Inside the hellish conditions of student teaching
A few years ago, I began looking for work that wouldn’t involve sitting and staring at a computer, and started my primary teaching graduate diploma. Teaching is the first job I’ve ever enjoyed; there’s truly nothing like the triumph of getting a room of people to understand something new, and some days I can hardly believe my luck that I get to help tamariki learn.
Many student teachers are in the middle of their second placement at schools across the motu. In the diploma I took, on first placement you’re in the classroom for six weeks, with at least 5 full days’ teaching spread across it. On your second, you spend eight weeks in a school and teach at least 3 full days per week for four consecutive weeks. Some programmes give student teachers more time in class or more placements, but this seems to be the minimum.
There are myriad causes for how ill-prepared beginner teachers are, none of which Erica Stanford is qualified to fix. The other week, one principal blamed it on people entering the training courses, saying “It's about the quality of the students in the programmes. I think that's the thing that really makes or breaks the graduate." What a fascinating choice to say this publicly, when many students are at the most vulnerable point of their training; maybe you’re not struggling in a bad system, maybe you’re just a low-grade human being!
In reality, the student teacher is the single most exploited worker in education. If you posit this to education higher-ups, many would probably argue they aren’t really workers. That’s how normalised the terrible conditions of student teaching are.
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Few outsiders realise that the core of teacher training involves fulltime unpaid internships. Being able to take student allowance, I lived off $400 a week while spending 40+ hours per week on school grounds. This works out to $10 or less per hour on site. I live pretty frugally but still wound up asking friends to help subsidise my bus tickets to and from work. My friend had to keep her supermarket job to stay afloat. “I feel like a shell of a human,” she said when I ran into her one evening.
As Paid Placements Aotearoa argues, paid placements need to be the norm across all training courses. In her talk on placement poverty, Bex Howells pointed out that dropout rates from unpaid training programmes are as high as 45%, and that students can sometimes be found sleeping in cars, sheds or parks to afford to study. However, paid placements alone won’t be enough if our learning conditions don’t change.
One of the hardest parts of teacher training is lesson planning; thinking about which concepts you need to teach tamariki, coming up with ideas on how to engage their attention, structuring the hour you’re spending on that topic (whole class teaching, small group work, individual work), and writing it all out so your mentor can see your thinking. When you’re teaching several days in a row, that also means assessing what didn’t work in today’s lesson and re-planning tomorrow’s one.
Lesson planning is fundamental to teachers’ thinking and learning; you sort out what questions to ask, what activities work or don’t, how to direct small children to get their books without causing a traffic jam. With experience you can improvise the craft and re-run successful lesson plans, but in teacher training it’s all new, and the cognitive labour is immense.
The mental and physical health toll this takes is staggering. I would get home after 8 hours on site, make dinner and anesthetise my brain with some TV or scrolling, wearily take up my planning at 10pm and type until around 2am—then get up at 6am to go to work, print off resources and rehearse my scripts for the day. Poor coping mechanisms, yes, but not uncommon. “When I was on placement, I’d get off school, go work at The Warehouse until midnight, then come home and do my planning,” said a teacher at my first school. “So you’d get what, 2-3 hours’ sleep?” I said, based off my own patterns. “Sometimes I wouldn’t sleep at all,” he replied.
When you have an average of 28 or 29 students relying on you, naturally it means a lot of admin. But it’s my belief that teaching these class sizes is inherently impossible. Experienced teachers have life hacks we can learn from, but the model has built-in child neglect and teacher burnout. This is true even within supportive schools, but unsupportive schools make it worse.
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Beyond the unpaid labour, active exploitation of student teachers isn’t guaranteed. On my best placement, I was treated like a respected and supported part of the team. However, the structure of student teaching makes placements a harsh lottery. Students are sent to one school at a time and assigned to one Assistant Teacher (AT) who mentors their progress and prepares them to teach their class. Although universities/wānanga and the Teaching Council have final say over a pass/fail, in practice the school and AT hold our students’ future teaching careers in their hands like a baby bird.
Awareness of this means that students often adopt fawn mode even at schools which recognise the power dynamic and want to mitigate it. And if the school has a bad attitude to student teachers and/or the AT takes a dislike to them, our students are basically stuck. The power differential leaves ample room for outright abuse; undermining, harassment, bigotry, being disallowed required planning time, or being used as free labour to cover staff shortages (a deeply unsafe and illegal practice). It takes a while for these patterns to emerge and longer for the student to determine their unfairness—and by that point they often just try stick it out for the next month.
Student teachers are an incredibly hard workforce to organise; they’re isolated from each other at different placement schools, only work at a school for a few months tops, and have no leverage within the workplace. Most beginner teachers then get busy adapting to their new job and don’t want to remember what it took to get there. While some ATs are great, a lot of experienced teachers have forgotten how hard being a trainee is—many had better conditions than us. They’re also not formally trained to meet adult learners’ needs; my worst AT treated me like an inept fellow teacher rather than the overwhelmed and needy pupil I was. I teared up when my next AT said “let me know if there’s anything I can do to support you”.
After finishing my diploma, I took up reliever work, since one year’s training didn’t make me feel prepared for my own classroom. I’m much more confident as a teacher now, less likely to consciously dread the day ahead, and boy do I love being paid. My body has retained my placement learning that teaching means insomnia, and I often have stress dreams or wake up multiple times before a shift. However, I’ve left behind the worst thing about student teaching: not the daily grind or poverty, but the constant anxiety that one wrong move meant I’d be shut out of an entire career.
It shouldn’t be a maxim that everybody cries on placement. Our training systems should empower aspiring teachers, not filter them out.
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To any student teachers reading: despite everything I’ve said, you can get through this. If you’re feeling incompetent, remember that you’re bringing unique skills and knowledge to this profession and deserve to be celebrated for it. If you feel uneasy about how your school is treating you, keep a written record of patterns and incidents, ask your course coordinators for help, and file a formal complaint as soon as you can (i.e. once you have another work referee). Some schools have known patterns of mistreating student teachers, and a paper trail may help hold them accountable—and help you not feel crazy.
To our ATs: I know your workload is already high, but your student teachers are incredibly vulnerable. They didn’t ask to be with you specifically, they’re just here. Your job is not to test whether they’re good enough; heading up the classroom is the test. Your role is to clearly outline your expectations in advance, prepare them for each test and counsel them afterwards. Pointing out their skills and boosting their confidence isn’t something they earn, but a professional competency on your part. Any good AT knows this, but some definitely don’t.
To our education systems: we all know trainee teachers need longer placements, but most of us can’t cope with three years of poverty or the psychological damage from these internships. Whether you’re a principal or a training course coordinator, we need more higher-ups to push for our students to have more time in a wider variety of schools, proper pay, and more recourse in cases of mistreatment. Or we can continue with teacher burnout and shortages, I guess.
Teaching relies on workers who care enough about tamariki and rangatahi that we’ll work ourselves into the ground to help them thrive. We put ourselves through hell just to get a shot at this career. Maybe some of the billions New Zealand spends on the military could go towards making sure student teachers don’t starve or break down on the job.