Culture
Those Who Teach, Learn
In a Kentucky suburb, student teachers are embedded in a public elementary school, helping them bond with kids and get real-time feedback while lightening the load for veteran teachers.
College lectures on pedagogy and early literacy techniques were helpful to Elena Humpert, but it wasn’t until she spent nearly all of her week in an elementary school classroom that she knew what it meant to be a teacher.
Humpert, a 21-year-old Northern Kentucky University student, spent most of her school weeks this past fall at Florence Elementary School, a Title I public school in Florence, Kentucky, near Cincinnati. Her day-to-day centered less on debating the merits of childhood benchmark tests and more on convincing antsy second-graders to sit still long enough to learn addition.