Student Teaching Survival Guide

Today’s survival guide is all about how to survive your internship or student teaching, which ever your university may call it. I absolutely loved my internship, so much so that I took my first teaching job at the same school, in the same classroom, teaching the same classes – with different students of course. These are my tips and tricks for what made my internship successful and enjoyable!

#1 Treat Every day Like A Job Interview

You never know when a job will become available for you at your school site. For me this happened to fall on my last day of my internship, two days before graduation. Treating each day like a job interview is going to make you their first choice for this job. Come in everyday prepared, excited, and ready to go. You want to put your best foot forward each day, and having this mindset was something that helped me stay positive and excited to show up each day.

#2 Treat Each Day Like A New Day

You are learning how to teach, so you are going to have good days and bad days. Remember all of the good days and celebrate those days. But when you have a bad day, go home and relax and put it out of your mind. You want to show up the next day like nothing ever happened. If you hold onto a grudge of the bad days, it is only going to hurt your teaching which in turn is a disservice to your students.

#3 Plan Plan Plan

By far the biggest thing that kept me stress free was that I planned a week ahead the entire way through my internship. I used our pacing guide to know what was coming up and planned my little heart away. I would leave on Friday and know that I have all my lesson plans planned, approved, keys made, and ready to go for the entire next week. This allowed me to really take a break over the weekend and enjoy myself or work on my edTPA. This is something that I have carried with me from my internship into my teaching career.

#4 You Won’t Know Every Answer

At the end of the day, learning to teach is a difficult thing to do. No matter how much you anticipate what your students are going to struggle with and the questions they are going to ask, there will always be that one student who asks a question you didn’t anticipate. It is okay to say, “You know I don’t know the answer to that, so let me look it up and I’ll get back to you tomorrow.” This is a much better response than giving an answer filled with nonsense just to make it look like you know everything.

#5 Every Lesson Won’t Be Perfect

You may plan this awesome lesson that involves your students discovering a rule in math, or explaining why something works in science, or just having fun with art and colors. This lesson may go perfectly as planned and be amazing. Or it can completely flop. If it goes amazing, that’s awesome. If it flops, that is okay too. Every lesson won’t go perfectly and there is always tomorrow to fix whatever went wrong. Every day is a new day, and every day is a great day to try something new and step outside your comfort zone.

#6 Ask Questions

If you aren’t sure how to handle a situation that happened in the classroom, ask your clinical teacher (cooperating teacher). They are there to support you and to give you advice when you need it. The same goes for if you aren’t sure where to start planning a lesson. Ask what they have done in the past and what they would do differently. Asking them what they have done will give you some type of guideline or base to go off of.

#7 Make Lessons You Are Proud Of

You are going to put a lot of time and effort into the lesson plans you create in your internship. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the main being you are still figuring out what to do and how to create lesson plans. No matter how long it takes you to create a lesson plan or how many times you start over, always make something you are proud of. If you are proud of your lesson, you will be excited to teach it. And if it ends up being a great lesson, you won’t need to make another for that topic until you aren’t happy with the one you just made. Every lesson I made in my internship, I ended up using during my first year of teaching with a very small amount of adjustments made to it. It made all the hard work worth it in the end.

#8 Have Fun

You have to have fun in your internship. You are finally doing what you have dreamed of doing for a long time, and that’s teaching. So have fun and enjoy doing what you have always wanted to do. Your internship is going to be a long journey full of all sorts of ups and downs, so that more fun you have the happier you will be. This will all make your internship that much more enjoyable and memorable.