New teachers at Kent-Meridian learn how to work with students beyond what they were told in textbooks

While experienced teachers at the Kent School District know their way around a classroom, it’s a different experience for those who are brand new.

Between working through lesson plans, navigating the district’s paperwork and establishing rapport with students, there’s a lot that education classes don’t teach.

Alisa Luedtke and Bud Bannon are new teachers at Kent-Meridian High School, and both have had to adapt what they learned in college around the realities of the actual teaching environment.

Bannon received a bachelor’s degree in athletic training at Washington State University, and then remained in Pullman for a master’s program. The South Kitsap High School graduate worked with the cheerleading and track teams at WSU while he pursued his master’s over two years. He was hired to the Kent School District this year.

“The easy thing is getting into teaching,” Bannon said, “the hard thing is everything else. Meetings, how to order things, how to get a sub, all these different things, I just don’t have a clue. But that’s normal, or I hope that’s normal.”

The key to making his classroom easy, Bannon said, is finding a balance between student respect and getting work done.

“Show them respect and that you care about them and they’ll bend over backwards for you, that’s been true.”

While he learned classroom management and lesson planning in school, it’s harder when it comes to individual students and how to understand each one’s different learning style.

“That’s kind of been the biggest one is looking at kids and see how they react to things,” Bannon said. “This kid, if he gets yelled at, he’s gonna lose it. So maybe don’t yell at that kid. Some kids, if you call on them, they’ll shut down. Give them a problem and they’re so afraid to fail at it that they’ll shut down.”

Finding the right balance of push and pull with students has been his biggest challenge, but something he handles with tact. Establishing three simple rules, instead of many, helps tailor his expectations of students to be education oriented and not overbearing.

“I only have three rules: allow me to teach, allow others to learn and be respectful,” he said.

As an example, Bannon said that if a student uses headphones while he works independently, Bannon will let it slide. It would be more disruptive for Bannon to “take 10 minutes to berate him and try to get them to take them out, then there’s an argument and I have to kick him out of class. No one’s going to get anything done during that time,” Bannon said. “I feel being non confrontational has helped me out a lot.”

While Bannon is fast to point out that his class isn’t run as a free-for-all, he said he tries to be flexible and give his students leeway to learn.

“If music helps you stay in your own little box and get what you need to get done done, that’s great.”

Luedtke, on the other hand says the key to her classroom management skills have been developing rapport with students and not rising to jabs.

Luedtke has three younger siblings who she had to look after at times, “so I know what’s worth telling them to stop doing and what’s worth ignoring or giving them a look or stopping. So I think that’s one thing that’s really helped me is that I have three siblings in high school.”

Luedtke received her teaching degree from Central Washington University in family and consumer sciences. She was a student teacher at Kent-Meridian in 2013 and was formally hired as a teacher for the 2014 school year to teach family and consumer science.

“The stuff that I learned at Central with just classroom management and planning lessons, that’s been pretty spot on,” Luedtke said. “But then I also think they can’t prepare you to build relationships. Someone telling you that is one thing, actually doing that is another.”

Luedtke said that it was a bit of a challenge during her student teaching years to develop rapport until she opened up to them about pieces of her life.

“If you want to really build a relationship with your students, you have to open up to them as much as you want them to open up to you,” she said. “That was a big thing that I especially learned in student teaching. I started off and wouldn’t tell them a lot about myself. Come halfway through student teaching, they still didn’t really know who I was as a person. As soon as I told them more about me in general, that’s when the relationships started to get strong.”

The key to building those personal relationships, Luedtke said, is being open and honest with students not just about teaching abilities, but also about who teachers are as people. While Bannon had to work with different educational styles, Luedtke had to show a more personal side of herself to build students’ trust.

Many educators emphasize not revealing their age to students, but for Luedtke who looked like she could have fit in behind a desk with the students she taught, it was a pressing question in her pupil’s minds and one that she needed to answer before they could feel like she was being open with them.

“So when I finally told them, they were like ‘OK, we can trust you, you’re going to tell us, you’re going to be honest with us,'” she said.

Now that students know Luedtke as more than just a teacher, things are easier to maintain in the classroom.

“They see my spunky personality and how quirky I am, and so they know who I am as a person more than just their teacher,” she said.