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Meredith Peters’ Student Teaching Experience
For my student teaching experience, I spent half of my experience in a local 1st-grade elementary classroom, and the second half of my experience in a 2nd-grade classroom in an international school in Luxembourg, a very small country in Europe. While both were very valuable and influential experiences, I cannot say that I can draw many similarities between the two.
I started the first half of my student teaching experience in a public elementary school close to where I grew up. For all my life, I had always been the student in the classroom, and it was very interesting to have the roles reversed for once. In this school district, the teachers had a planned-out curriculum that they were to follow each week. They were given the activities, the books, and even the questions they were to ask while reading aloud the books. With reading and writing, the teachers could not be creative with what they were teaching because it was all planned for them, and it was strictly enforced. With math, they had much more freedom to decide how they were going to teach. They had a curriculum map that they had to follow which
laid out what topic they were to teach each week, but they got to choose how they would teach it. While all the structure made planning very easy for the teachers, it was so strict that they had limited ability to do something that they wanted to do, or thought would be fun for the kids.
In my American school, technology was also highly incorporated into the school day. Each student had a laptop that they would use daily to complete lessons or play educational games. The students were highly efficient on them as well. They had figured out how to use the voice-to-text feature to be able to look up different things on their computers. Every morning their morning calendar was done on a smart board (basically a TV-sized iPad), oftentimes lessons were introduced with videos found on YouTube, and read-aloud videos for books were also played on the smart board.
The second half of my student teaching experience took place in an international school in Luxembourg. Luxembourg is a tiny country; you can drive from one end of the country to the other in less than an hour. Since the country was so small, there were a lot of students in my class who lived in France or Belgium and would drive into the country to go to school each day. I found that while I was in Europe most people spoke French, and because of this, students could take 2 different pathways of learning. They could do the French path where they were taught all day in French by a French teacher, or they could do the English pathway where they learned all day in English by a teacher who spoke fluently. I was in an English pathway classroom.
The schedule that the students followed was unlike anything I had seen before. In America, the students followed the same schedule every day. In Luxembourg, the students had a different schedule each day. Some days they would have music, art, and gym all in one day, and other days they would only learn math and language arts, other days they would do just language arts and have their second language class. Second language class was another thing I found so interesting about teaching in Luxembourg. Most days of the week, they went to their second language class where for about 30 minutes to an hour each day they would learn a second language chosen by their parents. Students would split up into different classes such as
German, French, English, and Portuguese. On top of that, students were also required to take one hour of Luxembourgish each week as well. Many of my students spoke 4+ languages fluently. It was quite humbling when they would ask what languages I spoke, and I said only English. The students also had an hour of lunch and 3 different breaks, or recesses built into their schedule each day which is unheard of in America. Students often get 40-50 minutes of lunch and recess combined in America. In Luxembourg, they also had a half day on Friday and would get out at noon instead of 3:45 PM.
In Luxembourg, the teachers had so much more freedom to plan what they wanted and were given ample time to do so. My teacher had half days on Tuesdays and Thursdays which were her planning time. She would come and teach in the morning and then leave at lunch for her planning time and her class would be taken over by a different teacher to teach art, gym, or music for the rest of the day. In America, the teachers are given strict standards that they are to abide by and meet by the end of the school year. In Luxembourg, the teachers keep their group of students for 2 years and are told, “The students must be at X point by the end of the two years, how you get there is up to you.” Since they had so much freedom, we spent a lot of time doing more enjoyable activities for the students where they could be creative. The teacher was also able to make changes to their schedule at any point. If they felt like their kids needed more time to understand fractions, they would wipe away the plans for the rest of the week to keep working on fractions, whereas in America the teachers are to follow such a strict schedule that they must move on no matter what and try to fit in extra interventions whenever they have extra time.
I was so fortunate to have such amazing experiences in both schools. I had wonderful kids and mentors who were so imperative to becoming the teacher I am today. While teaching and school itself has changed so much since I was in school, students and teachers still show up ever day excited to teach and learn.
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