Student? Teacher? Both. ‘Zero regrets’ for first-time teachers in CMS during COVID

For years, Leah Rausch thought about becoming a teacher. As a child, she recalls, she would line her stuffed animals up in her bedroom, forming a makeshift classroom with her toy students.

After 17 years working in the restaurant industry, she returned to school to finish her undergraduate degree at UNC Charlotte. In March, as the coronavirus pandemic forced universities and K-12 schools to move learning online, she began to wonder if now was the right time to enter the field as everything seemed uncertain.

“After the shutdown March, we were approaching the end of the semester and I confided in (a professor),” she said. “I was like, ‘I don’t know what to do. I want to continue with education, but I just don’t know if it’s a good idea.’ And she said, ‘Nope, you need to do it, you need to get in the classroom as soon as possible.’”

So in May, Rausch began her graduate degree in teaching. Aspiring teachers in North Carolina are required to spend 16 weeks in a classroom, observing a veteran teacher before leading their own classes. That requirement for teacher certification hasn’t changed as a result of the coronavirus.

Student teachers like Rausch find themselves at the intersection of virtual teaching and virtual learning.

“I have absolutely zero regrets. There was definitely doubt, but I still feel like this is exactly where I’m supposed to be,” Rausch said.

Rausch is completing her student teaching in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, where she is teaching social studies in her middle school’s full-remote academy. She’s juggled lesson planning, teaching to little squares on Zoom and learning how to keep her students engaged online by asking big questions that prompt their critical thinking.

Tisha Greene, assistant dean for school and community partnerships at UNCC’s Cato College of Education, said that student teachers are supervised but eventually take on all the duties of a full-time educator.

While UNCC had not placed student teachers in online-only classrooms prior to the pandemic, Greene said, most of this year’s placements are getting at least some experience teaching virtually. Some have been placed in full-remote assignments, while others are following the more-experienced teacher through hybrid or in-person schedules.

“We had to scramble to make sure we were supporting our candidates,” Greene said. “I was impressed with how well they managed the virtual environment. When you get lemons you make lemonade, and our student teachers and mentor teachers did that.”

New learning methods

In a normal school year, candidates spend weeks intensely observing veteran teachers in the classroom before taking over their own lessons. That has been limited by the pandemic, even in virtual only classrooms, as some districts have not let candidates sit in to observe Zoom lessons. Paul Fitchett, assistant dean of teaching and innovation at UNCC, said that the faculty had to work creatively to come up with new methods to teach those same skills.

One example, Fitchett said, was to have students study videos of teachers and discuss the practices the shown in the clip. Then, candidates are asked to put that into practice, teaching a class where their peers pretend to be students in a classroom. Each student is even assigned a personality, to make the assignment as realistic as possible.

Fitchett said that while it was a not an “apples to apples” comparison, the goal is still to give candidates practice-based teaching experiences before they set foot in the classroom.

Limited to mostly virtual methods, like these tape reviews, student teachers have gained some perspective on what their own pupils will face with online classes. For the upcoming months, student teaching will likely include some online component.

“Faculty and students are realizing how complex teaching is,” Fitchett said. “We’re able to maintain the complexity of what teaching is, but the pandemic has also forced us as teacher educators to be responsive to the instructional technology needs.”

For Michelle Stephan, an mathematics education professor at UNCC, that’s meant having her students record videos of themselves teaching at home to get feedback, and pairing her undergraduate students with graduate students who are already teaching while obtaining their license. It also means scaling back online meetings where she can, to combat Zoom fatigue, and increasing flexibility on assignments and deadlines.

Still, despite their successes, Stephan and Fitchett said they worried some aspects of teaching could not be replicated entirely in an online environment. That includes classroom management and culturally responsive teaching, and Fitchett said the university has worked closely with partner districts to make sure candidates are still getting hands-on experience with teaching.

Each year, CMS hosts more than 200 student teachers in the district’s classrooms, and most come from UNCC. Kristen England, who oversees the student teaching program for CMS, said that the district had been in the process of making changes to its program, in partnership with the Belk Foundation, when the pandemic started.

Those changes include centralizing the placement process, expanding professional development opportunities and working to retain student teachers into the district full time. Since then, the district has increased its retention rate of student teachers from about 25% historically to 43% in the fall 2020 cohort, England said.

At Ballantyne Elementary School, principal Summer Rogers said that her student teachers quickly internalized the importance of all the non-instructional aspects of teaching, such as supporting a child’s emotional well-being and connecting with families.

“They truly got just a big picture worldview of teaching, and how it is truly about the whole child,” Rogers said. “We have to reach out students before we can teach them. I don’t think they would have gotten this experience in a typical student teaching experience.”

Still, there are some skills that are hard to teach and learn on a screen. Hailey Rhodes, who completed her student teaching at Ballantyne, recalled her first day in the classroom when CMS returned to in-person instruction in the fall. For the first time, her students could see more than just her face and hands. Instead of managing little faces in boxes on a screen, she had to command the attention of an entire room.

“Once we got into the classroom, I was like, ‘Oh, what do I do with my body... you’re a person, not a little square on the screen,’” Rhodes said. “But it made my heart so happy, to see the students as much as we were allowed to.”

Tiffany Hazen, Rhodes’ clinical educator, said she was proud of the growth Rhodes had shown over the year, as well as her resiliency in the face of challenges. On her first day teaching a lesson, Rhodes broke down in tears after and said felt like she had failed to teach her students anything.

But Hazen told her what mattered was how she responded to challenges and mistakes.

“She could have thrown in the towel, but instead we had a conversation about how she could get class participation up and all these sorts of things,” Hazen said. “Her literal growth in one day was night and day... I tell them, ‘I don’t care if you get it wrong ... How are you growing?’”

Since that lesson, Rhodes said she felt like she found her footing more and more with each subject she took over, until she was responsible for teaching entire days of elementary school. Since her student teaching ended, she has stayed on at Ballantyne as a teaching assistant with the hopes of a taking on a full-time teaching position as soon as one is available.

Rhodes said she doubted her decision to start her teaching career in the pandemic as she watched her classmates delay or drop out of her graduate program. But when her students passed a math test, a subject she had taken over teaching, she felt those doubts start to fade.

“It felt like, ‘Yeah, I taught them something,’” she said. “It really reassured me that I’m supposed to be here.”