Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIU) started a new partnership this semester called Saluki Teacher Residency Partnership (STRP) to help prepare teaching students more quickly and give financial support and mentorship opportunities.

The School of Education website says the goal of STRP is to “bring together local educators from the schools and the university in a partnership with community mentors to recruit and support diverse teacher candidates from their admission into the Teacher Education Program through their first two years of teaching.

Senior Alex Quinn , majoring in special education, said she found out about the program through email, as did many participants.

“You’re spending more time in the classroom,” Quinn  said. “Then, of course, the financial part of it was also an added bonus, so it’s more like a scholarship they were paying us to go into the schools.”

Quinn is at the General John A. Logan Attendance Center teaching elementary students, specifically special education.

“I go into their classrooms to observe their classrooms and work with our students,” Quinn said. “I work with seven first grade teachers plus my resource teacher that I’m with.”

Quinn said she’s at the school Monday through Thursday and has check-in meetings with an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum, Dr. Christie McIntyre.

“It’s hard. It’s a lot, but then the second semester is full days, Monday through Friday, full hours that your teacher goes,” Quinn  said. “How SIU gets that long winter break, we don’t get that break. We go [off]  whatever our school district is, so we are there the full time that those teachers are there.”

Quinn said there’s many benefits being in the classroom environment for a full days, multiple times a week, helping build work relationships and trust in the school.

“Since I’ve been there every day, full days, It’s like, they kind of just let me do whatever, like, they still watch me but I’m able to, if I want to run the lesson, I can run it,” Quinn said. “ I get more teaching experience and also more experience with the kids, so they’re kind of letting me be my own teacher, in essence, which is really nice.”

Getting to see the ins and outs of a school system, like healthy communication with their office and going to meetings with other faculty and staff, has been a help, Quinn said.

She said she found love for being a teacher over time and loves working with the children.

“I get a million hugs a day being in elementary and I love it, and that’s all they want,” Quinn said. “You don’t know, at this age, like, they can’t identify that, ‘oh, this student has an IEP  (Individualized Education Program),’ like, they’re different. They don’t see that, they don’t see any difference. They just see their friends, like, regardless of their developmental areas or anything.”

Still being a student herself, Quinn said it does get stressful since she’s taking 12 credit hours along with the program.

“It’s a lot of extra work and it’s really a time management thing,” Quinn said. “It’s a lot, but a lot of our assignments, our teachers are being really good at, like, our instructors and my clinical placement teacher, like, our assignments kind of line up.”

Quinn said she is ready to get through this semester and to be in the classroom full time next term.

“I do think it’s an experience that people should try to branch out,” Quinn said. “Really look into it and make sure you get all your questions answered first though, because, like, once you’re in the program, there is no getting out.”

Cynthis Skiles, a senior in special education, said she likes everything the partnership has entailed towards getting experience in her career path.

“So the amount of exposure we were getting was definitely a big plus,” Skiles said. “We were told we were going to get a mentor teacher and a, like, a community mentor and so that was definitely something that really drew me to the idea.”

Skiles is teaching at Carbondale Community High School, working with freshmen and sophomores with her mentor English teacher Josh Taylor.

Skiles said she liked the transition from observing the class to leading some of the lessons.

“If my teacher needs to go to a meeting or something, I teach the class for that period,” Skiles said. “I’ve become, like, the kind of push-in sub because I’m in the classroom, and so I know the kids and I know what we’re working on.”

Being able to work with the children and seeing how to properly motivate them is something Skiles has enjoyed learning, she said. She’s become a sort of co-teacher in Taylor’s classroom.

“I sit down with Josh and we kind of look over ‘okay, so what are we doing next week?’” Skiles said. “How is this gonna tie into this big project that we’re doing and so being able to see how he structures his class to get to the point that he wants to be at has been really neat.”

Skiles said she appreciates the amount of time she gets to spend in the school that she wouldn’t be able to get without STRP.

“If you were there one day a week, you know, it’s not kind of the things you would get into,” Skiles said. “Making sure that all their accommodations are accounted for and kind of like move in IEPs, like, things that happen on the job, but you’re not really, like, taught or you don’t experience, until they happen.”

She said she enjoys that she gets to build a relationship with the students from the beginning to the end of their school year.

“Last semester, in the spring semester when I was student teaching, it’s not something I thought about, like all the little ins and outs and what goes into the day to day basis,” Skiles said. “There’s a lot that I didn’t think about and so being exposed to that has been fantastic.”

Senior in elementary education Alivia Meier teaches the fourth-grade Carrutthers Elementary school in Murphysboro with mentor teacher Tracy Landewee.

“The fact that I could be in a classroom full time for the entire year was super appealing to me,” Meier said. “That’s so much knowledge and just in and outs daily that I was going to learn that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to otherwise.”

The financial help within the program was alluring to Meier and getting the experience of co-teaching for an entire school year.

“I love it and I have built such a rapport with the students by being there,” Meier said. “I have been there since day one at their open house, they met me along with my mentor teacher, Mrs. Landewee. And so I have been a constant in their school year from the very beginning.”

Being there from the beginning has made Meier a trusted adult to the children.

“A kid that you know, if you can call on them by name, and you can talk to them and check in with them every day and see how they are, like, you become a constant in their lives,” Meier said. “It’s so sweet, you know, when they leave every day, instead of saying, you know, despite misses along the way, it’s always ‘bye Mrs.Landewee, bye Mrs. Meier’.”

Meier said she enjoys working with Landewee and couldn’t have asked for a better mentor teacher. Landewee gives Meier the room to make the decisions she would make as a teacher.

“The trust that she’s put in me to essentially come in her classroom and just kind of take over, you know, in a lot of ways and do a lot of things that she’s done on her own for so long,” Meier said. “The fact that she’s willing to share that with me, and let me be so integrated into her classroom is just fantastic.”

With STRP being a new program, Meier said communication is essential to balancing her workload.

“They don’t know what we’re going through and, as the guinea pigs of the program, they don’t know how we’re feeling or when too much is too much, unless we vocalize it,” Meier said. “I think that that’s something that really just comes with time where we have to be really big advocates for ourselves.”

Staff reporter Jamilah Lewis can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @jamilahlewis. To stay up to date with all your southern Illinois news, follow the Daily Egyptian on Facebook and Twitter.

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