Bridgewater, Va—Many Students from both the specialty education and elementary and secondary education programs have made claims that they are not getting the same quality education as other Teacher Education Program students, but the program staff have thoughts on this issue as well.
Dr. Jenny Martin, Associate Professor of Education and Coordinator of Secondary and All Grades, is a liaison between the education department and all of the different licensure areas. She makes sure that the TEP students are getting all of their education requirements so that they can be successful teachers.
Martin said about her role as the liaison between both the education program and the major that the student has chosen. “You have your specific major that you have to major in but then it can be challenging to get your education courses to be licensed in with that,” said Dr. Martin. “The reason it is a challenge is because the secondary education course series by credit is a major.”
“As soon as someone is admitted to the teacher ed program, I send an email to the registrar and am added on as a secondary advisor,” said Dr. Martin. “For example, if it’s a biology major then they will have a major advisor over in bio and then I’ll also be added on so I can approve classes and help them map out their schedule so that it all fits in the four years.”
“Same thing with All Grades [Pre-K-12th grade],” Martin said, referring to the way that scheduling is done. “As far as advising goes, it is a mixed bag. Sometimes the major advisor likes to do most of the planning and I don’t meet with those students as much if they are taken care of by their major advisor.. I get the feeling that in some majors, that’s actually preferred so that there’s not mixed messages or confusion. I reach out to all of my advisees to say ‘let me know if you need me’ and I hear from some more than others.”
Dr. Martin and other TEP faculty members take time to plan out their meetings with each of the major departments that a student could be certified to teach in.
“Last year, [another TEP faculty member] and I set up meetings with someone from every initial licensure area,” said Dr. Martin. “Before the meeting, I used a Box note to set an agenda and I linked to all of the state competencies that are tied to their classes that are required for teacher licensure.”
Different certification areas also have the right to change their curriculum as they see fit. “English really made a lot of changes,” Martin explained. “We asked them just to make sure we had all of the syllabi uploaded in a folder and that all of the competencies were assigned on this matrix.”
Dr. Martin noted that “every major has a matrix that holds the competencies required by the state and the courses that cover them.” She and a TEP faculty member had to take the time to put everything together and send it to the state to make sure that students were getting the requirements to be a teacher in the state of Virginia met by these new classes.
One of the topics brought up in the first article was that a lot of specialty majors did not feel that they were getting the same attention and resources that students getting ready to teach core subjects might have been given. For example, specialty students felt that they did not get to learn how to lesson plan for their specific class. This is important because most schools require each teacher to submit lesson plans for their class, and if up and coming teachers do not know how to plan for their class, that could lead to other issues in their future work environment.
Dr. Martin focuses on including every content area in her class to ensure that her students are prepared to teach in their own classrooms. “They do a very common literacy lesson plan where you focus on a text,” said Dr. Martin. She gave several examples of the type of text that they can use, such as sheet music, a play or a video. “Students then have to create a list of reading strategies, what do they need during the reading of it, and what do they need after,” said Dr. Martin.
Another thing that was addressed was how Dr. Martin integrated lesson planning and teaching into a room with so many different subject areas. She mentioned a pair of students who did a lesson together that were in different content areas. “[Student 5] is a biology, [Student 6] is math,” said Martin.
Martin provided an example of effective co-teaching, wherein a student majoring in biology and another majoring in math collaborated on Stem to explain how scientists identified the age of dinosaurs.
While this seems to work as a solution and is slowly becoming more of a practice in the classroom due to the rise of mixed classrooms and lab schools, many students were not satisfied with that answer.“I see how she tried to cater to everyone but it is not a one size fits all situation,” (Student 2)
Another area that students felt needed improvement was the placement program which is led by Dr. Jennie Carr. BC Voice reached out for a comment, but did not hear back from her.
BC voice will amend the story to include her comments when she responds to our inquiry.
This article was written to start a conversation between the TEP faculty and students about how to better fit everybody’s needs. While no program will ever be perfect, it is a good start to a much needed conversation.
