Teaching a Teacher to Teach

Last Friday (which happened to also be costume day on the end of Spirit Week) was my very first student teacher's last day. It's been a quick and crazy two months and I hope what I was able to offer was beneficial to her long term teaching.

Because she's completing an international certificate she was only with us for half the semester and left yesterday to start her eight weeks of student teaching in Ecuador. This really put a time crunch on our experiences and definitely shortened typical time frames.

Quite frankly, my own field placements during college (we called them "observations") were boring. Lots of watching. No engaging.  Erica was my first full time student teacher after several semesters of field placement students. I try to get any college students working with me up in front of kids early and often and she was no exception. The difference here though was that she was there every day. Looking back, it's not how I probably should have done it, but she was in front of kids for whole class periods within a week.

It was good to reflect on what I do and why I do it as I worked with her. She had great questions on everything from seating choices to managing paperwork to interactions with families. It was oddly validating to realize that I'm actually at a point where I had some answers and experiences with all those things.

To be honest though, I'm not sure I did the best job of balancing getting her extra time ASAP with letting her observe and debrief. There were times she understandably struggled, but doing more modeling instead of just talking about changes to try would have probably been better. It was also hard when she had a great question...that didn't have a good answer. How I would handle something would be different from another teacher. It's even different depending on the student, the circumstances of the issue, time of day, proximity to a major holiday, moon phase...etc.

Another new challenge was trying to help her develop her own "presence" on the podium. I remember having to practice walking into a room several times during a conducting course, but that wasn't going to be helpful here. While there are tried and true methods such as proximity and keeping kids engaged to handle classroom management, how each teacher goes about that is going to be different.

Something else new for me was approaching how a young female teacher can be authoritative without being perceived as "shrill" or other unfavorable terms that only seem to be used on women. I was glad to get to work with her and have honest conversations around the perceptions she'd encounter, but brought on an odd assortment of feelings to be the one to work with her on how her interactions as a band teacher would be different than those of her male counterparts.

I don't like that all her observations were based on only her first two months of student teaching. It makes sense logistically since she'll be out of the country, but it's not terribly fair to a new teacher only months away from being sent out on her own. A student teacher on week 14 is very different than one at week 8. I'm sure she'll continue to refine the things we worked on in our time together but she's got to start over in a new school with new students before getting the chance to do so.

Working with a student teacher was a great experience and it's one I'm looking forward to trying again in the future. Just like with my early classes of students, I was probably more useful than a cardboard cutout in the room but still have a lot to learn when teaching a teacher to teach.