Navigating Student Teaching: A Comprehensive Guide for Aspiring Educators
The student teaching experience marks a significant milestone in the journey of a teacher candidate, representing both the culmination of their formal education and the exciting beginning of their career. It is a crucial period for gaining practical experience and applying pedagogical knowledge in a real-world classroom setting. This article offers comprehensive advice for student teachers to help them thrive during this transformative experience.
Building a Strong Foundation
Establishing Professional Norms and Expectations
Student teaching often represents a young candidate's first experience in a professional workplace. Establishing professional norms and expectations from the outset is crucial for building trust and confidence with the mentor teacher.
Communication Boundaries: Be mindful of your mentor teacher's time and preferences. Avoid contacting them at inappropriate hours or with urgent requests that could have been addressed earlier.
Clarifying Expectations: Proactively ask your mentor teacher about their expectations regarding deadlines, lesson planning, and feedback. Determine their preferred timeline for preparing lessons and whether they expect to review your plans before each class.
Open Communication: Establish a schedule for regular discussions or maintain an ongoing conversation to address questions and concerns.
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Leveraging the Mentor Teacher Relationship
Student teachers have access to an invaluable resource: an experienced teacher invested in their success. Taking advantage of this willingness to share knowledge and experience is key to a successful student teaching experience.
Seeking Regular Feedback: Actively solicit feedback on all aspects of your teaching, including questioning techniques, wait time, and communication during meetings.
Observing and Learning: Closely observe how the mentor teacher establishes expectations in the classroom, utilizes various communication methods, and employs non-verbal cues.
Asking "Why" and "How": Inquire about the reasoning behind the mentor teacher's decisions and strategies, even those that seem natural or intuitive.
Expanding Your Observation Scope
While observing the mentor teacher is essential, student teachers should also seek opportunities to observe multiple teachers in the school.
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Gaining Diverse Perspectives: Work with the administration to create a schedule or obtain permission to observe different grade levels, subject areas, and teaching styles.
Embracing Fresh Ideas: Maintain an open mind and enthusiasm for new ideas and approaches, recognizing that experienced teachers may have valid reasons for their methods.
Avoiding Judgment: Resist the urge to judge experienced teachers and instead focus on understanding the rationale behind their decisions.
Embracing Challenges and Growth
Embracing Failure as a Learning Opportunity
Be comfortable with failure and embrace it as a valuable learning experience.
Reflecting and Refining: Recognize that failure is a natural part of teaching and use it as an opportunity to reflect on your practice and identify areas for improvement.
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Developing Resilience: Overcoming failures through reflection and refinement is a critical element of becoming a fully functioning professional educator.
Mastering Classroom Management
Classroom management is often cited as an area for potential growth in student teachers.
Creating a Management Plan: Develop a comprehensive classroom management plan that includes strategies for building positive relationships with students, establishing routines, and reinforcing expectations for student conduct.
Building Positive Relationships: Connecting with students starts with learning their names as quickly as possible. Make yourself available to be a listening ear to students, giving them a safe space to share where they may be struggling. Students may forget the content areas you teach them, but they will always remember the way you make them feel.
Positive Reinforcement: Praise students for good behavior more often than scolding them for bad behavior. “Recognize your colleagues for the good they do,” said Robin Dada, a professor and head of UNI’s Department of Elementary and Middle Level Education, who has a background as a science teacher.
Parent Communication: Take the time to get to know each students’ parents is also key. Report the good behavior back to their parents with a quick text. Students will hear about this from their parents, and it will increase trust with you as their teacher.
Adjusting to the Demands of Student Teaching
Adjusting to a full workday schedule and balancing lesson planning, grading, and coursework can be challenging.
Time Management: Develop effective time management strategies to prioritize tasks and maintain a healthy work-life balance.
Long-Term Perspective: Recognize that discovering your own teaching and classroom management style is an ongoing process that will evolve over time.
Sharing Students: Navigate the unique challenge of sharing a group of students with your cooperating teacher by establishing clear communication and collaboration.
Practical Tips for Success
Maintaining a Teaching Journal
Reflecting on Experiences: Record both successes and failures in a daily teaching journal to decompress after stressful moments and track your growth as a teacher.
Identifying Patterns: Review previous entries to identify patterns, gain insights, and inform future practice.
Filtering Feedback Effectively
Avoiding Internalization: Instead of internalizing negative feedback, filter it with questions like, "What's one thing I can change based on this feedback?" and "How will making this change help my students grow?"
Embracing a Growth Mindset: Learn from mistakes and move on, remembering that student teaching is a time for growth and development.
Prioritizing Self-Care
Engaging in Hobbies: Invest time in passions and hobbies unrelated to school to refresh and energize yourself.
Avoiding Burnout: Recognize that self-care is essential for maintaining energy and passion in the classroom.
Building a Support Network
Finding a Mentor: Seek out a teaching mentor who demonstrates enthusiasm and passion for the profession.
Seeking Encouragement: Borrowing a metaphor from Jennifer Gonzalez, think of these mentors as marigolds because simply being close to them helps you grow stronger. Teachers like this will inspire you to keep going on hard days and will celebrate your growth right alongside you.
Defining Your "Why"
Crafting a Mission Statement: Reflect on your reasons for becoming a teacher and create a mission statement to guide your career.
Staying Focused: Hold on to the core reasons you are teaching will help you push through the daily stresses and emerge a stronger teacher on the other side.
Remembering Your Impact: Remember moments with students that make you think, “This is all worth it”?
Relationship Building
With Students: Building relationships with your students will certainly make your job more enjoyable, but it will also make you a more effective educator. As Kevin Gartman, a 10th year business teacher in Montezuma who studied at UNI, puts it, “Students will want to learn from you once they've chosen to trust you.”
With Colleagues: Help them when you can and don’t be afraid to ask for their help when you need it. Collaborating with your fellow teachers can be a great bonding experience, and it’s a great way to make teaching feel a little easier. “Make collaboration with your fellow teachers a priority,” said Benjamin Forsyth, College of Education associate dean of undergraduate studies and teacher education at UNI who previously taught high school physics. “Research shows that teachers who collaborate stay in the profession longer. And they have more fun!”
Enthusiasm
Passion: Whether you’re teaching your students the ABCs or trigonometry, try to get excited about the subject. It can be challenging to consistently convey passion in the classroom, but without it, students aren’t going to pay attention.
Real-Life Examples: Try to connect the content to real-life examples and personal stories. This will also emphasize that what students are learning should matter to them outside of a grade.
Being Present
Attention: For some students, you could be the adult in their life poised to make the most positive impact. Make the most of that opportunity by truly being present for your students. “Sometimes it can be easy to mentally drift and think of other goals or places we are heading, but knowing that each student is counting on us to give them our best and to be present with them in their struggles and joys is vital,” said Emily Borcherding, a math teacher in Waterloo with nearly 20 years of experience as an educator. “Be there in that moment with them, in the good and bad.”
Self-Care: Part of being present is taking good care of yourself: eating well, drinking plenty of water and getting enough sleep.
Overcoming Challenges
Transitional Season: Your introduction to teaching will come with many firsts. While some of those are exciting, many will be nerve-wracking. This is a transitional season. It will end, and your knowledge and skillset in the classroom will improve.
Small Goals: “Remember that the first time at anything is always the most challenging,” said Angela Schneden, a first-grade teacher in Ankeny with 25 years of experience. “It will get easier. Try and set small goals for yourself and celebrate your successes and your growth along the way.”
Asking Questions
Don’t Hold Back: Unless you’re very extroverted, you might hold back on asking questions. Try really hard to get over that. You need to be asking lots of questions this term: Questions about classroom procedures, grading, and technology.
Seek Advice: Questions about how your host teachers handle tricky situations, how they manage to steal bathroom breaks, and how they determine whether an 89% is an A or a B. If you feel like you’re taking up a lot of your host teacher’s time, keep a list of questions as you think of them, then ask several at once. Or ask different people different questions, so you’re not “bothering” the same people all the time. Seriously, though, it’s really not a bother.
Connecting with Other Student Teachers
Shared Experience: If you don’t have another student teacher in your building to share the experience with, find someone else in your program and set up some kind of regular check-in.
Online Communities: If that’s not an option, look around online for a community. Find someone who gets you, someone who has a similar amount of pressure on them, and schedule time to hang out.
Observing Other Teachers
Instructional Techniques: The best way to learn what good teaching looks like, and what not-so-good teaching looks like, is to observe LOTS of teachers. Chances are your program is going to require you to do a certain number of these; my advice is to triple that number.
Classroom Management Strategies: Use your planning period to sit in the back of someone else’s classroom; grade papers if you need to multitask. You’ll still pick up plenty of instructional techniques and tweaks, bits of presentation flair, and classroom management strategies.
Diverse Perspectives: Although it’s vital to observe teachers in the same content areas and grade levels as yours, observing outside these parameters will also be hugely informative, so seek out teachers who teach something different from you.
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