Related Posts
What is your best classroom management trick?
Bowl Leader
an Elementary School Special Education Teacher
More Posts
Visual Storyteller
Additional Posts in Jobs for Teachers
What is the best tool for hiring teachers?
What can I do other than teach?
New to Fishbowl?
Download the Fishbowl app to
unlock all discussions on Fishbowl.
unlock all discussions on Fishbowl.
I was a para for a year, as a certified teacher. It was like a paid internship. I worked and got paid while learning from experienced teachers. At the end of that year, I applied for one of the open positions and was hired to teach. It was the best possible way for me to gain more experience and get paid.
That is a great way to get a good feel for the job and getting paid is even better!
Even if you were fully paid and had a full year in the classroom, you wouldn’t be fully prepared for the next year on your own. It takes at least 3 years to find your footing, sometimes 5 to see what you need to help your students.
You might feel prepared; however, nothing prepares you for the trauma of teaching .
What is the trauma of teaching? Asking for a friend.
When I was a new teacher 20 years ago, the guy I was replacing lamented this. His quote which I always loved was, "If the medical field passed on knowledge to new people the way education does, we would still be bleeding people with leaches." He had taught music for 35 years. My students lost those years. What I had to bring was energy and passion. How wonderful if we could have combined forces for a year. I could have learned so much from him, if I had a year to pick his brain instead of a couple days of conversations. And I will always count myself lucky to get those days, many new teachers don't even get that.
A full-year residency could be an amazing opportunity to see how relationships with students and families grow over time. Those are lessons you can’t always learn in 80 days.
I've advocated for something like this my entire career.
I think it would attract more qualified teachers and reduce the number of people who leave after a year or two because they didn't get a real sense of the profession from student teaching.
While having a full year residency and getting paid would be a great opportunity, most schools don’t offer this unless you’ve got your post-bac and are looking for a Master’s in education. That is just the reality. Yes, most of us felt unprepared when we got our first classroom, but honestly this is how we learned from “the ground up.” I would not have been the same teacher had I not learned these lessons for myself. That’s the real learning that counts. Making mistakes is always the best way to learn. Isn’t that what we tell our students? Even when you do make mistakes over the first couple years, the kids get a real look at what resilience and dedication look like. That is the best lesson anyone could teach them.
OES you had 4 months of student teaching?
When I did my student teaching ot was for 6 weeks.
I feel like if i had a paid student teacher experience today, I would have quit and never looked back!
We have all been through this. The first year is DIFFICULT. A paid residency would be nice, but actually being responsible for the class, in full, will still leave you feeling overwhelmed when you get to that stage.
I have known several paras who became teachers after a few years. They still had struggles transitioning to the place of classroom management/discipline, teaching, re-teaching, classroom management/ discipline, personality clash management, classroom management/discipline, parent relationships, and classroom management/discipline. Oh, and I forgot classroom management/discipline.
It's tough any way you look at it. Teaching is just hard. It is not at all what society thinks it is when remembering from the perspective of having been students.
I felt very benefitted by my experience. I was part of a program that offered the chance to do an "internship" rather than student teaching. This was a full-year position where I received half pay and full benefits. I didn't have a cooperating teacher, but instead had people at the high school that were assigned to check in and help me out when needed. I also had a person from the university that was assigned as a resource. I was the teacher in the classroom, but I had a lot of support. I don't know that this model would work for everybody (indeed, I had to apply to get it), but it sure was good for me!