USC Guiding Teacher
Overview
As a Guiding Teacher, I collaborate closely with pre-service teachers in my classroom throughout the school year. Each student teacher observes and teaches for 3 months, and is required to plan, teach, and reflect on lessons that they have implemented.
My Role as USC Guiding Teacher
My student teacher and I discuss lesson plans, discuss teaching philosophies, and evaluate classroom procedures and management. More specifically, we engage in pre-planning conferences where we discuss ideas about a particular concept to help guide the student teacher in his/her lesson planning. After each lesson, we exchange feedback based on our observations, and discuss what can be done to improve the lesson for future students.
What I Have Learned
As a teacher, I constantly reflect back on my classroom experiences to improve upon my lessons. This includes holding constructive conversations to receive advice from colleagues, and ongoing refinements to ensure best practices. The roles I take on as a guiding teacher has helped support this reflection process. Although it is my responsibility to observe my student teachers and provide them with feedback, their observations of my lessons are just as important. Through reflection and exchanging ideas, they have helped me broaden my teaching scope. We offer each other various strategies that are inherited into our lesson plans, and our dialogue also helps us identify the good from the bad. As a result, our lessons are revised for our students in the following year.
Additionally, this experience has helped me to become a more democratic guiding teacher. While my own personal teaching experiences have helped shape who I am as an educator, I have learned that using various collaboration techniques and continuous dialogue will support my student teachers in developing their own teaching philosophies. My role as guiding teacher has helped me to view leadership as a vehicle to influence others on how to become the best version of themselves. This is not done in vain, but in hopes of affecting the students they will eventually teach.
CPSEL Connection
Standard 5 - Modeling a personal code of ethics and developing professional leadership capacity.
5.7 - Reflect on personal leadership practices and recognize their impact and influence on the performance of others.
Standard 6 - Understanding, responding to, and influencing the larger political, social, economic, legal, and cultural context.
6.6 - View oneself as a leader of a team and also as a member of a larger team.
