Tales from Teachers College

Tales from Teachers College

We learn a lot of different things in Teacher’s college. We learn the fine art of educating the world youth. We are given the skills to prepare units, lessons and activities that will engage students and give them the wisdom to be responsible and productive members of society.

However, there are many other things that were taught to us as we were preparing to embark on our teaching journey. These are the stories from teachers college.

As students in teachers college, we are required to get some “hands-on” training. These are called practicum placements. Basically, we get to go and spend 3-4 weeks in a classroom learning from the teacher. This is a great opportunity to get a feel for what it is like to work in the classroom.

The practicum experience can be broken down into a few categories. Observation, lesson planning and teaching plus mentoring and feedback from your teacher mentor. The goal of this process is to learn the ins and outs of the job and to slowly integrate into doing some of the teacher related duties.

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Our practicum professor gave us some stern but sincere advice before we set out on our practicum placements. It almost felt like a warning. A warning that made us a little nervous but made perfect sense once we had arrived at our placements. Her statement was simply this:

“Remember your place and know your role”.

Basically, she was telling us not to forget that we are visitors in someone else’s classroom and as much as we might have opinions, questions and things we want to try, we must always respect that we are there as a guest and to learn.

We all went off and spent 4 weeks at various placements and the experience was fantastic. I personally had a great mentor who let me get very involved in planning and teaching. I was eager and she let me have a little bit of freedom.

When we all returned from our placements and were at our first class again together there was lots of story sharing and excitement about all the things people had seen and done. One of our closest friends was very quiet while we all chatted away. He actually seemed quite upset. This was odd to us as he was always very chatty and outgoing.

We later learned that he had been permitted to attend and listen in on parent-teacher interviews. What a great experience for him. Several of us had also been lucky enough to do the same. Unfortunately, he forgot that he was an observer and made the mistake of sharing information about some things that he should have kept confidential between himself and his mentor. A decision he immediately regretted.

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Needless to say, his mentor was far from happy and in the end, gave him an unsatisfactory report. He was going to have to redo the whole practicum placement again. As we were warned, “Remember your place and know your role”. Unfortunately, he learned that lesson the hard way.

Trust in the words and wisdom of your Master. Don't be pulled in by the Dark Side.