Consolidating Perceptions of Middle School Teaching Through Participatory-Type Early Field Experiences

It is entirely possible that prospective teachers whose early school exposures are limited to the short student teaching endeavor will have an inaccurate or distorted perception of the problems and frustrations they will actually encounter when they being their initial teaching assignment. This study was designed to determine the impact that extensive early field experiences had on the ranking of the middle school teacher characteristics at specific stages of maturation during the teacher preparation program. Of the 10 teacher characteristics ranked, half showed significant changes in priorities across the three assessments of the opinionnaire. Evidence from this study seems to suggest that additional and varied earlier field experiences in the teacher preparation program would enable prospective teachers to enter their initial teaching assignment with a more realistic perception of the kinds of problems they will actually face when they become practicing teachers in the middle grades