Episode Details

Anthony Godfrey:
Hello and welcome to the Supercast. I'm your host, Superintendent Anthony Godfrey. They are the best of the best coming right out of college, many of them heading right into Jordan School District classrooms. Who are they? Well, you're about to find out.

On this episode of the Supercast, we sit down with some very talented interns who are well on their way to full-time jobs as teachers, thanks to a partnership between Jordan School District and local universities. It's a pretty cool program with some pretty cool people.

We're here talking with Jane Olsen today about our intern program in Jordan School District. Introduce yourself and talk to us a little bit about the future intern programs we have going.

Jane Olsen:
So I'm Jane Olsen. I'm in Human Resources and I'm a Talent Acquisition and Licensing Specialist. So our intern–

Anthony Godfrey:
Talent Acquisition and Licensing Specialist. I'm trying to see if that makes a good acronym. TALP? No, it doesn't really work.

Jane Olsen:
No, it doesn’t really work.

Anthony Godfrey:
Alright. And tell us about acquiring talent in Jordan District.

Jane Olsen:
So one of the ways that we acquire talent is through our intern program. So we have three partnership universities, BYU, UVU, and U of U and we house anywhere between 22 to 13 interns per year. We have a really high retention rate on those because it's a really wonderful opportunity to have a great realistic job preview from start to finish as a teacher instead of a really short preview when you're doing a student teaching experience of about 12 weeks.

Anthony Godfrey:
Most people are used to student teaching as the concept for how you learn to be a teacher. Many people may have when they were in school had a student teacher. So can you describe what the traditional student-teacher program looks like? Which we still have a lot of student teachers in our district. And then what the intern program looks like and how that's different.

Jane Olsen:
So for an intern, it is actually full year teaching. The biggest difference for them is they actually have a dedicated intern facilitator that they work with all year long. So from start to finish, from classroom setup, even when the summer they'll be preparing their curriculum. But student teaching, on the other hand, it's more concentrated. You have a gradual release of about 12 weeks and you're only in charge of the classroom for about two weeks. So in terms of ownership and accountability for that classroom, it's much higher at an intern level.

Anthony Godfrey:
The intern with a lot of support is the teacher for the year.

Jane Olsen:
Yes.

Anthony Godfrey:
And the student teacher starts out with observations, does a few lessons, and as you said, for about two weeks takes over the class.

Jane Olsen:
Yeah. So as it determines a realistic job preview, you're not really getting the full experience of setting up your classroom, setting up the rules, setting up an entire year worth of curriculum, and making sure that you're following through on the planning. Student teachers, they have an opportunity, just a small window of opportunity to see what that looks like. The parent interaction is obviously going to be lower as well because in two weeks you're not going to have as many interactions with parents than you would over the course of a school year.

Anthony Godfrey: