K12
Wendy Anderson talks about the disconnect between the undergraduate experience and the teaching reality
A video clip where Wendy Anderson discusses the often jarring transition new teachers experience when moving from the educator preparation program to leading their own classroom and how important it is to develop partnerships with universities and colleges to achieve balance.
Wendy Anderson:
We see some new teachers that are coming in with a disconnection between the training or the preparation they’ve received in their undergraduate experiences and the realities of the job.
So one of the things that we’re seeing is I think this sort of idealistic concept that the students coming in are going to be excited, engaged, and ready to learn and on grade level, and when in reality, many of our students are not on grade level. They’ve experienced trauma, they are anxious about being there, and they don’t have the support at home that they need. So many times, all the wonderful lessons and the things that new teachers think that they have, they’re ready to go, and all of a sudden, you have to put that aside and I have to go back and teach prerequisite skills, and it sets them off balance at first. And so I think definitely a challenge that we face is developing partnerships with our universities and colleges in terms of, how can we achieve more of a balance between what’s happening academically at the university level and what’s more those realistic experiences that we have on the job?
