Crucial live classroom experience prepares students for teaching success

Josh LeGreve ’09 teaches Spanish at Green Lake (Wisconsin) School District, which offers a 4K-12 International Baccalaureate program.

Ripon College is not just a destination to experience excellent teaching. It is producing excellent teachers at all levels of the educational system.

Year after year, educational studies is among the top areas of study of graduating seniors at Ripon. In the past decade alone, 174 students graduated with a teaching certification. This academic year, 13 students will complete their student teaching assignments in various local and national school districts.

Ripon students achieve their dreams of working in classrooms in a variety of ways. Teacher education programs are approved by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and prepare students for Pre-K through 12 licensure and crosscategorical special education in public and private schools, locally, nationally and even internationally. In addition, there are 24 subject licensure programs, ranging from traditional biology and life sciences to general music, foreign language and physical education.

The teacher preparation process at Ripon College requires a rigorous sequence of classes throughout multiple disciplines, ranging from the history of public schools to the importance of diversity in the classroom. Methods classes enrich students with pedagogy and allow them the opportunity to practice teach to their peers. Education students also develop specialties for the areas and grade levels at which they wish to teach.

Future educators must have at least 100 hours of classroom time observing and teaching before they are placed in student teaching positions. Department professors observe student teaching lessons and provide feedback.

“Almost every education class has a clinical component,” says Abby Hilker ’19 of Menasha, Wisconsin, who is student teaching chemistry classes at Fox Valley Lutheran High School in Appleton, Wisconsin.

“I had many opportunities to watch excellent teachers and to teach myself before I actually started student teaching. It is a lot more work than I ever could have imagined. I even find myself hoping for no snow days because we are a little behind on content. It seems like there are never enough minutes in a class period when you are student teaching.”

It is awesome to see students develop understanding, and I get to watch as they progress from unsure about a topic to a thorough understanding,” says Hilker.

Beccah Jones ’18 of Dixon, Illinois, now is a health teacher at Reagan Middle School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her student teaching experience began in the Princeton School District where she worked individually with students. Her second placement was in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

“My placements for student teaching taught me more life lessons and how to relate to students probably more so than teaching itself, which is not a bad thing at all,” she says. “I definitely saw myself grow into the teacher I wanted to be someday.”

Ripon College students and alumni like Hilker and Jones benefit greatly from their applied experiences, becoming knowledgeable, passionate and able to positively impact their classrooms and communities.

Josh LeGreve ’09 teaches Spanish in the Green Lake (Wisconsin) School District and says his Ripon education “made me intellectually curious, and the quality education program at Ripon helped me take that and become a reflective and responsive classroom teacher.”

His student teaching semester was at Kenwood Academy High School in Chicago Public Schools as part of the Chicago Center for Urban Life and Culture. He also had clinical experiences with public schools in Ripon, Berlin, Green Lake and Two Rivers.

“Even before beginning my student teaching, I had the opportunity to participate in plenty of observational and hands-on experiences in the classroom, learning from practicing teachers and being able to use the methodologies that I was learning in practice,” he says.

He says this variety of experiences made him a flexible teacher — “able to work comfortably with students from many different paths of life and to reach students at their level. I feel this experience helped prepare me at such a depth that I went into the classroom as an independent teacher with confidence.”