WKU News

A WKU senior education major says even though her in-person student teaching experience was cut in half, she feels prepared to take on her own classroom this fall.

WKU’s Amy Bingham tells us why in this week’s View from the Hill.

Gary Ransdell Hall, where education majors spend the bulk of their time until their last semester when they get that crucial student teaching experience. 

Senior Kayla Shults explains how WKU helped her adapt when student teaching shifted online.

“It’s so funny to be in Zoom meetings with first-graders, they’re like Ms. Shults, Ms. Shults and they’re all lined up and I’m like who is saying my name, I’m like say your name and they say Ms. Shults I’m here and I say, where?”

Kayla Shults couldn’t resist revisiting the first-graders she spent her first eight weeks of student teaching with.  She had moved on to middle school students when COVID-19 turned her student teaching into a virtual experience.

“We would do Google hangouts once a week for staff meetings, then I would be in a seventh-grade Google hangout with all the seventh-grade teachers then be with the students in their hangouts.”

Shults says WKU’s director of student teachers quickly pulled together a website full of professional development requirements.

“It was filled with a bunch of like to become Google certified, Screencast certified, Apple Teacher certified.  That way we were working towards all these certifications that we would have done anyway in our first year of teaching.”

She says because WKU already stressed using technology in the classroom she was able to contribute ideas during this transition, and now she’s ready for her first job even though it may look a little different.

“Everyone’s trying to figure out what fall is going to look like and I now feel like with this being my student teacher experience they just added these tools to my toolbelt and it will help me be successful in the future.”

WKU had 189 student teachers this semester. It’s largest group in a long time. More than 60 have secured a teaching job for the fall.