SOLSC #7: What does a new teacher need to learn?

I am participating in the
March 2018 Slice of Life Story Challenge (SOLSC).
All participants are writing about one moment, one part of their day, every day for thirty-one days.

A big thank you to Two Writing Teachers for providing this unique opportunity

for teacher-writers to share and reflect.

My school is a Teaching Residency school, where most classrooms are led by a lead teacher (or "master teacher," not a term I'm particularly excited about) and a Teaching Resident (a novice teacher). Teaching Residents work alongside their leads for an entire school year, while simultaneously taking evening classes towards their Masters in Teaching, and then they move on to be the "teacher of record" in a classroom of their very own next year. It is an intensive process! A couple times during the school year, we have "Resident swaps," where we assign Residents to work in a different age classroom, so that they might have some exposure to a different grade level. We are a community of teacher learners, so it is good to mix things up and hear everyone's reflections afterwards.

This week, we had a Resident from the kindergarten classroom come to our classroom for the day and my Resident went to the kindergarten classroom. I explained the "teacher swap" to the preschoolers, and I asked them - What should we teach Mr. Smith [the Teaching Resident who was visiting our room for the day]? Without a moment's hesitation, they rattled off the following possibilities:

- karate
- how to make jewelry
- how to stretch
- the song, "Three Little Birds"
- how to do gymnastics
- how to make play dough
- arts and crafts
- how to make gak

It is delightful to me that this is their school world - nothing but fun, fun, fun! We had a great time with Mr. Smith and I think he enjoyed his day with us immensely.