Whole Classrooms of Individual Needs: How Student Teachers Meet the Unique Needs of All Students

• In Event: Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: Building Capacity for All Future Teachers to Work Effectively With Special Needs and Language Learners

Abstract

The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to examine how 64 student teachers at one mid-sized rural Midwestern university identified their students’ needs and perceived the ways in which they met their students’ individual needs. The authors used constant comparison methods and focused coding (Charmaz, 2006) to examine, verify, and draw inferences from 4,668 journal entries. The student teachers met their students’ needs in 27 different ways across four themes: cultural, behavioral, social, and curricular. Though student teachers described a variety of methods for addressing classroom management and learning differentiation, they exhibited deficiency at meeting students’ cultural needs.

Authors

• Derek L. Anderson, Northern Michigan University

• Joe M. Lubig, Northern Michigan University

• Markisha Smith, Western Oregon University