Abstract:

In the United States it has become increasingly challenging, due to a host of reasons inclusive of testing and accountability, to find student teacher placements in classrooms. In the rural context of our university, we especially note the stress we place on the school system as we try to find mentors and classrooms for all the student teachers from our many programs. In order to identify possible ways to address this stressor, it was decided to pilot the pairing of student teachers in a classroom to see if the approach might be workable for students and mentors, while also alleviating some of the pressure on the local school system. Initially, it was challenging to find students willing to pair up as well as a mentor teacher willing to take on a pair of student teachers. Students had concerns about ownership of the experience if they were paired and teachers worried about the additional responsibility of mentoring not one, but two future teachers. Ultimately, one volunteer pair was matched with a mentor teacher for the semester. During interviews, concerns that were registered at the start of the placement were discussed as well as the approaches taken by the mentor to address each student teacher’s sense of ownership and individual teaching experience. Through interviews and observations what was consistently identified was that both the mentor and the student teachers saw value added for the children in the classroom. The mentor teacher described the added value as “more eyes on” and for her this was the biggest selling point of a paired placement. In addition, while this outcome seems like it should be an obvious advantage to having an extra professional in the classroom, it is clearly worth highlighting the benefit-to-cost outcome when seeking paired placements from administrators and potential mentor teachers. This paper will explore benefits and challenges of paired placement from the perspective of the participants and researchers and further illustrate the value added as identified by the participants.

Keywords:

Preservice teachers, paired teaching, placement needs, value added.