Tips for Practicum

Teaching practicum - what a wild time of life. Julia and I both lived together while we were doing our short practicum (5-week) and long practicum (8-week),  and for the long one, we were actually in the same school along with two other teacher candidates, who were also friends of ours. It was so great to have that support for such a stressful time of life! Also, misery loves company, right? I think each of us cried in the staff room at least twice, and I remember one time stay up until 2am making a To Kill a Mockingbird trivia game, only to wake up at 5am to finish up before getting ready for school. I am definitely thankful that those days are behind me!

All that said, practicum really is an exciting time, where you can finally take all that theory and give it a go in front of a set of real students. You get a chance to really see how schools run; to meet educators and see how they run their classrooms, tackle challenges, and inspire their students; and to get creative and try out the ideas that have probably been building up in your mind as you go through your own classes while learning to become a teacher.

Our hope is that you can take some of the lessons that we learned on practicum (and since then too!) so that you will have the most enjoyable experience with your students, and feel a bit more comfortable about this amazing career you're about to begin.

Here are the biggest things we have learned from our practicum experiences:

1. Get to know people!

If you were lucky like us, you may have other teacher candidates in the building. As I said earlier, this can be a great source of support. You can bounce ideas off of each other, empathize with each other on the challenges, and have a buddy to have lunch with. 

This is all great, but don't stop there! Make sure you take the opportunity to get to know as many people in the building as you can: administrators, office staff, teachers, education assistants, custodial staff... Not only will it give you a much more well-rounded experience, but you will undoubtedly learn a whole lot more and feel comfortable reaching out if you need help (a student spilled their smoothie all over the classroom floor? No problem! You and the custodian are pals!). 

Find yourself in the copy room with someone you haven't met yet? Introduce yourself! Don't be shy! You might feel awkward, but teachers are used to having teacher candidates in the building, and most are very welcoming, in my experience. 

Another thing to consider is that it's entirely possible that in the future you could end up working at the school where you did your practicum, and let me tell you, it's so much easier to start working at a school if there are a few familiar faces working there.

2. Observe as many teachers as you can.

This is related to tip number one, but is specifically geared around teaching staff. I remember on practicum feeling so uncomfortable asking teachers who weren't my mentor teacher if I could watch them teach. Sometimes they clearly felt uncomfortable too, but almost always they would say yes. We can tell you after nine years of teaching (each!) that there really is no other time that you will be able to capitalize on an opportunity to gain such valuable experience like this. Take advantage of it! 

Check out a different subject area or grade level than you're used to. Spend some time in the different learning services classrooms if that applies to your school. One of the schools where I did my practicum had a class that was meant for students with more externalizing behaviours, and it ended up being my favourite class to observe. I truly think this is what led to my interest in alternate education, which ultimately led me to my dream job as a school counsellor. I may not have discovered this passion if I had not ventured out of my comfort zone and observed in these classrooms! Maybe you'll discover a passion for special ed, or that you really prefer working with grade 12s instead of grade 8s - you probably won't know for sure until you try.

You might feel comfortable with your mentor teacher because you spend the most time in his or her classroom, but by venturing out into other classrooms, we guarantee you will learn SO much more. Different teachers will have completely different styles for everything from classroom management to cell phone policies (school by school, of course) to ways they review for assessments to how much homework they give... it really is endless. Take the opportunity to watch, take notes (see tip #3) and ask all the questions you probably have in your head as a practicum teacher. Ask about "what if" scenarios! You are in the school to learn, so try to make it as meaningful as you can.

You may feel like you've narrowed down your teaching style, or you may have no idea, but if you want to see a variety of styles, personalities, and policies, there really is no better way than getting into as many classrooms as you can. Once you're in there, don't forget to ask them if you can have an extra copy of any resources they might be using (more on this in tip #4).

3. Journal

I'm not talking "dear diary" or starting up a blog that you have to post in every day, but I do recommend that you take some notes in whatever way makes sense to you, especially once you start getting into those other teachers' classrooms. It doesn't have to be formally written, but take a bit of time to jot down what you observed. What worked or didn't work? Who do you feel has an effective (or ineffective) teaching style and why do you think that is? What ideas did you see that you might want to implement or make your own? What, from the day, are you going to take with you, and what are you going to leave behind?

Maybe you never come back to these notes again, but I find that if I don't write ideas down, they are way more likely to disappear behind the thousands of other things I'm juggling in my brain every day as an educator. I wish that I had done more of this in my practicum because I think it would be really interesting to go back now and see what parts really stuck for me, and if I've implemented some of the great ideas I saw while doing my own practicum.

4. Do not reinvent the wheel!

Like I said, I remember staying up until 2am trying to create a trivia game, only to get up at 5am to finish up and get ready for the day. This was not an isolated occurrence during my practicum, or even during my early years of teaching. I hear this all the time from new teachers! They want to start from scratch creating all of their resources for their classes. Hello Burn Out City! 

Maybe they aren't feeling inspired from resources they have collected, or maybe they are scared to use things that they aren't 100% comfortable with because they did not make the resources themselves (this definitely applied to me more often than I would like to admit). 

If I had a resource from someone else that had reading questions, for example, and I didn't know the answers to all the questions, or felt like I wasn't totally comfortable with the material, I would rather spend hours re-doing the entire assignment for myself than to go through the experience of having to show vulnerability with my students by just admitting I might not have all the answers!

This is a practice. That said, your mentor teacher likely has a lot of resources and ideas that he or she can share with you, as do the other teachers that you will hopefully be observing! Take them up on this! Become a little collector! You can always purge your collection later once you've started teaching and realize what works for your personal style.

In addition to collecting from your placement school, if you haven't yet, get yourself acquainted with Pinterest (yes, it is alive and well!) and Teachers Pay Teachers. Prepare to have your mind blown by how many resources are out there for every subject and grade level.

Teachers Pay Teachers is a service where teachers can upload resources that they have created and offer them to other teachers to purchase (there are lots of freebies too). The nice thing about this is many of the resources are tried and true in the classroom! Lots of them come with answer keys, and many of them have reviews from other teachers who have tried the resources out as well.

There is everything from clipart and short "bell ringer" type activities to full year curriculum and materials to teach an entire course. They offer everything from pre-k to adult education, including homeschool and virtual resources, in most subject areas. It really is incredible. Check it out, download some freebies, and see how long it takes before you're hooked.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't create any of your own resources. Finding your own style and learning how to create from scratch is an important part of this, but it's not the only way. You are not automatically a better teacher just because you burnt yourself out creating your entire curriculum from scratch, and you're not a lesser teacher because you found a killer resource online that you want to use with your students.

Julia and I have our own Teachers Pay Teachers store, Earning a Learning, where we are building our own little library of mostly high school English resources. Check it out if that's your subject area!

5. Take it day by day.

This is probably the most important piece of advice I can offer. As a practicum teacher, there are so many things you will likely be juggling. You may feel overwhelmed and out of your depth. I remember my first practicum, I was teaching To Kill a Mockingbird to grade 9 students, and I literally had never read the book before (embarrassing for an English geek, I know). I just made sure to be a chapter or two ahead of where the kids were supposed to be, and honestly it was fine. Do I wish I had read the whole novel ahead of time? Of course. Did I manage anyway? Yes.

If you try to do everything and cover everything, you will get overwhelmed, and you may burn out. It's okay to just focus on one day at a time: what do you need to cover in this one day, and how can your mentor teacher support you? That's what he is or she is there for.

The last mini suggestion that I would offer is to let yourself take risks and make mistakes. I would suggest asking your mentor teacher not to automatically jump in if classroom management gets out of hand, for example (unless there's a safety concern or something like that). You need to learn how to manage these things and what your own style is for dealing with challenges. If your mentor teacher jumps in every time you feel stuck, once you're teaching on your own, you won't have your own strategies and you'll have to start from scratch. Instead, give it a go on your own and then ask your mentor teacher for feedback afterwards, journal about it (tip #3!), and adjust how you deal with things, if necessary, in the future.

Practicum will probably feel challenging at times, but it is also so rewarding. Those days where you get into your car at the end of the day after nailing a lesson and seeing your students have their "lightbulb moments"? This is why we got into the profession in the first place, right??

You've got this!