Into the Classroom: A Practical Guide for Starting Student Teaching

Chapter 16: Tensions of Practice Teaching

Chapter 16 Tensions of Practice Teaching All student teachers, interns, and teacher candidates experience tensions during their school placements. In fact, the initial year of teaching via your internship or student teaching is replete with tensions. The tensions come with the combination of you—your personality, your prior classroom experiences, your concept of yourself as a teacher—mixed with your teaching context—school placement, cooperating teacher, and university affiliation. These tensions often create anxiety, which distracts student teachers from their primary tasks of learning to teach and becoming a teacher. Such tensions also can lead to preoccupation and in some cases sleeplessness. Although this type of tension may not be resolvable during your first year of teaching, recognizing the tension and acknowledging it as a source of anxiety will prevent you from spending too much emotional energy thinking about it, coping with it, or trying to resolve it. By identifying tensions common to practice teaching and giving examples of how these tensions manifest themselves, I hope to relieve some of your anxiety, thus proving the axiom, “awareness is half the battle.” Deborah Britzman (2003), in her book Practice Makes Practice, identifies tensions “between knowing and being, thought and action, theory and practice , knowledge and experience, the technical and the existential, the objective and the subjective” (26). Britzman writes, the delicate position in the classroom allows insight into the struggle of voice in both teaching and learning. Marginally situated in two worlds, the student teacher as part student and part teacher has the dual struggle of educating others while being educated. Consequently, student teachers appropriate different voices in the attempt to speak for themselves yet all the while act in a largely inherited and constraining context. This struggle characterizes the tensions between being and becoming a teacher as student teachers draw from their past and present in the process of coming to know. (36) 142 Becoming the Teacher You Want to Be Britzmandescribesmanycontradictionsofteachingandlearning.Iamgoingto focusontwothatconfronteverystudentteacher,intern,andteachercandidate. The First Tension: Becoming the Teacher I Want to Be vs. Fitting In One of the largest tensions of student teaching is the conflicting realities of becoming the teacher you imagine you want to become and “fitting in,” not only with the culture of the school but also the expectations of your cooperating teacher. All of us carry images of the teacher we want to be (and some images of the teacher we donotwantto be).Thisinternalimageandthedesiretobecome that teacher often come directly into conflict with becoming the teacher that others—faculty and administration at your school placement—expect you to be. When the two conflicting conceptions of “teacher” simultaneously confront the new teachers, they experience anxiety, discomfort, or pain. The new teacher must choose whether to acquiesce, rebel, negotiate, compromise, and so forth. Here are some comments from teacher candidates in the midst of this tension during the early weeks of their school placements for practice teaching: • My supervising teacher gives worksheets all the time. I don’t want to teach with worksheets. • I want to wear jeans and a t-shirt, but my university supervisor told me I have to wear a shirt and tie. • I want the kids to call me Jim, but the principal told me I have to go by Mr. Smith. I made my students read and answer questions from the book today. I thought I’d never do that, and here it is only the second week of my block teaching and I’m giving blah assignments. As the year progresses, the same tension often appear around instruction and classroom management. Teacher candidates comment: • My cooperating teacher told me to lead discussions rather than do hands-on activities. She said students learn just as much from discussion , but I think she doesn’t like the noise and the desks moved around. • I had the students in learning groups; they were talking and learning . The principal walked in and I could tell she did not like the conversation. One of the conflicts common to student teachers is how much noise the student teacher is willing to tolerate versus that level the cooperating teacher will tolerate. The noise question is both an instructional and classroom man- Tensions of Practice Teaching 143 agement issue. It has a lot to do with older and newer philosophies of teaching . In the previous century (especially 1950–1999) learning was thought of as an individual endeavor. Now, we recognize the benefits of people learning...