Getting down to work with interns
September 2006 DRAFT for review and revision
We might tell two stories, or offer two fundamental ideas, about learning to teach. Each story leads to ways of working with interns. This short piece will tell both stories, and emphasize the second as a basis for field instructor work with interns.
Story 1
The standards for school students' learning have escalated dramatically over the past fifteen years. Inevitably, that means teachers must attain new and higher standards of teaching, so they can help their students to attain the standards for learning. And, there is a substantial literature describing the repertoire of options for thought and action that might help teachers to attain the new standard for teaching, thus helping their students to meet those standards.
So, it is very important that teacher candidates and interns read, discuss, write about, and practice the available repertoire for teaching, so that they will know it (and, we hope, use it in teaching). This is a legitimate and urgent story about learning to teach, that compels our attention. Call this story the "formal education path into teaching."
In the internship, we work hard on this story in the TE 80x courses, which extend interns' formal study of teaching and support interns in applying those studies to their work in schools. Field instructors also play a part in this.
Story 2
At the same time, there is a another story about learning to teach: A young person has declared, to herself and others, that she wants, as her life's work, to teach school. As a student in school, she has formed many ideas about teaching, learning, schooling, and related matters, and all those ideas seem to her to be recommended by her considerable direct experience. Her intention to teach probably is based on that body of ideas.
She is morally serious--within the limits of her inexperience and naivete. She is committed to teaching school--as she now understands and thinks about that activity. She is committed to school students--as she now thinks about them and has interacted with them.
She works hard, values the good grades she has earned, and values the identity, of a good student, that she has constructed on the basis of those grades. The valid feeling of knowing exactly what to do in a classroom, as a student, tends to foster the invalid feeling of knowing exactly what to do as a teacher in that same classroom.
None of these states of mind are anything like switches that the intern or anyone else can turn on and off. More nearly, they are like habits, that she or anyone else can change only slowly, with systematic exertion.
With these habits of thought, action, and interaction (her continuous experience), she enters into her work with children in schools, over an extended period of time. Let's say that in her freshman year she volunteers at a school, in her sophomore year completes the service learning project as a tutor to school children, spends at least 2-3 hours per week in the practice component of TE 301, spends 3-5 hours a week in the practice component of TE 401 and TE 402, completes the practice component of the internship, and, with a high probability, moves on into her first and second years of teaching.
As her continuous experience interacts with this sequence of situations of work with school children, we might, in crude terms, anticipate three trends:
(a) A nice upward spiral of increasing success, investment, satisfaction, valid learning, and commitment to the enterprise.
(b) An awful downward spiral of non-success, dis-investment, dissatisfaction, invalid learning, and disconnection (not the same as physically departing).
(c) Sort of bumping along between the two.
Call this story the "autonomous, existential, experiential path" into teaching. This story also is legitimate and urgent, and compels our attention. Arguably, this story is the special province of field instructors because they work with relatively few interns, and work with them almost entirely around their attempts to perform as teachers.
Connecting with Story 2
To work with interns on the basis of Story 2, we need some important information about the interns. [And we have some things to suggest to them about these matters]:
1. Who are you trying to be, and what are you trying to do, as a teacher?
[We assume that you are actively trying to forge a professional teacher's working stance (intellectual position), working manner (external appearance), and ways of interacting with others in the school. We aim to support you in that.]
2. How will you and the other members of the guided practice seminar work with each other, and treat each other, in order to support each other in learning to teach?
[The guided practice seminar is, among other things, a time to learn how to work as colleagues with other teachers. The question is how colleagues think of each other, treat each other, work with each other.]
3. How are you going to take initiative to help your mentor teacher to teach the pupils?
[99.6% of the time in an elementary classroom, a second teacher can find some useful way to be involved. The early task is to figure out what the lead teacher is trying to do, and to function as an effective support teacher to the lead teacher.]
4. What are good enough reasons for teachers to do things to other people's children (the pupils)?
[Your mentor teacher and her pupils are your colleague and her and your clients, who are entrusted to her and to you for the purpose of their education. What are good enough reasons for doing what you do to them? One way you figure this out is planning for instruction.]
5. What part of the extensive teaching repertoire are you trying to learn and refine, at this moment, the next moment, today, tomorrow, next week?
[We assume that you are actively trying to learn to teach, in some specific way, in which you set particular goals for gaining and refining particular knowledge and skills.