My story as the Cooperating Teacher

At the beginning of 2012, I reflected on teachers being learners too – where teacher professional development practice lack scaffolding, showing of different strategies, involving self-directed and collaborative approaches ideas. Individual teachers are left to “get on with it”, whatever, “it” might be, considering that they are already not knowing what to start with. This time round, I was provided with the opportunity to recreate the purpose of development experience with one of the trainee teachers as her cooperating teacher.

Being a strong believer that the quality of professional development depends on the quality of collaborative relationship between the trainee teacher and myself, I set out to develop my collaborative work with her. We started off by developing an understanding of what a range of successful lessons is like, by selectively structuring her learning experience and giving her time to understand the issues in teaching. In this way, such experiences will provide her with a solid basis for good teaching. It is my belief that a training teacher or even a first year teacher who has successfully experienced a variety of lesson types, and has been given the opportunity to reflect upon them through focused discussion and collaboration with many teachers, rather than just solo teaching lots of lessons, is able to take on the “heavy” workload more easily because she understands what she is trying to do.

I hope that through this structured experiences, my trainee teacher’s learning will improve. Now I will look for evidence to put once and for all to the myth that teachers are “born and not made”. Of course, I recognize that some qualities of a good teacher may occur in some trainees and not in others, but my belief is still –  all teachers can be developed!