It is that time once again, the future educators are venturing out into various classrooms and gaining new learning experiences to one day use in their own classes, or that's the premise at least. Field assignments and placements can be the most valuable of experiences, although sometimes for the bad just as much for the good. There are students every year that are, unfortunately, placed in classrooms with cooperating teachers that don't exactly want to cooperate. Or, if they do cooperate, give an example of what NOT to do in the classroom.
With all of this talk about methods and theories and best practice techniques, it can be discouraging when I do not see current teachers implementing the very strategies we discuss day in and day out. Understandably, there are more factors influencing the teaching than what we see on the surface in our brief time in the classroom, although it makes me wonder if a lot of this is all for naught.
In the era of high stakes testing and merit pay, I truly wish and hope that teachers can still "teach." There are far too many of us, future educators, that are going into this field and still feel blind to many aspects. Not once, in any of my classes, have we talked about the PARCC testing or how to deal with manipulative and unruly administrators that pollute the workplace. This is not to discredit the teacher education program at all, the staff and professors do a phenomenal job, I just wonder if there is more to the teaching world than what is being shown to us and it's time we know the facts.
With all of this talk about methods and theories and best practice techniques, it can be discouraging when I do not see current teachers implementing the very strategies we discuss day in and day out. Understandably, there are more factors influencing the teaching than what we see on the surface in our brief time in the classroom, although it makes me wonder if a lot of this is all for naught.
In the era of high stakes testing and merit pay, I truly wish and hope that teachers can still "teach." There are far too many of us, future educators, that are going into this field and still feel blind to many aspects. Not once, in any of my classes, have we talked about the PARCC testing or how to deal with manipulative and unruly administrators that pollute the workplace. This is not to discredit the teacher education program at all, the staff and professors do a phenomenal job, I just wonder if there is more to the teaching world than what is being shown to us and it's time we know the facts.