Between Classes

My first cooperating teacher during my student teaching experience didn’t want a student teacher. She’d had a bad experience a few years before, and as department chair, she’d actually managed to get her high school removed from my college’s list of receptive schools. Due to a story for another day, I arrived against her wishes.

As an extrovert who learned names quickly, I often impressed people with my ability to command attention in the front of a classroom. My cooperating teacher noticed immediately, however, that I wasn’t teaching as much as performing. “Did you have a good time?” she asked casually after watching me in front of a class for the first time. I can’t remember everything that followed because the experience of receiving accurate and bald criticism about my teaching pained me. Within a week, however, she saw my sincerity and willingness to grow as fully as she saw my areas in need of improvement. “We could spend these eight weeks applauding what you already do well, Kate,” she sighed. “You know your content. You like the students. You plan meaningful assignments and group activities. That’s all important. But you don’t think about what happens during the lesson when you’re not talking.” Sheesh. It makes me wince just to type it since there are days when I think it still holds true!

This master teacher taught me how to write my discussion questions ahead of time for Socratic method, using verbs from Bloom’s Taxonomy. She explained that ironically, students excel at “wait time,” and they would wait to respond until I broke out into a panicky sweat and told them the answers; I needed to cultivate my ability to endure the silence, she said, to develop the confidence to let the room fall quiet without needing to fill it with my own voice. From her guidance, I learned to plan the considerable questions of paper management during a lesson. When during the lesson should I return graded work? At what point during giving directions should I pass out the worksheets? Where should students keep their works in progress? What should students be doing while they waited for me to write something on the board or overhead?

Planning the quiet parts of the lesson lacks glamour. Like having clean underwear in the drawer on a workday morning, managing the parts of the lesson when no one is talking plays a crucial, yet pedestrian part to any effective lesson. I value that my cooperating teacher took the time to teach me some true tricks of the trade.