ND may waive student teaching

Schools are having difficulty filling open positions. In North Dakota, there are currently 200 open slots. These are clearly challenging times and various strategies have been proposed to keep an adult at the head of the classroom.

The Educational Standards and Practices Board in ND has proposed a new solution to the Governor. How about if student teaching, the supervised semester that preservice teachers spend in a classroom, just be eliminated if an unfilled position is available and the novice be declared the teacher of record.

OK. Depending on how an educational major has arranged his or her schedule, the student teaching experience could be the last semester of college. Why not help a school out and fill in? When I student taught many years ago, my in-school cooperating teacher was very seldom in the classroom. After a week or so of observing, I first took over sophomore biology sections on film day. The teacher had a day a week dedicated to showing biology-related films. Access did not allow many of such films to be relevant to the current topic, but you took what you could get. I had decent AV skills and had mastered the challenge of looping the film just right so it would feed through the projector without a problem and as long as I could control the class with the lights off I was golden. After I rolled the empty 55-gallon aquarium into the store room so students could not get a handful of gravel to throw at each other during the film sessions, things went well. I moved on to actually deliver presentations while my mentor spent time in the teachers’ lounge doing other stuff.

Why is the ND proposal any different? I think it is because the students knew their “real” teacher was still in the building and I was a kid a few years older than them substituting for a few weeks. The data on new teacher survival are discouraging. Nearly 50% of new teachers quit within the first five years. This plan may make things worse in the long term. Having a good experience as someone new to the profession is very important and being thrown directly into the fire without much support is not likely to improve the present dismal odds.