Aric Foster is our guest blogger this week. He is offering another perspective on the student teaching experience–the university-cohort liaison. Never satisfied with his own teaching and ardently passionate about student learning, Aric has been teaching English 11 and AP Literature for 16 years in a rural town 35 miles north of Detroit. Committed to the growth mindset, Standards Based Learning, and differentiated instruction, Aric has also taught using #TTOG (Teachers Throwing Out Grades) for three years. Through twitter (@aricfoster2), Voxer chats (aricfoster2), and trading web-based resources (armadafoster.weebly.com), Aric is diligent in using 21st century tools to promote and internalize best practices for student learning and serving as co-founder of the STEM & Flower Learning Consultants (stemandflower.weebly.com).
What is typically the most prominent area of growth needed in student teaching? Is it a lack of emotional and academic support for the intern while doing field work? Is it a lack of an effective way to pair interns and mentors according to personality type and expertise? Is it a lack of effective training for mentor teachers? Arguably, it is all three. However, another aspect of the student-teaching process that can stand some attention is the disconnect between what the intern learns in university coursework translating to authentic practice in the field. Often mentor teachers ask, “What are they teaching you in your coursework?” and interns exclaim, “Well, we were never taught that in our coursework.”
Thankfully, Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, has developed a model to address all four of these concerns-with extra emphasis on the latter. Through Oakland University, a small group of interns are in a cohort placed in the same school. Currently, there are four interns in Armada High School. Acting as the student-teacher liaison, I meet with the interns once a week to attempt to give them the academic and emotional support that is sometimes found lacking in “silo” field placements where there is only one intern in the school building. Working closely with Oakland University teacher education professors, I am able to listen to intern concerns, find common patterns, relay them to the university and the mentors in the building anonymously, and present the interns with workable options to handle the rigor and stress of student-teaching.
Before interns are ever “given” a mentor in Armada, they have an “open house” day in the spring of the school year prior to student teaching. On this day, the cohort of potential interns visits Armada for a full day. They spend their time observing potential mentors with whom they might be paired, participating in interviews with potential mentors, and, probably most importantly, conferencing with the current Armada intern cohort (without mentors present). This open house works to alleviate possible future conflicts between potential interns and mentor teachers. In trying to make the best fit, this process hopes to connect each intern with a mentor that is most conducive to his or her personality type, learning style, and academic strengths. After the open house, as liaison, I meet with potential interns and mentors privately to listen to concerns and wishes about future intern-mentor pairings. After consulting with university faculty, we establish pairings of interns and mentors with a much more informed mindset.
Another way that the Oakland-Armada partnership improves the student-teaching experience is the summer training that mentors receive. In the teacher education classes, Oakland University professors use a specific curriculum outlined by Teaching Works-a think tank from the University of Michigan. Specifically, they reviewed the “High Leverage Teaching Practices” (HLTPs) promoted by Teaching Works (http://www.teachingworks.org/work-of-teaching/high-leverage-practices) and chose five of them to focus on during the fall of the student-teaching experience. During the summer before the student-teaching year, mentors are brought to the university and are coached in these HLTPs. They are informed about each practice, review rubrics that assess the practice, watch videos from former interns that try to exemplify each practice, score the videos, and discuss the work. What results is a focused, cohesive approach to what to look for in intern proficiency. Rather than just assuming what “good teaching” is and providing seemingly helpful feedback to the interns, mentors have specific criteria to look for, a specific scoring guide, and specific tools to help the intern improve in specific areas. Mentors report feeling more prepared to effectively guide the interns in their growth as educators after going through this training.
Finally, and most importantly, within this model, there is a clear pipeline between university course work that the intern learns on campus and practical field work that the intern demonstrates in the school building. From the summer training and through continued training throughout the school year, mentors cannot ask, “What are they teaching you in methods classes?” as they actually attend the classes at the university where the interns are taught the HLTPs. Furthermore, the course work assignments that the intern needs to complete during the fall of the student-teaching experience involve recording their attempts to demonstrate specific HLTPs and writing analyses of their performances. The intern knows exactly what specific aspects teaching he/she needs to focus on; the mentor knows exactly what kind of feedback to focus on when observing the intern; both stake holders leave the fall session of student-teaching with five HLTPs as a common language to use when discussing lesson effectiveness. Mentors and interns take this common language into the winter semester to continue to “be on the same page” about what effective teaching looks like. It is in the winter, when the intern takes on a fuller load of actually teaching classes that the mentor is then more able to move past the core HLTPs and add feedback about other aspects of teaching. This focused approach facilitates potent feedback, mutual points of emphasis, and clear expectations for all members of the student-teaching process.
Other benefits of this liaison-cohort approach emerge that may not be as obvious at first glance. First, at our weekly meetings, interns have a place to “vent” in a healthy supportive environment-a practice much needed to assuage the stress of teaching responsibilities. Second, at our weekly meetings, interns are able to trade notes about logistics: when is the next college assignment due, what do we have to have in our portfolio, where do we get the paper work for graduation, etc. Also, in these meetings, interns get answers to field work specific questions that mentors might often forget to address, as they are typically low on the priority list: what do we do for a fire drill, what if there is a snow day, can I drink the coffee in the teacher’s lounge, etc. In addition, I am able to share supplemental teaching strategies to interns in our weekly meetings that might not get addressed while working with mentors or in the course work: classroom management tricks, communicating with parents, syllabus preparation, etc. Another invaluable aspect of our meetings is when I bring in current Armada teachers to share their experience and address specific concerns. This year, I brought in several different kinds of educators to these meetings: a teacher that was an intern in Armada in the past to share the difference between student teaching and the first year of teaching; our union president to discuss teacher certification and the benefits of being in the teacher union; the principal to share tips for the interview process; an assessment consultant to clarify standards based learning; and a marketing teacher to discuss getting a part time job while teaching.
I am very fortunate to be a liaison for Oakland University and cannot say enough about how this cohort model has benefited the interns’ teaching proficiency, my own teaching expertise, the quality of teacher education at Oakland, and most crucially, the learning of the pupils in Armada classrooms.
Do you have a idea for Ethical ELA? Would you like to start a conversation with our readers on an ethical issue in teaching? Want to be a guest blogger? Let us know.