Here I will reflected on ideal interpersonal relationships within the school, problems that they hope would not develop, and strategies for solving problems. The importance of maintaining positive relationships at school needs to be in the mind of every student teacher. Things may not always go smoothly, yet a professional should have some ideas on how to handle tricky situations.

Ideal relationships at school help make each day a pleasant day for everyone…teachers, students, support staff, administrators, and parents. Ideal relationships involve the exchange of kind words, good manners, teamwork, and positive attitudes. If such relationships are in place in the school setting, staff can work together in a supportive way to solve problems and to help each other. The staff would care about others and not just their own well-being. Lines of communication would be maintained. The entire staff of the school would work together for the good of the students and to sustain hardworking, dedicated employees. The students would be sure to thrive in such a positive, supportive environment. Furthermore, parents might be more apt to be involved in their child’s education if they felt welcomed and appreciated. This is a brief example of what some ideal relationships within the school setting; however, this is not always the reality.

While student teaching, problems between the pre-service teacher and administrator, support staff, students, colleagues, cooperating teacher, and/or faculty advisor can develop. For instance, one hopes that the issue of differing educational philosophies will not hurt a pre-service teacher; however, a student teacher’s philosophy may be subject to scrutiny, as s/he does not have the experience that other staff members might have. Another possible issue of contention is that many teachers deal with an enormous number of tasks and issues and often need to vent their frustrations.

Unfortunately, this negative energy may get a student teacher into trouble if s/he partakes in these conversations. Communication barriers may be another problem that can develop between support staff, the cooperating teacher, administrators, and so many more. Some people do not have interpersonal skills, and student teachers need to make sure that s/he does not prejudge based on a look. Additionally, one always hopes not to run into the staff member who just does not care anymore, as this can be harmful to all involved. Finally, not establishing effective classroom management techniques from the beginning with students is a problem that can develop, and one that teachers should avoid at all costs.

Several strategies can and should be implemented when solving problems. First, when dealing with administrators, support staff, colleagues, cooperating teachers, and faculty advisors, confrontations must not occur while a student teacher is emotional. Furthermore, as stated previously, many individuals will express their frustrations to others as a way to cool down. This should not occur in the workplace. The student teacher should ask to speak to the person privately. When solving problems, a student teacher should never use you statements. “You made me mad when…” should be “I felt upset when….” Numerous problems arise due to miscommunication. A student teacher should be willing to listen actively and to try to see the situation from the other person’s viewpoint.

When dealing with students, student teachers must first know the expectations and rules of their cooperating teacher. If a cooperating teacher gives permission to actively work through problems with students, a student teacher must maintain composure. Students can sense when a teacher is frustrated, and this will potentially create an explosive situation. The student teacher should talk to the student in private and try to see the problem from the perspective of the student. The student teacher should not be afraid to talk the problem over with his/her cooperating teacher, and when deemed appropriate, the student’s parents and/or the school counselor. Many times a fresh viewpoint provides a solution. If a student has a child study team, the child study team should be made aware of the problem, and depending on the severity of the problem, the administrator should also be notified.

This paper was an attempt to reflect on ideal interpersonal relationships within one’s school, problems that they hope will not develop, and strategies for solving problems. When dealing with other individuals, problems will occur. Humans are innately different and possess differing viewpoints and perspectives. This can and will lead to conflict. Everyone has an opinion of an ideal relationship, but an ideal relationship is different from a real relationship. When working with people, whether they are adults or children, a student teacher must pick his/her battles. Not all battles are meant to be fought, and not all battles will be won.

The battles worth fighting for are those with the goal to make both sides better for having fought and to create a win-win situation for all parties involved. A student teacher must remember that s/he is not only in the classroom to teach but to be taught. Student teachers should see problems as doorways to learning and growth and not as hurdles to be charged through and overcome.

Rebecca Schauffele: Teaching is my PASSION. I am fun-loving and really enjoy working with kids. Through my work, I hope to make a difference in the lives of youth and inspire them to dream big and work hard to reach their goals.

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While it is unlikely that teacher college and university training programs will change dramatically any time soon, there is no harm in speculating about what the curriculum should look like now. Subjects that are currently covered only in teacher inservice workshops, professional development seminars and education conferences, should be routinely included as a major focus of professional training for educators. When this type of practical training is left to be an optional add-on that must be sought out, located, and often paid for with a teacher’s own personal funds, it becomes far less likely that most teachers will ever update their skills. I know this is true because many participants of my popular Problem Student Problem-Solver Workshops tell me that they have to pay for their own training, beg for days off so they can attend, and sometimes even use vacation time or forfeit their pay when their school can’t or won’t fund the costs.

Putting aside those concerns for the moment, in an ideal world, what might teacher training programs cover beyond content and testing? Here are the top 5 critical things that teachers are never taught but may really need right now:

1. Give Teachers Basic Juvenile Mental Health Training

More and more students have serious mental health concerns yet most teachers don’t know a conduct disorder from an attachment disorder. That’s like not knowing the difference between arithmetic and spelling. When teachers don’t know basic mental health information, it creates the perfect conditions for safety concerns to simmer and boil throughout the school and in the classroom.

2. Offer Teachers Real-World Violence and Safety Training

Schools are more out of control than ever before. School shootings, gangs and bullies can pose enormous potential safety concerns yet few teacher training programs devote extensive course work to practical, preventative methods. Using character education– the current violence prevention method of choice today– to stem this type of violence is naive and ineffective. While character ed can work well with many students, it will always fail with some youngsters. With some populations, such as conduct disorders (who are an estimated 11-14% of students), empathy-based approaches like character ed will actually make the situation far worse. It is an approach better suited for Archie and Jughead, not the South Park kids.

3. Show Teachers How to Teach School Skills

Years ago, families reliably taught their offspring to show respect, arrive on time, dress appropriately, and to have an appreciation for the importance of school. Now, many families cannot or will not instill those beliefs and teach those skills. If families do not teach kids how to be students, then schools must perform this function. Until then, teachers are working with untrained, unmotivated students. Teachers need to be taught how to systematically train youngsters on all aspects of school functioning from punctuality to homework management, from how to raise their hands to how often to talk in class, and so on. Motivation should be given special attention, but typical contemporary teacher training includes almost no practical focus on that today.

4. Show Teachers How to Teach Coping Skills

Because families are more likely today than years ago to be fractured, abusive, troubled and otherwise impaired, teachers need to know how to manage the problems that result when family problems come to school with students. A special focus should be given to what methods work with school refusers, withdrawn kids, work refusers, depressed students, traumatized children, and students in crisis.

5. Show Teachers How to Teach Social Skills

If a student can’t sit in a chair, talk one at a time, or keep his hands to himself, it makes it almost impossible to teach that child academic content. Yet today’s teachers see dozens of socially maladjusted students each day. If parents cannot or will not train their offspring to have basic social skills, teachers must pick up the slack. A child who can sit in his chair, talk one at a time, and keep his hands to himself, is far more likely to be a teachable student. There are no shortcuts around the serious social skill deficiencies that educators cope with today. Until Susie can acquire at least minimal social skills, educating her may be impossible.

It is way past time to drag teacher training into the new millennium. If you are a teacher struggling to make sense out of your troubled, challenging students, the problem isn’t you. The problem is that your professional training fits students who walked your corridors a whopping half century ago. If you want to learn the practical, updated, more effective methods that they didn’t teach you in college, your only option now is to find an inservice course, workshop or professional development seminar that can upgrade your skills to fit contemporary youth.

About The Author
Ruth Herman Wells MS is the director of Youth Change, (www.youthchg.com) See hundreds more of her innovative, problem-stiopping interventions at the Youth Change web site http://www.youthchg.com. Ruth is the author of dozens of books and conducts workshops, inservice, professional development seminars, and trainings throughout N. America.

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Teachers can learn from other teachers who work with ELLs in either a general education class or small ESL learning group. They can create supportive learning and working environments when they know the various ranges of activities that have worked successfully for ELLs. They get excited about adapting activities when it can help their ELLs become more proficient readers and decoders. They learn collaborative strategies by collaboration. The key is to put the teacher as the learner.

My first and second grade ELLs enjoy oral work that focuses on sound and meaning when it is combines in a variety of playful contexts such as rhymes, songs, jazz chants and poetry, but I have found that they sometimes they don’t get the deeper meaning and this frustrates me. What’s this word? What does it mean? Back to thinking different strategies on my own…not again.

During my first year of teaching struggling elementary ELLs, I worked closely with a mentor and ten other teachers. The focus of our workshop was learning what worked from other teachers, so we could bridge some of literacy gaps. The facilitator had us engage in learning journals using guided subjects for reflection. We began by writing our concerns and questions, and then we reflected on the lessons using guiding questions. Our facilitator then responded to our journals and extracted various entries, which were then categorized under various subjects. Some of the other reflections revealed a totally different approach to teaching ELLs. Some of the teachers had plenty of practical activities and thoughts while others raised more thoughtful questions and concerns. Reading their responses helped me get into the mind of a first grade ELL – what a great experience!

After this, I realized that there were plenty of issues I needed to be aware of before expecting ELLs to read. The challenge with using the teachers’ responses as a guide for planning lessons was being prepared in knowing that some activities wouldn’t work for my particular struggling ELLs. They couldn’t acquire meaning without doing lots of decoding exercises and so there was not much they were able to do without a lot of oral help and support. In addition, they needed a lot of support in other areas as well. The most important thing a teacher of ELLs can do is to is to take a pre-assessment of their abilities and interests and create a student profile. Then, a teacher can customize instruction by providing successful activities based on what is available to the teacher and what the ELL can do. If teachers want ELLs to succeed just like their native English speaking peers, they need to be prepared a wide variety of learning options.

With other general education and ESL teachers, I tried to recreate a productive collaboration mode whereby teachers were able to learn from each other. I encouraged general education teachers to reflect on how successful they were able to teach a balanced mode of reading using components of oral and reading instruction. Then I asked teachers to reflect on the challenges using a series of lead-in questions and subjects for reflection we could investigate. Then we categorized the responses and as a collaborative group, we came up with a wide range of possibilities for teaching struggling ELLs in both educational and ESL learning contexts. The ELLs from both groups were then challenged using the wide range of activities we were able to pool together.

Creating the need to collaborate between general education and ESL teachers is a lot harder than it looks. General education teachers need encouragement, guidance and support to see the benefits of collaborating with ESL teachers and vis-versa. But teachers are actually benefiting when teachers successfully collaborate, not simply for the sake of acquiring additional teaching ideas but how to use those ideas more strategically to support their struggling ELLs. Students continued to struggle, but at least, teachers felt that the dialogue experience gave them more confidence builder strategies and tips to fully cater to the needs of their ELLs and they created lessons with more thought and engagement than before.

Reflective thinking is one process that I have used successfully, but there are strategies for encouraging reflective thinking as well. Reflective practice and professional development encourages educators to incorporate reflecting thinking in their daily practice as a prerequisite for collaboration. In our book proposal on Collaborative Teaching between ESL and General Education Teachers, Grades K-2: What Educators Need to Know, we wrote: “The critical need to successfully teach struggling ELLs in primary grades makes collaboration not only beneficial, but necessary. But before teachers can truly collaborate, they need to understand their ELLs and the areas in which they struggle. They will also want to consider how they have grouped their students. Teachers take this information as input when they meet with other teachers to work on practical solutions. Teachers face constraints of time, curriculum, and district procedures. They can suggest collaborative models to their administrators and colleagues to be part of the solution. The ultimate goal is to create a supportive learning environment for teachers and students.”

I think this sums up the goals of the collaborative teaching experience in a nutshell.

Make Your Teaching Sparkle. Teach for Success. Make a difference in the classroom. Subscribe to receive your FREE e-zine and e-book, “Taking Charge in the Classroom” when you visit the New Teacher Resource Center at http://www.newteachersignup.com. Purchase your ebook of classroom tested tips – “Tips and Tricks for Surviving and Thriving in the Classroom,” at: http://www.MakeYourTeachingSparkle.com and you’ll receive a FREE ebooklet, “Yes! You Can Teach K-12 English language learners Successfully!”

Dorit Sasson is a freelance writer, speaker, educator and founder of the New Teacher Resource Center.

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