This past week I visited one of our students doing her student teaching at a middle school in Aichi. I teach English, but we help out when there are more students than the arts professors can visit. While I can't speak about art, I can certainly observe students in terms of how they present information and how they interact with students and I feel like I can give some basic advice regarding their experience.
This week I was more impressed with a student's teaching than I have been in a long time. Generally our students don't get a lot of preparation in their education classes. Actually, I'm not sure how much training they get, but they are kind of thrown into the deep end in their student teaching practicum. They observe their teachers at their schools for a week while they work on their official presentation, sometimes with the help of their observing teacher, and sometimes on their own. Then they do their official class under the eyes of their observing teacher, other visiting practicum students, other teachers at the school, and sometimes the principal. Oh, and me, in this case. Sometimes they get really nervous and tense and after they are done and we chat about how they felt they did, I've had students cry, even ones who I felt did well!
This student did many, many things right, in my book, anyway. Although she is a design student, she was asked to teach a morals class. In these classes students learn citizenship and life skills. The assignment this week was to have students learn about the concept of the value of human life. Yes, that difficult! The impetus was a famous Pulitzer Prize winning picture by Kevin Carter of a vulture eyeing a dying starving child in the Sudan. Let me see if I can include a link...
Kevin Carter Prize Winning Photograph
If you follow the link, you will see how powerful it is and might wonder how a teacher might use this with third-year middle school students!
What this young teacher decided to do was rather than just having students read some text and then look at the picture, she asked them to look at the picture first and write why they felt the photographer took the picture. She then asked students to share their ideas individually with the whole and many rose their hands to volunteer! She then had students share in groups (which they got into at lightning speed) and write their group members' ideas on A3 size paper. She then put all the groups' pages on the board and underlined in different colors the three main threads that wove through all three. Finally, she summarized the main point of the lesson, about the value of life and added that she didn't have all the answers but that students should think about their fellow students as real people.
Amazing. First, that she decided to go off away from the book, then that she got students to share ideas, and finally that she was able bring it all together.
After the class I usually get the chance to chat with students one on one, but the principal and vice principal also sat in this time. While we were waiting for her, I shared that I thought she had done a good job of guiding the students, but the principal decided to focus on teacher talk and suggested that she should have given the main point of the lesson first instead of asking students to think first. That was the opposite of what I'd just said, but I didn't disagree. I did write the student afterwards that the principal's advice was valid because the balance of teacher and student talk is always good to consider and besides, as a student, she needs to please her raters.
It did give me a chance to give my spiel that a good teacher, even one with long years of teaching, can benefit from thinking about every lesson and how they might change it if at all. My favorite example is a teacher at the University of Minnesota, one of my alma maters (don't know the Latin plural for that!) where there was an ESL teacher who had an entire file cabinet with each version of the grammar lessons he had taught. Each one was tailor made for a particular group. I always like to say that it seems hard to teach in the beginning and many feel that it will get easier as they get experience, and I say that is true, but that even really experienced teachers are always thinking about how and what they teach. The good ones, anyway.
I even considered using this artwork in my English classes, but the pictures I use are more to elicit lots of easily shared ideas, but this kind of picture is too powerful for that. What I did come away with was a sense of hope that there are future teachers out there who can draw outside the lines, so to speak. I like it when that happens!
