Into the Strenuous Briefness

soak it in: Advice from a student teacher to coordinating teachers

Disclaimer: In my student teaching experience, we called our cooperating/coordinating teachers our “mentor teachers.” Terms will be used interchangeably here.

So…the other side of the fence. Well, I haven’t been on that side just yet (how many sides to this fence are there? Student…student…

Now that I have officially completed my own student teaching, I wanted to piggyback onto lhuddles’ brilliant post with my own thoughts about how mentor teachers can best support their student teachers. And I completely second everything lhuddles has already said here.

Don’t forget that your student teacher is a student! He might look like he has everything under control, and she might seem like she knows exactly what she’s doing, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t need your support and advice. Student teachers are still learning, no matter how confident they may seem, so try not to assume that you don’t need to keep an eye out for them just because they’ve been in control of a section for two months.
Be your student teacher’s strongest advocate. I was so lucky that my mentor did this instinctively and passionately, and it made my internship manageable. My mentor was in my corner on nearly every issue with students, parents, other teachers, and my university supervisors. She let people know what I was accomplishing and under what circumstances I was working. This isn’t to say she never helped me identify things to improve or point out places where I should have done things differently, but she absolutely refused to let anyone—student or otherwise—bully me.
Set a good teaching example for your student teacher. If you have a planning period, use it for planning. If there are students in your classroom presenting behavioral or academic challenges, discuss with your student teacher the various ways this might be handled. Don’t dismiss a student or a class section as being hopeless.
Require your student teacher to submit lesson plans in advance. My mentor teacher did not require this of me, but I think I would have been a better teacher if she had.
Have a candid conversation with your student teacher about classroom expectations—what do each of you expect from your students? What is it OK for students to be doing/saying in your classroom? How do your two perspectives differ? During my internship, I found that I had very different expectations for student talk than my mentor teacher. Generally it wasn’t too problematic, but there were a few times when I wanted to shut down student conversations for being disrespectful or inappropriate but could not because my mentor was actively condoning them.

Source: lhuddles