Negotiating Preparation and Practice: Student Teaching in the Middle

Abstract

Student teaching is the bridge between preparation for teaching and the beginning of a teaching career. All that has been previously theorized, discussed, imagined and observed either comes together or gets left behind as new teachers begin the development of their own personal teaching style through a day-to-day immersion in the realities of classroom life. The fit between preparation and actual teaching is never perfect; the most conscientiously prepared student teacher will find that a portion of the work of student teaching involves an ongoing accomodation of differences between the preparation for teaching and life in the classroom. In this article, the AA. consider the work of our own collaborative student teaching team composed of a student teacher, a classroom mentor, and a university mentor as they negotiated the less-than-perfect fit between teacher preparation and life in a middle school language arts classroom