I am getting emails coming in and have some friends who are about to start student teaching. Many of them seem to be expressing the same fear about going into student teaching.  As we  quickly approach what will for many be the first week of student teaching, I thought it would be helpful to throw out these 10 keys to unlocking the best possible student teaching semester ever.

I was fortunate that I had been teaching private lessons for three years already in the district where I student taught before I began. My school had a two semester process, with the first being mostly observation and the second being full internship. I spent far more than the required 8 hours a week during the fall, sometimes approaching 30 hours in addition to time spent teaching private lessons after school. I was either in the classroom, on the marching field, at football games, or running sectionals. That was huge as far as preparation went. I also realize that those experiences really helped me to not have so much anxiety going into my first day to walk into the classroom.

Most people don’t get it so easy. So what can we do to make it easier?

1. Relax
   Think back about student teachers or younger teachers you had when you were in school.  The ones who were most calm were generally the ones who earned the most respect. If you haven’t done any teaching or much public speaking before, it will grow on you. The key is to try to stay relaxed as much as possible. Check out these articles for more help in this area.
   • If You Make Only One Change This Year…RELAX!!!!!!
   • 25 Tips For Less Stress
   • Overcoming Stress In A Stress-Filled Season
2. S.U.
   Shut Up. So many of the problems we get with discipline come from students losing focus. They lose focus when we keep talking and talking. Kids don’t come to class to hear you talk, especially if you’re a boring public speaker! They come to class to learn. I love learning via lectures, but most people don’t. Most people learn by actually doing something. Also, if they ask you to do something you don’t feel like doing, don’t complain. It’s probably something teachers have to do anyway. It may be unglamorous, but it’s part of the job nonetheless. Check out these articles for more help in this area.
   • Shut Up And Teach!
   • To Shut Up Or Not To Shut Up? That Is The Question
3. Approach each day with excitement
   Maintaining a high level of energy throughout the day (and throughout the week, and throughout the semester, and throughout your life) will help you be more prepared for the unexpected. Just roll with the punches and go with the flow. One of my mentors used to tell me that if you look forward to Monday more than you look forward to Friday, you run the risk of being successful. This may be difficult as many teachers fall into this trap. Indeed, much of the world goes there. Check out these articles for more help in this area.
   • Do You Run The Risk of Becoming Successful?
   • Make A Two Year Commitment, And 100 Other Great Teaching Tips
   • 50 Reasons To Love Your Job As A Teacher
   • 10 Tips To Stay Motivated And Love Teaching
   • Less Stress: Play At Work
4. Learn like crazy
   Another place where it pays off to shut your mouth is when your mentor teacher is teaching, or when you are having discussions. As I grow up, I realize that most of the mistakes I have made have been due to talking too much and listening too little. Sure your college training has given you some great advice, but the teachers that they place students with tend to be pretty successful in their own right. Learn a new way to do something. See what you can learn from the students also. Check out these articles for more help in this area.
   • Learning New Lessons – Tips for Rookie Teachers
   • Finding Excellent Educators To Emulate
5. Ask questions…all…the…time
   Remember that your mentor teacher probably doesn’t go to work every day excited about what they get to teach YOU. They are concerned about the kids, and often just happy to have an extra body there to help them out. It is up to you to be sure you ask questions. When you see them doing something that you don’t understand, ask why. Check out these articles for more help in this area.
   • Questions That Will Save Your Career
   • How Do I Keep My Students Quiet?
   • How Do I Keep My Students Engaged?
   • How Do I Keep My Students Interested?
   • How Do I Keep My Students Learning?
   • Turning The Ship: Overcoming A History of Poor Teaching
6. Discuss with other student teachers and young teachers
   More than likely you know some other student teachers. They are going through many of the same things you are. They have many of the same fears and questions that you do. They want to be great teachers too. Try to form a network with these people. Maybe you could meet together once a week or every couple of weeks and discuss what you have learned. Make sure to keep these from being gossip sessions. That’s a slippery slope you don’t want to begin falling down! Keep the teaching discussion about actual teaching. Then talk about other things. You can also go to the SYWTT Forums and discuss there. Check out these articles for more help in this area.
   • Networking To Save Your (Teaching) Life
   • The Vitality of Collaboration
   • Less Stress: Deepen Your Relationships With Coworkers
   • Student Teaching Spring 2009
7. Get a life
   Don’t spend all of your time teaching or thinking about teaching. Yes, spend a lot. The more time you invest early on, the easier it will be over the long run. But go out with friends (who don’t teach), work on hobbies! Check out these articles for more help in this area.
   • All Work And No Play Makes Joel A Dull Boy
   • Less Stress: Deepen Your Relationships With Friends
   • If You Don’t Fill Your Schedule, Someone Else Will
8. Revisit your educational philosophy
   If you ever had an educational philosophy assignment for one of your classes, it would be interesting to look at this from time to time. Revise it. Also, use it to help get you back on course as it’s easy to lose focus. Experience in the real world does wonders for your views on education. Let the excitement of teaching remain, but also season it with your own observations. If you haven’t written one, write one at the beginning of the semester and revisit it throughout the semester to see how it changes or how you have lost sight of it. Check out these articles for more help in this area.
   • The Purpose Of A Personal Mission Statement
   • My Teaching Philosophy: The 50 Word Version
   • The Deep-Seated Problems With Public Education
9. Reevaluate student success
   Success isn’t always getting the most trophies. It isn’t always keeping the most kids on the team. Success is a combination of a whole lot of factors. The fact that a teacher has a lot of honors hanging on the wall doesn’t make that person a great teacher. The great teaching is what makes them great. Resting on past success is a surefire way to quickly see future failure. Check out these articles for more help in this area.
   • Tools For Success
   • Top 5 Character Traits Of Great Teachers
   • All Time Best Teaching Advice
   • Be The Best Teacher In The World
10. Keep a journal
    Whether I kept it on your Facebook notes, MySpace blog, a spiral notebook at home, or some other online blog, I am convinced that blogging has been one of my greatest sources of encouragement and introspection of my teaching career. I highly encourage you to get involved in blogging your way through this semester. I plan to link to as many student teach blogs as I can find and highlight some of the really cool content I find.  Check out these articles for more help in this area.
    • Blogging Your Way To Being A Great Teacher
    • 8 Ways Blogging Makes Me A Better Teacher

Hopefully you’ll find some information here that will help you be more relaxed as you begin this (presumably) final semester of college! Hang in there. There is a light at the end of the tunnel and it’s not an oncoming train!

In what has turned out to be some of the best comment-produicing material on this blog, I wrote about Asperger’s Syndrome early this month. Amidst the comments, G. Broaddus dropped this little gem:

Fairness in the classroom is not always about giving equal tasks; it is sometimes about giving students an equal chance to succeed, and clearly a student with Asperger’s will need a different way to demonstrate learning than his or her “typical” peers.

He then later fleshed out that idea on his own blog with the post Fairness and equality in the classroom. Please check out his post to read some of these thoughts.

As we take this break and get ready to go back into our classes in January, I want to challenge you to reflect on how you may be being unfair in your quest to provide equality for your students. Though the subjects in the two linked posts deal with disabilities, I contend that equality is unfair for most people in most circumstances. This is why communism is such a flawed concept. Equality is, in many cases, counterproductive to the concept of hard work.

Speaking of fairs, the 204th Carnival of Education was posted this morning!

I saw a great post on The Yellow Board today. The author asks a simple question:

This is a little “out there”, but let’s say you could go back in time and and meet yourself when you were 18. You could tell yourself one thing, and zap, you were back to the present. What one thing would you tell yourself, even if it changed the present? I thought about this and decided I would let “me” know about Sept.11,01. What about you? I hope you don’t tell yourself not to be a band director or to buy stock in Microsoft. What would help the world or others instead of just you?

My response would be, “Avoid debt entirely.” If I got a chance to tell myself something else, it would be, “Put down that twinkie and get off the couch.”

My follow-up question is, “Why aren’t you doing that now?”

2009 is quickly approaching. I’m going to be doing a lot of looking back and forward over the next few weeks. I am really excited about what this year holds for me personally. Oh yeah, keep your eyes open for a little giveaway coming soon too.

I put a forum up a while back and had lackluster response to it. This is not something that I will be very actively involved in, but I would like to try it again as a support system especially for the Student Teaching Project that I’m starting up this semester. Go check it out.

SYWTT Forums