Student Teachers Matter: The Impact of Student Teachers on Elementary-Aged Children in a Professional Development School

Teacher Education Quarterly, Spring 2004 by Fisher, Douglas, Frey, Nancy, Farnan, Nancy

As one of the kindergarten teachers said, "Oh, heavens no, don't send me any more adults for my room! I have parent volunteers coming out my ears. I like these student teachers because they understand literacy development and can make instructional decisions themselves. Sure, I need to guide them, but I'm happy to do that. You never know, one of them could be hired to be the first grade teacher that these students go to next year!"

One of the first grade teachers suggested that her commitment to the student teachers, and her trust that they could work with students, was important. "Sure, I like having lots of people in my classroom - it's an open place. But that isn't why achievement went up in my class. The volunteers who come in here are great people, and they do a lot of work for me - stapling, cutting, filing, copying, recording grades, creating bulletin boards, you know. I really don't want them working with kids. These student teachers, though, I really trust. From the first week, I wanted them working with students - small groups at first, not the whole class. But that kind of extra adult is the reason that we're better, I think anyway."

Our classroom observations confirmed these reports as well. We observed several adult volunteers as well as high school student mentors from a local high school. However, these individuals were rarely engaged with students. While they clearly completed important tasks for the teachers and probably reduced the amount of time teachers worked after school or at home, they likely had less of an impact on student achievement. The student teachers, however, were engaged with students from their first week. They understood how to provide guided reading and math instruction, conduct literacy assessments such as running records, miscue analyses, and developmental spelling inventories, engage groups of students in listening to read alouds.

Course Assignments

The third most common theme to emerge from the question on an increase in student achievement focused on the course assignments in the student teachers' methods courses. The classroom teachers were acutely aware that the student teachers had several assignments to complete that required their access to students. These assignments required the student teachers to assess students' current level of performance and then design instructional plans to improve that performance. Teachers commented on several of the assignments and their impact on student achievement as well as the impact these assignments would have on the student teachers' future teaching style.

For example, one of the first grade teachers was most impressed with the library assignment. Student teachers had to assess the library knowledge of a group of students. The student teachers were to create the assessment tool, administer the tool, and then create a lesson from the assessment information. The student teachers in her class created an instrument that required students to identify authors, book titles, and words from a list of real and not-real entries. After identifying the real authors and book titles, they had to find one example of each in the school library. Based on the assessment data, the student teachers decided that they wanted to focus more time during the read aloud on the title and author.