I am currently completing my Student Teaching experiences! I am an Elementary Education major and a Special Education minor and I am in my first of two 8 week placements in a K-2nd grade Special Education classroom. During student teaching, there comes a time where you get to be the "official" teacher for at least two weeks. This means that you are teaching all of the classes, you are making the lessons, and you are the students go to person if they need something. I started being the "official" teacher this past week, and let me tell you, it is so wonderful! Being in student teaching has made me think back to my time at UNI and think about how prepared I have been throughout my student teaching experience so far!
So, enough about me, I want to tell you a little more about the College of Education and the opportunities you could have out in the classroom before you start your career as an educator. There are so many teaching opportunities for you to take advantage of during your time at The University of Northern Iowa if you are apart of the College of Education.
As a part of UNI's Education program, you will have a Level 1 field experience. This experience allows you to be in the classroom, observing, interacting with students and maybe doing some teaching. The Level 2 field experience builds upon the Level 1 experience. For your Level 2's, you still get the chance to observe how other teachers are having success with their teaching strategies, interacting with students and you get to teach a few lessons. Throughout these experiences, you have a UNI faculty member coming out to the schools, watching you teach and providing feedback as well as encouraging you as you teach! The semester or two before you go out to student teach, you will complete your Level 3 Field Experience. Your Level 3's are a week of teaching and you get to be in the same class all day for those five days. By the end of the week, you get the chance to teach all day and "be the teacher". For your Level 3 Field Experience, you can get the chance to do that experience in Texas, Chicago, Arizona, rural areas of Iowa and a few larger cities in Iowa. Finally it gets to Level 4, which is Student Teaching. As a student teacher, you get the chance to student teach abroad, in a different state, or right here in Iowa. All of these experiences build upon each other and can help you to gain confidence as an educator as well as seeing many different settings and environment which helps you to be a stronger teacher!
But wait! There's more! One of the greatest things that I love about UNI's College of Education is the fact that most students get to have more teaching experiences on-top of the required field experiences which I talked about above! Many classes also have field experiences within them. For example, I took my Math Methods course and some days instead of meeting on campus for class, we would meet at a local elementary school and teach a lesson to a group of students. This lesson was something we had been learning how to teach in class then got to apply it in an authentic setting! I had many classes at UNI that had those types of experiences within them. As educators, we love being with students and what better way to learn how to be a teacher than being out in the classroom practicing our craft!
Overall, I have felt very prepared while I have been at Student Teaching. I definitely owe that to the great professors I had who instructed me within the College of Education, and to the authentic experiences I got to have in classrooms throughout my educational career at UNI.
Sarah, STAR
No comments:
Post a Comment