Here is your three part challenge should you choose to accept it: 1.) Demonstrate your proficiency as a teacher measured in part by MSP/HSPE scores, 2.) Mentor a student teacher so they may start their career at a point of proficiency, 3.) Remember those tests? MSP and HSPE? Make sure your students pass them.
In light of a new position I recently started and conversations about whose class to place my own child in next year, I have been ruminating about the three way raw deal this “mission impossible” presents. How should we shepherd new entrants into the profession given the current climate of high stakes testing and teacher evaluation tied to said tests? No matter how knowledgeable of content and pedagogy, no matter how energetic and committed, a student teacher by definition presents inconsistency in instruction. In spite of the fact we have all been there, in spite of the fact no one can step into teaching with any hope of success without at least minimal “in front of the class” experience, how many of us are going to continue to be willing to take on student teachers? Especially in the spring, when our names, our evaluations, our jobs are tied to a test someone else is preparing our students for? And what about those fresh faces who bring talent, energy, and optimism? How are they to get the experience they need to become successful teachers? Then there are the students. Kids need consistency and firm boundaries on multiple levels to feel secure enough to take the intellectual risks required for growth. The first grade classroom I am considering for my son will transition between the master teacher (fabulous known commodity) and at least two student teachers (who will likely be great). Dynamic? Yes. Consistent? In fits and starts. Is that set up really in students’ best interests?
This year, more than any other, I have heard teachers complain about having a student teacher and the lack of growth they see their students having under the student teacher’s tutelage. In all fairness student teachers should not be expected to deliver similar rates of growth as that of master teachers. I think we can all agree on that. Yet the underlying fear that complaint is pointing to could be a game changer when it comes to how we structure teacher preparation programs in this era of reform and testing myopia. More and more of my colleagues who regularly mentor student teachers are saying no more. They don’t want the inconsistency inherent to the learning curve in our profession to reflect on them in their evaluation and student test scores. Valid point. But we can’t get to a point of widespread unwillingness to mentor student teachers.
So a policy challenge for any takers out there: 1.) Create a highly selective teacher preparation program, 2.) Require student teaching for a full school year based on a team-teaching model with the master teacher taking the class back for the six weeks prior to MSP/HSPE for the student teacher to observe, 3.) Develop an evaluation model within the new framework to take into account a student teaching situation.
Fair enough. If team teaching works during the student teaching experience and if it prepares those candidates well for their first year, then great! It sounds like it might be a good idea.
In thinking back, I have to say there were times as a student teacher when I would have loved to have my mentor step in and “save” me. A lot of those times, though, he was out of the room letting me learn things the hard way.
It sounds like a better idea has come along.
My last student teacher (who was awesome, if we weren’t riffing that year I’d have hired her instantly) was in a program where we were to “team teach.” For us, that meant co-planning, sort of peer reviewing lesson plans, but when she was teaching and assessing and working with the kids, she was “the” teacher and I was there as support…an extra set of eyes to watch, help her refine her practice, and reflct. I think team teaching can still provide plenty of opportunities to fly solo. I don’t think having the supervising teacher disappear would be very effective in molding a pre-service teacher either.
Well, here’s the thing.
I student taught 7th grade LA/SS. I pretty much team taught, because my department collaborated so fiercely and also because my cooperating teacher was just awesome and usually in the room. She couldn’t not collaborate. I didn’t even write my own curriculum – the team did.
Then I subbed for a year. You might say, “Ah hah! But you flew solo as a sub!” No. Subbing challenged my management, but no more than my management was challenged when my cooperating teacher left to use the bathroom. The true challenge of flying solo is relationships, parent contacts, curriculum development and assessment. Subbing gave me no practice with those things.
My first year, I taught Spanish I, 7th LA/SS and 8th LA/SS.
The only thing I’d ever truly “flown solo” on was 7th math and science, where I’d had a long-term sub job and had to do all the flying solo stuff.
Despite that, I handled my first year just fine. I had a successful first year teaching because I’d been taught well in what I’d call a co-teaching / coaching model.
This year I am co-teaching for the fourth time. My three previous co-teaching student teachers are working full-time and felt comfortable their first year, as did the four 6-week solo student teachers I had before them. I’ve spoken to colleagues who work in the buildings of all my interns, and my student teachers did great. I would be afraid of that sounding braggy, but I’m not, because the fact is I had a really fantastic cooperating teacher a long time ago, and I just imitate her.
So if co-teaching is good for me, my students, and my student teachers, and was good when my cooperating teacher inadvertantly co-taught with my almost twenty years ago, I support it, without any worries for the kids who have that fledgling her first year.
I fully understand that the team teaching model is what’s best for the students in the student teacher’s class. My concern is for the students in that teacher’s next class.
Team teaching is great, but it isn’t reality. At some point a teacher needs to learn how to handle an extremely complex job on his or her own.
Tom, I don’t think flying solo’s all that crucial. To put a student teacher in alone after knowing the kids for only a short time isn’t the best situation. Now that my children are in school, I’m glad they don’t lose their teacher for 6 weeks while someone practices on them. I think team teaching is best for the intern, the students, and the cooperating teacher. I know SU is not using this model out of concern for test scores.
Tom-your point about student teachers not having the opportunity to “fly solo” and the school’s concern about test scores are the crux of the raw deal I’m seeing on all sides of this. So raw in fact I think it puts the whole profession at risk-because even if we could get to a place where the Teacher Prep programs functioned as true gate keepers, those “best and brightest” student teachers(along with many of the mentor teachers)are going to recognize the rest of the process for the whack job it is and take their talent elsewhere. And it will be the students who ultimately shoulder the loss.
I’ve done a lot of work in teacher prep in my capacity on NCATE’s Board of Examiners.
I was recently on an accreditation visit in which all the student teachers worked with their mentors in a team-teaching situation. It was great for the kids – they essentially had two teachers – but my concern was that the student teachers never had a chance to “fly solo.” When I voiced that concern, I was told that there was no way in the current climate that a student teacher would be allowed to take over a class. The students’ test scores and the school’s rating would be compromised.
That’s what it’s come to.
There is a lot of work that needs to be done in the area of teacher prep and induction. I see many student teachers who graduate in the spring after student teaching in the winter/spring. They never see the work that goes into building a classroom community and setting expectations in the fall.
When they are hired their first months are a trial by fire and the mistakes of the first few months can become difficult barriers to effective teaching later.
My mom and sister are nurses. We often talk about the clinical approach to training nurses.(experiential learning with a hierarchy of skills- theory to practice) The colleges of education could learn a lot most often students get a year or more of theory and six weeks of practice (a practice too far removed from the theory).
I’m so with you guys. Mark, I love that phrase “the first filter for people entering the profession.” It’s like Obama telling us all to shop more to help the economy…if there are more shops than customers, we need fewer shops. If there’s a year when not enough exceptional candidates apply to a TEP program, those professors should find something else to teach. You can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.
Sorry. I just wanted to use that idiom.
Tamara, your list of suggestions is excellent. I find that having a student teacher improves my own practice. I work with student teachers from Seattle University, which uses a co-teaching model, and I would no longer take a student teacher who needs 6 weeks alone in the room.
No teacher should have more than one student teacher a year. Those situations are ridiculous, and not the best scenario for kids.
Which is exactly why my first challenge to policy makers is to create a “highly selective” teacher preparation program 🙂
It is important to note, though, that under the newly evolving teacher and principal evaluation system, test data is not The Way we are being evaluated. We are to be evaluated on how we as teachers use student data, and that data can be from classroom-based assessments.
My beef with teacher preparation is that they are more concerned about letting any supposedly good-hearted individual into their programs than with serving as the first filter for people entering the profession. There are many individuals who should not be even considered as candidates who end up making it through and becoming poor student teachers and eventually ineffective teachers. And then there are those who couldn’t cut in the corporate world who turn to teaching because it is “easier” with “summers off.” Yeah, those are the teachers we really want.