Teaching the Newest Members of the Family to Teach: Whose Responsibility?

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

for and with them as they face problems. we are often frustrated by the limitations of what we can do. We untangle bureaucratic webs in the paths of their completion of university requirements, close gaps in knowledge and theory, observe and evaluate a few lessons, and offer empathy and suggestions for solving those problems they choose to share with us. But, as John Goodlad in Teachers for Our Nation's Schools (1990) confirms, the influence of the university supervisor is limited. The student teachers surveyed by Goodlad ranked university supervisors ninth out of ten groups who they believed had affected their values and beliefs (248). Not surprisingly, the most influential were their cooperating teachers. Similarly, university supervisor Mary Ann Tighe's student teachers reported that their cooperating teachers' practices and procedures were the number one influence on their own developing classroom practices (1991, 232). We are humbled but not surprised by this documentation that not we, but the cooperating teachers with whom our students are placed, will most affect their metamorphosis to competent English teachers. After all, it is with their cooperating teachers that student teachers spend most of their time during the internship period. The cooperating teacher is the student teacher's primary model, mentor, and colleague. But our recognition and acceptance of this fact does not lessen our concern for nor our commitment