3 Ways To Prepare Yourself To Start Student Teaching

If you have plans to start student teaching soon, you might be feeling both nervous and excited about this step towards your future profession. Since student teaching is often the first time many prospective teachers will actually be in a classroom with students, it’s vital that you are properly prepared and ready for the adventure, as the last thing you want to do is fail your students.

To help you have the best chances of success here, here are three ways to prepare yourself to start student teaching. 

Introduce Yourself To The Parents

As you’re getting ready for your first day in the classroom, on top of doing things like going to the spa to get in the right mindset, you should also reach out to the parents of the students that you’ll be teaching. 

To best do this, you should craft a letter or email that you’ll send out to the parents. In this letter, introduce yourself and share with the parents what your educational background is. You can also share some of your ideas for what you’ll be doing with their kids during your time as their student teacher. Along with this information, give parents a way to contact you and explain to them that you’d love any feedback they have to help you become a better teacher. By doing this, you can start yourself off on the right foot with some of your biggest supports in the classroom. 

Learn How To Learn From Your Cooperative Teacher

In addition to all the teaching you’ll be doing as a student teacher, you’ll also be doing a lot of learning from the cooperative teacher that you’ll be working with. 

To help you have the best possible relationship with your cooperative teacher, it’s important that you learn how to learn from them. To do this, try to come up with questions you can ask in order to glean some invaluable knowledge from your cooperative teacher, like how they manage the classroom, what techniques have worked or haven’t worked for them in the past, and any advice they can give you. 

Embrace Flexibility

While you might have a lot of ideas and expectations about how you think your time student teaching will go, what you really need to learn during this time is how to be flexible. It’s very likely that things won’t go as well as you’re hoping, so being able to go with the flow, think on the fly, and roll with the punches will make your time student teaching much more enjoyable and useful to both you and your students. 

If you’ll be student teaching in the near future, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you prepare for this time spent in the classroom. 

4 Things Most English Teachers Have In Common

If you are an English teacher or professor, you know just how hard and thankless the job can sometimes be. But teaching English can also be very rewarding and fun, especially if it’s something you’re passionate about. There are sometimes little telltale signs of English teachers though. Here are 4 things most English teachers have in common. 

They Have Little Free Time

Teaching schedules are already busy and hours are already long if you are only considering the school day, but keep in mind that teachers work after hours, often long into the night at home, grading papers and making lesson plans. English teachers often have extremely long papers to read and grade and this can take many hours per week. Because of this, it can be very hard to find time to do the things they want to do, whether they’re needing to spend more time with their family, go to the store to buy a t-shirt, or simply just relax and have some downtime. Remember this when dealing with an English teacher – they have to make a lot of sacrifices to do what they do. 

They’re Always Correcting People’s Grammar

When you teach grammar for a living and much of your day is often spent using a red pen to correct spelling and grammar mistakes, you simply can’t help but carry that over into the rest of your life and correct people’s grammar, even outside of the classroom. This may annoy an English teacher’s friends, family, or social media followers, but it’s also pretty funny. 

They’re Under-Appreciated

Teachers in general often feel underappreciated and underpaid, and this is even more true of English teachers. While many children love to go to art class, physical education, or even science, fewer kids enjoy English. To many people, it is just plain boring. For this reason, English teachers really are rock stars, so make sure to thank them the next time you meet one. 

They Love To Read

Being an avid reader is a common trait among English teachers, and that makes a ton of sense. When people have a love for the English language, they tend to not only enjoy teaching literature to their students but to also enjoy reading it in their free time. Often a great love of books is what causes a person to want to become an English teacher in the first place! So if you’re looking for a great gift for an English teacher, head no further than your local bookstore. Just make sure they don’t already have the book you’re thinking of getting them first because chances are they have a lot. 

English teachers are awesome for so many reasons. The fact that you were even able to read this list is probably owed to them!