Pilots Prevent
November 30, 2021
University of Portland’s School of Education has always made field experience a top priority. Beginning with their first year in the program, students spend time in K-8 classrooms around the region, observing the teaching process, getting ready for their senior year when they work with mentors as student-teachers in a classroom.
But, as with many things, COVID threw a big monkey wrench into the works. Ever since the pandemic hit in spring 2020, students have had to forgo those early field experience opportunities, although the hope is they will resume in the spring. Still, that means this year’s seniors have been faced with quite a steep learning curve this past semester when schools resumed teaching in person.
“This is their first time in the classrooms and they’re jumping right in with their practica,” says Jackie Brocka, a supervisor in the School of Education. “Traditionally they would have had three years of field experience in classrooms—a couple hours here and there, in small groups, getting a feel for what the classroom is all about—and working up to being in the classroom full time.”
The silver lining for UP’s student-teachers is that even though the pandemic cut their field experiences short, it has created tremendous opportunities for growth and learning—even for the veteran educators they’re working with. “The class environment is so different from what it would have been four years ago,” says Brocka. “It’s a brand-new landscape for everyone.”
UP student Adamm Creel, who is in his final year of the 4+1 Masters in Education program, says last year his shadowing was all done via Zoom. This past semester was his first time teaching students in person, and he says the challenges of teaching during COVID are making him more resilient.
“COVID limits the activities we can do, we can’t have groups of kids close together, so we have to come up with creative ways to do things,” he says. “But that’s good. It gives you practice improvising. My CT (cooperating teacher) has been teaching as long as I’ve been alive, and even she’s like ‘Well, that idea didn’t work.’ Even a seasoned vet is having to go with the flow and change things up. We’ll talk about, ‘Hey how do you think we can get this to work?’”
Brocka says thanks to COVID, UP’s student-teachers are getting a crash-course on what’s arguably the most important characteristic of a good teacher—flexibility. “We’ve proven how agile we have to be. It didn’t matter how many years you had been teaching, everyone had to start from square one. A lot of educators reexamined their practices. There had to be a whole new way to present the content. There’s so much new learning and we're still figuring it out. As a teacher, we talk about being lifelong learners, and we’re really putting it into action.”
Creel says he’s gained a lot of insights about how kids learn, how to be mindful about the delivery of his lessons, how to pivot, reassess, and try new tactics as he gets his students up to speed after a year of online school.
“The biggest thing I learned is it’s never going to go as planned,” he says. “When you’re writing lesson plans and think, ‘This should take one period’ you end up teaching it for three days. Or ‘This is going to take all week’ and the class gets it in half a class period.”
These are the lessons that can’t be replicated in a book, and that will stay with Creel and UP’s other student-teachers as they embark on their careers after graduation. “So much of teaching is learning by doing,” says Brocka, “These students are teaching more every day, being in charge of the classroom. I know they’re getting a good grasp of what it’s like to be a teacher and they’ve made tremendous growth over this term. They’ve been really remarkable.”
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