3 of 5: Short Essay Answers: Student Teaching Expectations

The most that any prospective teacher can ask of the student teaching experience is to get meaningful instructional experience, undergoing the intense highs and lows of the daily grind of both planning and executing lessons, in a supported environment that allows for learning experiences, growth, and indeed some mistakes. To be truly involved in instruction, and to take meaningful responsibility for student learning on a day-to-day basis, are the motivating elements here.
As I’ve progressed through my methods classes and my observational experiences, each seems to have encouraged me to dive deeper and deeper into the experience of teaching secondary English, what it means, and where its challenges and moments of joy can be found. I seek a student teaching experience that allows me to both plan and execute instruction, as well as assessing student learning, in a supportive environment. In particular, although I understand that it may not be totally feasible, I would like to be given the opportunity to write and enact lesson plans as routinely as possible. I understand that mentor teachers may have very specific plans about how they want their classrooms structured, but I also believe that an elemental practice point for student teaching is in planning instruction, and concurrently, seeing how those plans work out, both in terms of student motivation, behavior, and in formal and informal assessments. This, to me, is the primary purpose of the student-teaching experience. It's therefore my earnest hope that I will be placed with someone who will allow me to write and enact lesson plans of my own regularly, as opposed to once or twice a semester, and while giving an important critical eye, will also allow me to instruct creatively, in keeping with at least some of my own ideas.
Furthermore, I hope to find out if any of my occasionally high-falutin' ideals about trying to develop critical and empowered citizens can be translated directly into a day-to-day instructional experience. My pedagogical and educational classes have given me a terrific sense of philosophical underpinning in my quest to develop highly empowered democratic citizens, but I feel that until I've experienced those day-to-day rigors, I cannot really understand how practical this background, meta-level thinking is, nor what it accomplishes for me in the classroom. So for me, there is a certain experiment in-itself to this experience. I want to know what works, and what doesn’t work, instructionally, and why. Finally, although I think of myself as a sort of natural teacher, with a good understanding of the differentiated instructional techniques I want to use, I'm curious to test myself against a full-on classroom experience, one that truly gets me into the life of an everyday high school English teacher. I want to see if I can measure up to my own standards, according to my own goals, and my own particular philosophy, and above all, if I can actually help students learn. I believe the answer provisionally to be yes, here, but I want to know it for sure. This is where student teaching comes in.