Student Teaching Reflection

Cole Urban

For my student teaching experience, I had the opportunity to experience two different
fifth-grade classrooms over the course of two semesters. During this time, I had the opportunity
to collaborate with different teachers and work on different subject areas. I got to see how both
teachers handled situations and how they managed their classrooms. On one hand, one
teacher had a much more relaxed and friendly manner. On the other hand, the other teacher
had a much more serious tone when speaking and was very firm with students. I feel like I
learned a lot from both of them and would like to be somewhere in the middle. I want to be calm
and friendly like one of my cooperating teachers, but I also want to be firm. This will allow me to
build relationships with students and help me establish mutual respect with students. This will
then lead to a positive learning environment where students can do their best learning.

However, I believe the biggest takeaway from my student teaching experience was how
important and impactful building relationships with students could be. We started working on
building relationships with students right away during our first semester, but because 5th grade
rotated classrooms throughout the day, I only really got to see our homeroom class for an
extended amount of time each day. This led to a much easier time building relationships with
these students in particular but also made it harder to build relationships with the other classes.
This led me to realize that having relationships with students allows for a much more relaxed
and positive classroom environment where both students and teachers can make jokes and try
new things, even if they fail. However, when I switched to the other classroom, it felt like a very
large shift in tone. I hadn’t had as much of an opportunity to get to know those students as
much, so it was much more difficult to relate the lessons to them.

Overall, I loved my student teaching experience. I got to work with two great cooperating
teachers, as well as, a bunch of great students. I got to see various teaching styles and
methods used within the classroom. I can’t wait to apply what I have learned to a classroom of
my own one day.