In the theory part of the practicum, they role-play, they've considered various hypothetical questions. But as you can imagine, there's really no substitute for standing in front of a class all by yourself. In their final semester at RIC, prospective teachers spend about 450 hours as student teachers, out in one of the schools working with students under the direct supervision of a mentor. That's where the students put what they have learned about classroom management to the test. It's a light net, but it's there all the time.
Some people are able to do that from the first minute they walk into a class.
Some people are struggling with that desperately through a hefty part of their student teaching. If all goes well, the one semester of student teaching should be enough to prepare prospective teachers to go out onto the job market and into the schools. Not all goes well all the time, however. Two recent national surveys have shown that teachers themselves feel they needed more and better training in classroom management before they started on the job. A study of first-year teachers by Metropolitan Life and Louis Harris Associates found that more than half of the teachers wished they had had more practical training before they began teaching on their own in the classrooms.