Hi, I’m Patti Brosnan I’m here to welcome you to begin your journey through this course with me. As an educator I’m all about learning. I worked as the director of a statewide mathematics coaching program where we spent all of our time engaging in trying to figure out ways to figure out how kids learn. In this model our coaches and our teachers work together they plan together they taught together and they focused on learning. With this laser focus on learning our students did very well. In fact, many good things happened. Several of our schools over the past 10 years came from academic emergency to excellent in three years not bad Also in my work, I work with our pre-service teacher preparation program in this program i spent many years observing field experiences for our interns were out and the field during student teaching many times in the traditional model the interns would be sitting in the back of the classroom sometimes this would go on for weeks, then after weeks past they would be allowed to teach a lesson and they would build upon the number of lessons they would teach until they took over a full load. It was expected that not only would they do everything the teacher does but they would do it alone and they would have to be successful and they would be expected to be totally prepared to teach the following year. To me thinking about the learning of on the interns part I didn’t think that a lot of learning occurred in that first part of the student teaching so this gave me pause so about five years ago what we did is we took our learnings from the mathematics coaching program and we implemented them in the pre-service program so here when we had the coach and the teacher working together side by side co planning co-teaching it wasn’t a major leap to take a mentor and an intern and adjust how they operated to get them to be co-teachers where they co-plan and co-taught we call this model the co-planning and co-teaching apprenticeship model for learning. The first day of school the mentor introduces the intern as their co-teacher this sets the stage for them to Coplan co-teach and focus on learning. Again, with this level of learning focus many good things happened in fact all of the teachers who have worked on this co planning and co-teaching model all of them say they will never go back to the traditional model of student teaching. Now it’s your turn. Try this, test it out, see how things work for you. Enjoy.
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