Student Teaching

Traditionally student teaching has been the terminal course for those preparing to teach. All the work in educational psychology, methodology, philosophy of education, and so on was seen as a prologue to working with children in the classroom. In some institutions this is still the case. But there are many colleges and universities in which direct experience with children begins much earlier. Therefore, while some who use this book are only on the threshold of their first teaching experience of any kind, there are others whose initiation into the profession has already begun.

Regardless of which group you belong to, it is almost certain that student teaching will be the most concentrated experience in teaching you have had thus far. Student teaching provides the greatest opportunity for synthesizing and applying what you have learned in your academic courses and in your work in educational theory. To most students entering their practice teaching course, this work promises to be a crucial test. For one thing, it will be a test of whether you will enjoy the work of a teacher, something you really have had no way to know heretofore. It will also be a test of whether you have the kind of personal attributes and the degree of physical stamina required by the rigors of classroom work. For reasons such as these students wish above all else to be successful in student teaching.

One factor which seems to be closely related to success in student teaching is to make a good beginning. While some students have been able to recoup after an unfortunate start and to go on to successful teaching, the experience of the authors is that the right beginning is a powerful factor in over-all success in the work. This first chapter, therefore, has been written to give you some suggestions for making your first days in student teaching as satisfying and profitable as possible.

Each institution has its own plan and routines. Some of you will be assigned for student teaching in a school maintained by a college or university for such purposes as student teaching, demonstration teaching, and research. Probably most of you will be assigned to one of the public elementary schools in the community through an agreement between the college and the public school authorities. You will spend all or part of the day working in a classroom under the immediate supervision of the teacher of that group.Regardless of the particular type of school to which you go, your success will be proportional to your ability to establish and maintain good personal and professional relationships with your associates.

If you find that you must make certain adjustments, you need not feel that you are compromising your own principles. A few students have felt that if they budged one inch from their beliefs, they were guilty of intellectual and moral treason. This seems manifestly false. There are many approaches to teaching and many methodologies-a point we will develop more fully later in this chapter. Student teaching can never be exactly like professional teaching and the degree of responsibility of the student teacher can never equal that of the regular teacher. Instead of worrying about differences in philosophies of teaching, it will be much more rewarding in student teaching to watch carefully the approach used by your supervising teacher, noting the successful and the unsuccessful aspects of his work. If you keep your eyes and ears open and your wits sharp, the chances are that your principles will remain intact.

To develop a style of teaching takes time, experience, thought, study, and guidance. Obviously you cannot expect to develop a finished style during student teaching, nor in your first year or so of professional teaching. In the beginning most of you will tend to imitate your supervising teacher as completely as possible. There is nothing wrong or undesirable in this. The only danger is that you may never pass beyond the level of imitation into the formation of your own teaching style-the style which is best for you because you are the person you are.