Every education major is eventually required to start their field experience with teaching. For some students, this can be either exciting or terrifying. However, field experience with teaching can be both challenging and rewarding!
If you're an education major, you'll remember your first time in field. You start out feeling excited but unsure. You feel less confident about what to do, where you should begin and how you should help students. But don't worry! It's normal to feel unsure when you first start out. Here are eight things that you can expect when starting your first field experience.
1. You won't always get assigned an ideal host teacher.
When you're starting your field experience, you should know that you won't always be assigned a host teacher that you agree with. You can either be given a great host teacher, or you could end up with a host teacher that has a teaching style that differs from your own. Whatever the case, you should always make sure to follow all instructions from your host teacher and make sure that you are listening to them.
2. You’ll find that you don’t always have all the answers.
This is a big thing to know when you are doing your field experience. When you first start teaching in field, you're going to think that you know enough to help the students. But you'll quickly find out that you don't. The way students are learning is going to differ from when you were taught in school. Therefore, you're not going to always know how to answer a student's question. But that's part of the learning experience that comes with teaching!
3.  When you first walk into the classroom, you’ll feel like a student.
When I first walked into the classroom that I had for field experience, I remember feeling immediately like a student rather than a teacher. However, this is normal! You're not going to feel like a teacher when you first start your field experience due to a lack of experience with teaching. Over time, you'll start to gain experience and confidence that you'll begin to feel more like a teacher rather than a student.
4. There will be times when you feel frustrated.
Whether it's the students or not knowing how to approach a lesson, there will be times when you will get frustrated. However, everyone goes through this during field experience! I don't know one student who hasn't felt frustrated during field. There will be times when you can get frustrated with not being able to manage the classroom or know what to do. However, as long as you take a deep breath and try approaching the situation from a different angle, you will be able to find a way to get through it.
5. Working in Field is a completely different experience than reading about it.
The first thing you'll notice right away is that working in field is completely different than reading about it. I know this is a given, but it's something that you don't think about too much before you start your field experience. There may be times when some of the methods you've read about in textbooks to help students may not always be effective. That's why it's best to try different methods and find different ways to help students before sticking to one method or teaching style.
6. You’re going to make mistakes.
You will make tons of mistakes when you first start field. There's more than one occasion where you'll find yourself accidentally giving a student an answer only to find out later that you gave them the wrong answer. Oops! But don't worry! Everyone who's been in field has made at least one mistake while teaching. You will make dozens of mistakes, but it's part of the learning experience. You'll learn from the mistakes you make, and they will help shape your experience with overcoming them. So, try not to get too discouraged.
7.  You will find yourself overwhelmed at times.
Did I say at times? I meant that you'll feel overwhelmed a lot! There are so many times where you will be overwhelmed by the workload of assignments for your field experience. You may also feel overwhelmed by the pressure of having to teach the classroom by yourself. It's challenging at times, but you will get through it. Just make sure to work on assignments beforehand for field and do the best you can to get those done as soon as possible so that you can enjoy your field experience without the pressure of the workload.
8. You’ll most likely shed a few tears when you’re finished.
If you think you'll be emotionally stable when you say goodbye to your students, think again. I can't count the number of times when I tried to stop myself from crying when my students hugged me and begged me not to leave the classroom. It's going to be tough, especially when you get into student teaching. One of the hardest things about being a teacher is that you can sometimes get a little attached to the students in your classroom.
When you start your field experience, you will most likely encounter all of these things. However, you shouldn't feel intimidated! Field experience is one of the best learning experiences that you can get before graduating. You will learn so much in field from host teachers or simply just experiencing teaching in field. So, if you're starting field soon, the best advice I can give is to try to enjoy it as much as you can before you graduate and get a job in teaching!
