Anthony Sorrentino
Champlain Education student
Student Makes the Grade
During Anthony Sorrentino's student teaching experience, he learned that teachers never stop being learners.
"I began thinking about the good teachers I've had throughout my life," says Anthony Sorrentino when asked why he wanted to become an educator, "and I thought maybe I could be a good one."
Anthony has spent a lot of time watching the "good ones" work. At Champlain, education majors spend literally hundreds of hours in classrooms before they take on their student teaching. Field experience for education majors at Champlain begins with observation and one-on-one tutoring; next, students progress to developing lesson plans that they then teach to small groups and eventually move on to teach to full classes. The final semester for Champlain Education majors culminates in full-time student teaching.
But before he ever took over a class of teenagers, Anthony found himself standing before a room of the school's Social Studies teachers who were expecting him to give them a lesson in how to teach Social Studies.
"Teaching the teachers was definitely not in my original plans," he laughs. "One day, I was showing my cooperating teacher what you can do with a SMART BoardTM. The next thing I knew, he had signed me up to teach an in-service class for the entire Social Studies Department on the use of SMART Boards. "It was a very tense situation-being a kid and getting up in front of all those adults and you are the one who has to get up and teach them."
The in-service lesson was a big hit with the teachers. Likewise, when it came time for Anthony to take over his cooperating teacher's classroom, it went better than he had originally anticipated. "Before I did my student teaching I thought no matter how much you prepare, when you get in front of a bunch of teenagers, you just don't know how it's going to turn out," he says. "But Champlain taught me how to be prepared. I really feel like I had a successful class and that I actually helped a lot of the students that worked with. It was all the work that I did at Champlain that has helped me to really know that I am one of the good ones."
Student Teaching: Bellows Free Academy
Poster design for an invitational snowboarding competition.