Carlie Lambert '13

2011 Soar Student

Major/minor: French, elementary/secondary education

Hometown: Hellertown, PA

Project title: Mentoring student teachers: making this important work succeed

Project advisor: Joanne McKeown

Project details: The goal of my SOAR project was to find the difficulties that lie in the relationship between a cooperating teacher and his/her student teacher. We did this by conducting interviews with both cooperating teachers and former student teachers of Moravian University. All of the student teachers had majored in a foreign language. After our interviews, Dr. McKeown and I found common threads between the responses as well as identified rather interesting information about certain experiences. We then organized our findings into a presentation for a conference for the American Association of Teachers of French in Montreal, Canada.

Why I wanted to participate in SOAR: When Dr. McKeown gave me the outline of what she hoped to accomplish over the summer, I was honored to be asked to work on such an appropriate project for my major. I knew it would not only give me great insight to know how to handle my own student teaching, but it would also be helpful to the educational world by giving cooperating teachers advice during the conference on how to make a student teaching experience successful and effective.

Results: We presented our findings to a group of foreign language teachers in Montreal who were intrigued and felt the presentation would benefit them in the future. Most even stayed after the presentation to comment, ask questions, and give feedback.

Future plans: I may work with Dr. McKeown to produce a packet for cooperating teachers and future student teachers that would include advice about handling this important relationship.