Friday, November 28, 2008

Advice for Student Teachers


Here is a list of hints from a current student teacher to those of you who will be student teaching soon:




Any thoughts?

5 comments:

Mark Rindfuss said...

Great link Dr. Luongo....
One thing that I would add to tip #1 would be to ask the cooperating teacher their expectations as well as telling your cooperating teacher your expectations. From prior experience, all cooperating teachers have different expectations, some have high expectations and some have low expectations.

Another tip that I would add to the list would be to find out the assessment expectations. This is where many student teachers may have differing opinions with their cooperating teachers. If student teachers find out early on in the student teaching process how their cooperating teacher assesses students, it will save them a great deal of time and grief in the long run.

Thanks again for the link.....I'll be sure to pass it on.

tpalm44 said...

I think this really breaks down other people's expectations, mainly adminstrators. Personally, I really like the part about overpreparing. It's like the old cliche, failing to prepare is preparing to fail.

While there can be an argument made stating that you can prepare too much and not reach the students because you jump from one area of a lesson to another without getting to the crux of the matter, preparation is so very important in anything you are new to.

Michelle said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Michelle said...

Even though I won't be doing student teaching until 2010, I think that the advice was very valid, especially about becoming involved immediately and building a relationship with the cooperating teacher. I think that having constant communication with the cooperating teacher will help you create better lessons, learn about the class (students) quicker, develop a better relationship with the students, and eliminate any anxiety about being in the classroom. Also, I think that overplanning is a great tip.
♥ Michelle

Chris said...

I completed my student-teaching last spring and I DEFINATELY would recommend these tips to any prospective student-teacher.

Tip 10, "Always plan too much", can't be stressed enough in my opinion. For me (I was teaching 5 different 11th grade history classes), I could never predict how my lesson would turn out. There were some lessons where I thought the students would be engaged and have plenty of thoughts and they provided little feedback. Other times the opposite happened where the students found themselves interested in a topic I didn't think they would be. The discussion s would carry over into the next day (sometimes even 2 days). But it was important to always be over-prepared with activities in case the lesson didn't take as long as expected