Even though it is soooo close to the end, there is still a lot to be done before I get to walk across that stage. Today, we met with our supervisors to discuss what this semester will look like for us. Because this isn’t your traditional program, we didn’t have to go through a lengthy orientation about the do’s and don’ts and preparing for our final internship because we are already in it! Instead, we got straight to the good stuff.
There are a few things that separate the USF Urban Teacher Residency Partnership Program from the rest. The first is the idea of content coaching. This semester we have three content coaches: Literacy, Math, and Science. All of our content coaches are previous professors of ours and have experience working with us in our internship sites as well. This semester, we will get 5 weeks to work closely with our content coach to further develop our pedagogical content knowledge. This can entail anything from meetings, lesson planning collaboration, providing resources, observing, modeling, co-teaching, etc. This is an awesome opportunity, because now not only do we have our PRT (partnership resource teacher) to help coach us throughout the semester, but also a content coach who can help us specifically with a certain content area.
This semester we will also be conducting classroom inquiry. For this, we have each thought of a topic to conduct a semester long inquiry on which we will be presenting at the USF Annual Inquiry Conference at the end of April. I will be creating an “Inquiry” tab on my blog to follow the progress of my inquiry throughout the semester.
Along with this, we are still engaging in two classes (ESOL 3 and Math 2), which just provides us with more to be learned and practiced in the classroom!
There is definitely a LOT to learn in the next 15 weeks, but it will be full of excitement! I can’t wait to take that learning with me to a classroom of my own in August (where ever that may be….!)