TIFTIN KIDDER / Scroll Photo Illustrations
Breanne Weber plays with her child, Kayden Weber, in her home.

Student teaching: benefits beyond the classroom

by Dominique Perkins PER04022@BYUI.EDU Scroll Staff

Breanne Weber arrives early at Sandcreek Middle School in Idaho Falls. Her materials are well organized, and her day is well planned out. Upon arriving, she finds that the school’s assembly schedule has been changed once again and she will now have only half the time to teach her class. Weber has learned that flexibility and preparation are the keys to student teaching.

According to Robert Maxfield, the director of career placement at BYU-Idaho, “There are quite a few [student teachers] out and about.” Information indicates that “BYU-I will soon have as many graduating education majors as all other Idaho universities combined,” he said.

Weber, a recent BYU-I graduate of art education from Bellevue, Wash., taught four art classes at Sandcreek: three for seventh and eighth grades, and one for sixth grade. According to Weber, this is a comparatively light load. “Most student teachers have five or six classes to teach,” she said.

Maxfield explained that student teachers are responsible for teaching a full semester of classes. “It is very exiting because this is where the teachers are trained,” he said. “They will be the teachers for the next generation.”

The beginning of the semester is spent observing the present teacher’s methods, lesson plans and the children. From there, student teachers gradually work their way up to teaching full lessons until finally, they are in charge of each lesson, every day.

Weber had a slightly different experience. “She just threw me right into it -— generally you work into it,” she said. After she had taken over teaching the class, the other teacher was mostly there to give her any help if she needed it. This was good, because Weber reported that “there were definitely situations.”

According to Weber, most method classes teach theories that can be adapted to many different types of situations. So, in most cases, Weber said, “you just handle it the way your first instincts tell you to handle it. And then maybe ask the other teacher afterwards what they might have done differently, or for any other advice.”

“It’s a whole chemistry, so many different people and different personalities,” she said. “Nothing too serious happened.” Most issues were ones that any teacher might expect to encounter. “You always have the kid who doesn’t shut up that you have to deal with.”

Weber recalls one particular group of young men in her sixth grade class who had a comment for everything. “Literally everything,” she said. “I could be talking to them about the color red, and one would yell out ‘Oh that’s my favorite color!’ They just had a lot of energy. That was probably my hardest class. There is a big difference in maturity between the older and the younger kids.”

Being a student teacher is also a lot of work. Weber said that she was very lucky because due to the nature of her classes, her schedule included three prep periods a day, which gave her a lot of time to get things done.

“I was the oddball case,” she said. “Most people do a lot of work outside the classroom, more so even than homework [you get in school].”

Despite these various challenges, Weber felt her student-teaching experience was positive. “It was actually a lot of fun. I enjoyed middle school more than I thought I would,” she said. “I had wanted to do high school, but I enjoyed the younger ages too.”

Weber’s adviser came into the classroom about six times during the semester to observe and evaluate her teaching methods and abilities. These evaluations go into a report at the end of the semester and are put into a file. According to Maxfield, these files are then looked at by schools that are looking to hire teachers. Many student teachers are actually offered jobs at the schools where they are teaching.

A final challenge Weber was faced with was leaving her classes when it was all over. “I miss my kids,” she said, laughing. “It was a lot of fun.” Now that she has graduated, Weber plans to use her learned flexibility in a new way to be a stay-at-home mother. Once she’s through teaching her own children, she may return to the formal classroom.