My First Teaching Experience

      During the summer of 2019, I did an internship with the Breakthrough Collaborative in Atlanta, GA. The internship was an 8-week program that consisted of 2 weeks of intensive training and 6 weeks of active instruction in the classroom. The program was designed to bridge the opportunity gap for underprivileged youth as well as prevent the summer slide, a phrase used to indicate the loss of learning that happens for students during the summer when their minds aren’t intentionally interacting with the material they learned in the year prior. It allows current college students to teach in their area of expertise. I was assigned to teach 8th grade English. I found myself to be very comfortable in this arena given that my on-campus job is as a tutor in the Center for Writing and Speaking. 

      The experience showed me the importance of creating a classroom culture prior to being able to effectively teach. I always noticed that, if students didn’t feel welcomed or supported on any given day, they were not likely to engage with the materials being presented. Because of that, I had to learn to read a room which is not an easy skill to have when you have an agenda and limited time. I learned to set a timer that would be monitored by a given student and then would just let them talk freely about how they felt while serving as a moderator to ensure that everyone felt heard and respected in the space. I would do the same thing when teaching content. If a group of students did not understand the content, I would switch to independent work and pull those students together to give them more personalized support. 

      I think that this experience gave me a lot of insight into what it takes to be an educator. On the other hand, it made me wonder why this same strategy is not utilized in a college setting. I have only had a few professors hold space after a traumatic event or even slow down the content if people don’t understand what is going on. I am unsure if this is true at other institutions, but I think it would be beneficial to students’ overall experience because it allows the students to be acknowledged as individual humans with emotions that deserve to be supported.