During Boots on the Ground orientation, students learn about the different volunteer opportunities available to them at local elementary schools. (Photo by Natalie Fedor)
More than 75 students in the School of Teacher Education gathered this week to kick off Boots on the Ground, a semester-long volunteering experience for teacher candidates.
Boots on the Ground is a service-learning opportunity for teacher education students to support local schools within traditionally underserved communities. For 15 hours throughout the semester, students provide assistance to local teachers and begin to develop skills for differentiated instruction, behavior management and collaboration in a professional environment prior to internships.
“Volunteers work one-on-one and in small groups in classrooms of their choice," says Senior Lecturer Lee-Anne Trimble Spalding. “They get to select which grade levels to work with, and they can even go into exceptional student education classes or classes like music and art to learn how we educate the whole child in our local schools.”
She adds that Boots on the Ground offers a unique experience from the traditional internship that all teacher candidates complete.
“In traditional internship placements, the interns take over many more roles of the teacher, including designing instruction and teaching whole group lessons,” Spalding says. “Our volunteers typically work with small student groups on pre-planned learning tasks or provide support during whole-group instruction.”
To qualify for the program, students must be enrolled in one of three classes: Introduction to the Teaching Profession, Teaching Social Science in the Elementary School, or Teaching Strategies and Classroom Management. From there, they attend two orientations to learn more about the schools and the service-learning experience. Boots on the Ground regularly partners with various schools in Orange County, including Andover Elementary, Deerwood Elementary, Discovery Middle School, Riverdale Elementary and Sunrise Elementary.
Not only do students provide teachers with instructional support in the classroom, they also play an important role in assisting children with grasping the concepts being taught during lessons. This gives them the chance to exercise pedagogical skills they’ve learned and apply them to a real-world classroom. The program is mutually beneficial to our students and the classrooms, providing support for traditionally underserved communities, while gaining valuable service-learning experience.
“For our students, it gets them out in the schools right away to see how elementary and middle schools are currently functioning,” Spalding says. “Our teacher candidates can network with in-service professionals and possibly have connections to lean on when their internships arise in their programs. It allows for them to hone their teaching skills and gives them the ability to establish rapport with today’s learners.”
Judy Lindquist, gifted resource teacher and internship coordinator for Andover Elementary, also coordinates the school’s volunteer placements. She says the positive impact UCF students have in the classroom is tangible, citing an example in which one of the fourth-grade classes last year was struggling with mathematics scores.
“We had four or five volunteers go to the teacher’s class, where she broke them up into small groups and had them work with the children doing a variety of intervention exercises,” Lindquist said. “After that, the kids’ test scores were phenomenal, and the teacher absolutely credited the UCF students. She said that without their help, they would never have made that growth.”
Lindquist adds that the school is grateful to have UCF students providing additional support to their teachers.
"Our teachers just love having the students come in,” Lindquist says. “We have students spread out all over the school doing a little bit of everything. It's wonderful to see not only the extra hands in the classroom, but to see the relationships that the UCF students develop with our little Andover ‘Stars,’ too.”