Center for Teaching & Learning

10/18/24 - CTL’s Internship Program

Hello, CTL Families,
It’s been a reflection-filled week as we have hosted eight interns from Buffalo State and two professors. It’s so wonderful to have people ask you, “Why?” about everything you do and say! Connecting with interns provides us with a contextual opportunity to talk about our goals for the classroom, our values, and the reasoning behind our practices and decisions as experienced teachers. 

While here, each student focused on one of the following aspects of CTL’s program as part of their internship:

• Mini-lessons
• Conferencing in reading workshop
• Conferences in writing workshop
• Student sharing, authentic publication, and portfolio-based assessment
• Book-talks, classroom libraries, and roundtable literary discussions
• Using poetry and other shared texts

Interns are here to observe our teachers launching each day’s work with concise mini-lessons, conferencing with individual students and giving them personalized feedback, and facilitating sharing and group understanding at the close of each class. CTL teachers meet with interns after the classes to reflect and process, to discuss planning and structure, and to help them plan their own classroom routines and procedures to support workshop. 

It can be tempting to say that our students are not impacted by interns. When and if that is said, it’s meant because interns are observers; they do not teach our students and they rarely even talk with CTL kids during the class period. But hosting interns has a profound impact on our students, even when the visiting teachers fade into the background of the writing workshop. CTL students see adults as learners, observing, taking notes, and wondering. They infer that observation sparks questions and change. When interns come, our CTL kids understand in a different way that the structured classroom routines and patterns they participate in each day are wholly purposeful and even considered to be an admired model for others. Our oldest students may begin to process that it is not magic or personality that makes the difference between them and peers who do not love school, it’s workshop. 

Hosting interns helps us all refocus on why we hold the beliefs and practices about teaching and learning that we participate in each day. It’s good to answer the question “Why?” about everything you do at least a few times a year! Showing young teachers the feel of our school, the depth of our students’ work, and the positivity of the kids’ approach to learning influences their thinking about what is possible, sparks their creativity, and charges up their batteries for their own work with kids. Our teachers leave the exchange feeling intellectually stimulated and refreshed in their own practice. Our kids see all people as collaborative learners and CTL’s program as purposeful and valuable.Thanks for reading and keep in touch,

Katy