on their comfort level and abilities. During the second semester they are in another classroom at a different grade level, again for four days each week. They teach in this classroom independently for four weeks. At the end of the year, they substitute throughout the building. A professor from the university is at our school once a week to observe and to lead seminars after school twice a month. She works with these interns in their university classes and they know her well. Also, there are four to six interns at our school each year. They have a built in support group.

I know this internship is intensive. They have work to do for their university classes and they are practically full time teachers as well. It’s a program that is post-undergraduate and lasts less than two years total. But at exit they are better prepared for their first year teaching than I could even have imagined. They have not only taught lessons and units as all student teachers have done; they’ve participated in all the other aspects that were such a shock to me my first year teaching. They’ve collected forms and money for field trips, they’ve attended staff meetings, team meetings, planning days, parent conferences and more, they’ve written newsletters, they’ve rearranged schedules for class pictures, assemblies, and fire drills. In short, they’ve been a teacher. It almost feels like an apprenticeship to me, which is probably what we need to prepare people.

In thinking about the reasons why this internship feels more useful and productive than my student teaching experience I’m left thinking about best practices with our students. We would never isolate our students as learners, as I felt isolated in a school. We wouldn’t send someone in to grade/assess them they did not know and had not had the opportunity to build a relationship with. In this instance I feel that we are doing well as teachers and that our schools of education could learn from the classrooms they send their students to.