The Center for Teaching and Learning was excited to welcome interns back to CTL in October, fulfilling an important aspect of the school’s mission as a demonstration school. For over thirty years, teachers have visited Edgecomb to observe methods developed by CTL’s faculty and adapt them to their own classrooms and schools. For the third year in a row, CTL partnered with Buffalo State University to host pre-service student interns. Eight undergraduate and graduate students and two professors spent four days at CTL this fall. 

CTL is a demonstration school for workshop teaching. Authentic student experience is forefronted in workshop classrooms, with students spending their class time actively writing, reading, creating experiments and collecting data, applying math skills to problems and challenges that interest them, and exploring artifacts and other historical concepts. 

Interns come to CTL to observe the teachers launching each day’s work with concise mini-lessons, conferencing with individual students and giving them personalized feedback, and facilitating sharing and group understanding at the close of each class. CTL teachers meet with interns after the classes to reflect and process, to discuss planning and structure, and to help them plan their own classroom routines and procedures to support workshop.

While here, each Buffalo State student focused on one of the following aspects of CTL’s program as part of their internship:

• Mini-lessons

• Conferencing in reading workshop

• Conferencing in writing workshop

• Student sharing, authentic publication, and portfolio-based assessment

• Book-talks, classroom libraries, and roundtable literary discussions

• Using poetry and other shared texts

Hosting interns helps CTL teachers refocus on why they hold the beliefs and practices about teaching and learning that they participate in each day. Connecting with interns provides them with a contextual opportunity to talk about goals for the classroom, values, and the reasoning behind CTL’s practices and decisions as experienced teachers. Showing teachers the feel of the school, the depth of CTL students’ work, and the positivity of the kids’ approach to learning influences their thinking about what is possible, sparks their creativity, and recharges their batteries for their own work with kids all across the country. CTL teachers leave the exchange feeling intellectually stimulated and refreshed in their own practice. 

CTL students see adults as learners, observing, taking notes, and wondering. They infer that observation sparks questions and change. When interns come, CTL kids understand in a different way that the structured classroom routines and patterns they participate in each day are wholly purposeful and even considered to be an admired model for others. 

To learn more about CTL, please visit our website at www.c-t-l.org, or contact CTL’s Head of School, Katy Inman, at katy@c-t-l.org.