Can I join a different chapter if I transfer or do my master’s at a different university?

Do I have to renew my membership?

Why, in our teacher education classes, do we have to write so many long, detailed lesson plans when all the teachers I know say they never do that in the real world?

I am moving to another state as soon as I graduate and get my certification. What do I do to get certified in another state?

How do I study for the PRAXIS?

What should I look for when I go into classrooms to observe?

Just call KDP Headquarters at 800-284-3167 or check Find A Chapter to see whether your graduate institution has a chapter. To change your chapter affiliation, send an e-mail to Headquarters including your name, address, membership number (if known), and the name of your former and new chapters.

Do I have to renew my membership?

Unlike other traditional honor societies, KDP provides both recognition AND professional resources and services for members at all levels and stages of their educational careers. To provide these services and benefits, KDP assesses its members an annual membership fee. Once initiated into Kappa Delta Pi, you are a member for life—but you must renew your membership each year by paying annual international membership dues to receive publications and member services.

Only active members who have paid Society membership dues are eligible to wear honor cords or a stole at graduation. Also, some chapters may have additional local participation requirements that need to be fulfilled. Check with your local chapter counselor about any requirements.

Why, in our teacher education classes, do we have to write so many long, detailed lesson plans when all the teachers I know say they never do that in the real world?

Your teacher education program is probably part of a state or national accreditation process that demands evidence of certain types of thinking and of the effects of your course work. If lesson plan requirements recently have become more strictly prescribed and tied to specific performance standards, that’s probably why. However, there are more important and meaningful reasons for writing thorough lesson plans.

As part of your professional preparation, you should begin to think about your teaching in more intentional and sophisticated ways. You should be able to prove that your instructional decisions are closely aligned with the needs of your students, your community, and what research says is effective. You should be able to demonstrate that you are now thinking about educational considerations that never would have occurred to you when you began your preservice preparation.

Much of your professional growth would not be apparent simply by watching you teach. Further, the opportunities for teacher educators to actually see you teach are few and far between. Therefore, for teacher educators to determine whether you have grown as a professional, they need to see your thinking. You need to make your decision-making process visible. Serious teacher educators believe they have an obligation to the profession and the children served. That obligation includes helping to develop the most competent, caring, and creative teachers possible. They need to see whther you are moving in that direction. They need to know that your most successful lesson was not a fluke, or that if a lesson did not go well, it was not due to laziness or lack of preparation or competence. Lesson plans are a useful tool in this evaluation.

Putting your thinking on paper also should be a reflective and educative experience for you. It should help you to consider the complex factors in your classroom more intentionally. If you write enough plans and engage in the type of thinking required for preparing them, eventually this preparation will become second nature and you will not have to do them as often. Be aware, however, that if you stop thinking in this manner, your professional growth also will cease. Don’t let yourself become complacent during your career as an educator. Commit youself to revisiting and revising your teaching philosophy at least once each year and to rewriting your lecture and discussion notes every semester. It will make a big difference.

When you walk into your first field experience, even if just for a one-hour observation, you’ll quickly discover that you are working in three different but co-existing worlds. First, there’s the “real” world, or the immediate classroom in which you are observing or working. This world can be filled with uncooperative students, cynical teachers, complaining parents, and overwhelming expectations. This is the world where you are often told to “forget all that stuff you learned in college.” Ah yes, college—a world where teacher educators are telling you that you must honor and teach to the diversity in your class; provide hands-on, active learning opportunities in all subject areas; be an agent of change in your building; and reflect on everything, all the time—preferably in writing. Finally, there is the world of teaching that you created in your mind in the 12 years of classroom experience that preceded college. That is the world in which your second-grade teacher told you that you would make a wonderful teacher someday and, from that point on, you knew you were going to be a teacher. This is the world that, if you are like most preservice teachers, was one of positive and successful school experiences.

These worlds are not always compatible and, in fact, can make your transition into teaching even tougher. Determining what is “real” or “right” is not easy because what you thought was true (your past experiences) and what you would like to try (teacher education) often do not make sense with what you see happening.

To help deal with this confusion, you may want to write an educational autobiography. This can be a helpful exercise in critically examining what you believe about teaching, how you came to believe those things, and how you can overcome the negatives and incorporate the positives into your present teaching.

Discussion groups also can be very useful. If your teacher-education program does not provide ample opportunity to discuss your field experiences with peers, create your own discussion groups outside of class. If possible, find a professor or thoughtful veteran teacher to lead your discussions.

Your first organized field experiences probably are going to include structured and unstructured observations, perhaps for an hour at a time. Most likely, you’ll sit in the back of the room and take notes about what you see. Your role in the classroom will be clear. You are a student and an observer. You’ll begin to make mental notes about the good and bad things in the classroom, and what you would do differently.

As you become more experienced and comfortable in classrooms, though, you’ll feel less like a student and more like a teacher. This is especially true if you’re a nontraditional, alternative certification student who is older than the teacher and has worked in educational settings for many years. You might even think you know more than the teacher and could be more effective. This feeling reaches its zenith during student teaching. You’ll want to make changes, but you’re not the “real” teacher.

In making an effective transition from student to teacher, it’s helpful to keep a few things in mind. In all field experiences and even while student teaching, you are still a guest in someone else’s classroom. Whether that teacher is brilliant or incompetent, you are the guest and there is a professional and personal etiquette and protocol that should be observed. There may even be times that you see something that is offensive or is not in the best interest of the students. At that point, you probably need to take the problem to your university supervisor and get his or her advice.

Think of yourself as a “student of teaching,” rather than a “student teacher.” Research on preservice teachers shows that they tend to enter teacher-education programs with certain beliefs about teaching and seldom change those beliefs, no matter what they learn or observe. Even more unfortunate is that most schools view it the same way and give new teachers all the responsibilities of veteran faculty members. The chances that your new employer will provide an environment in which you can continue learning are slim. Your preservice years are a time when you should be able to experiment and take risks in a setting in which you are “fail-safe.”

Someone will be there to talk with you about the things that don’t work, head off potential problems, and help you refine and repeat things that go well. Don’t be in a hurry to get the cooperating teacher out of the room. Instead, solicit his or her ongoing commentary. Ask the teacher to take over the class again periodically, and be a student of his or her teaching.

Ignore all that stuff they tell you in college! You’ll undoubtedly hear that from one of your cooperating teachers at some point. Sadly, many methods courses indeed might be irrelevant or unrealistic. But more often than not, the relevance or irrelevance of your teacher-education courses is what you determine it to be. You must make the course work relevant. That’s what constructivism is all about. Because an idea or theory proposed in a methods class seems unrealistic at a particular time or in a particular class does not mean it is always unrealistic. Maybe it needs to be adapted. Maybe it is something that has to wait. Maybe you need to hold your methods teacher to a higher level of accountability and press for a realistic application of the idea. Before you declare an idea to be worthless and discount it, be sure to examine the context, the cooperating teacher’s perspectives, and your own belief system.

You don’t have to take the ideas and theories presented in teacher-education courses or by practitioners on faith. Before you declare a teaching method to be effective or irrelevant, put it to the test. See whether there is any research to support the theory. Create your own research and test the idea in your classroom. Action research is an excellent way to explore your own beliefs and abilities as a teacher.

I am moving to another state as soon as I graduate and get my certification. What do I do to get certified in another state?

Each of the 50 states has its own teacher certification process and rules. You may want to start by going online to www.professionalteacher.net. This site gives you links to every state’s office of teacher certification and provides general information about the state. Two other helpful sites are www.teachers-teachers.com and www.aaee.org. Some career centers at colleges and universities also can answer these questions, as can your college’s certification officer.

What may be involved? Grade levels at which you can teach vary from state to state. For example, you may be able to teach sixth grade in one state with a certification in elementary education, but may need certification for middle grades in another state. That’s why it is important to check with the individual state where you will be moving. For some states, all you need to do is fill out a form and pay a fee. In others, you may need testing or coursework. It is always best to become fully certified in the state where you do your teacher education program, because moving before completing a degree or before student teaching will mean much more course work on your part. Once you are fully certified in one state, it is generally easier to gain certification in another.

Consider the field in which you want to pursue your master’s degree, and then shop for a program. If you are an elementary, middle, or secondary school teacher, you can consider a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction, where you will learn more about teaching. A master’s degree in reading will enable you to be a reading specialist at a school, while a master’s degree in educational administration/educational leadership is the first step to becoming a curriculum director, principal, or other administrator.

When you choose a program, look at course offerings. Do they include evenings, weekends, or summers? How many students are in these programs? Will there be enough students that courses will be offered regularly? What do past graduates say about the program and its reputation? Is financial aid available through the college? Be sure to look at many factors, including location of the campus compared to your home and the school where you teach.

How do I study for the PRAXIS?

The test you’re about to take isn’t focused so much on theory as it is practice. Go into the test thinking like a teacher and you will do fine. Even though it is all multiple choice, don’t be fooled and believe it’s going to be easy: it is a well constructed test. There are no obvious distractors/wrong answers; each question operates on the synthesis/analysis levels (no simple recall). Time management is an issue as well—you have 120 questions in 120 minutes, so bring a watch and pace yourself. The best preparation is taking practice tests. Contact your university library to see whether a study guide is available particular to that test.

For study guides, practice tests, or guides to what content area will be on particular tests, check your college library for resources, or review your state standards (available through your state Department of Education Web site) for clues as to the areas in which to concentrate your efforts. There are some good practice test books which can be purchased for about $20. www.brainpop.com is a site that provides visual learners a way to get some study tips or learning devices for remembering content items. Cheyney University of Pennsylvania at www.cheyney.edu/pages/index.asp?p=161 has a helpful site for PRAXIS II with review information and terms to create study cards.

What should I look for when I go into classrooms to observe?

Here are a few helpful hints if you are feeling overwhelmed with observations, collaborating, and reflecting on all the things you need help with in your classroom:

Go into classrooms to observe masterful teaching with a focus. Know what you need help with and go in to observe that one thing. If you are unsure about what you are supposed to do at a teacher conference with a student, observe two or three examples of that interaction.

If you are going in to observe, OBSERVE! Carry your notebook and follow the teacher around closely. If you want to learn about teacher conferences, then write down everything the teacher says in the conference. After you listen to a few conferences, you will begin to hear the prompts that the teacher is giving and, in turn, you will have some things to take into your classroom and use in your own teaching conferences.

Divide your notebook page into two columns. One side can be titled, “What I see and hear.” This is where you write down the prompts or phrases you hear the teacher saying, perhaps visuals he or she is using, and body movement and physical space of the lesson. The other side of your notebook can be titled, “What I think.” In this space, you can write your reflections on what you notice in the lesson. This organization keeps you focused on what you originally came in to observe and helps you think about the effectiveness of the teaching in front of you. It also makes the conversation with colleagues after the observation much easier. You will be able to point to specific segments or conversations in the lesson and ask the teacher about those moments.

Ideally, you would get the chance to try a similar lesson in your own classroom with the teacher you observed then observing you and giving you feedback. Remember to stick to the one thing you need feedback on and ask your colleague to observe you doing that kind of lesson.