Education Majors Get Practical Experience at Green Valley Elementary School

It is no secret that educators are hard workers, and that the standards that they must teach within can be strenuous, but each year, education majors in the Interdisciplinary Instruction class within the Irvin School of Education, take a rather unorthodox field trip to learn how to make the system work for them. 

Green Valley Elementary school is the site of a field experience where education majors have the opportunity to see how multi-disciplines can work together not only within their grade levels but across grade levels within the school. 

The Irvin School of Education teaches their students to pair multiple subjects together to teach across disciplines and incorporate themes in order to teach the whole student.  An example of this is when teachers use reading and writing to also teach concepts in social studies. 

Each semester Green Valley Elementary School opens its doors to the students of HSU and allows them to shadow throughout each grade and class to see the practical application of what they have been learning.  This field trip not only makes their studies jump off the page and into real life but it also is designed to get them ready to start student teaching. 

Dr. Judy Shipley, professor of education explains how including multiple intelligences in the classroom can impact teachers and students. “Social studies trains us to be good citizens, historians, and economists.  It is a subject that connects life in general and can easily be interwoven into other subjects,” she said. 

This style of teaching can also be beneficial to lighten the load of educators because it encourages teachers to work together to create whole lessons based off of themes for the grade level.  Green Valley assigns each grade a theme and each teacher reinforces each subject with that theme in mind.  An example of this is would be the kindergarteners learning patterns in every subject or fifth graders learning relationships within each topic. 

The Department of Educational Studies strives to provide a quality, value-centered pre-professional and professional education in a Christian environment and to encourage students to lead lives of service.

For more information about the Irvin School of Education and about the degrees offered within the Department of Educational Studies visit www.hsutx.edu/academics/irvin/