While some are good at faking it, no teacher is completely confident when they first enter the field of education. Capture your initial emotions through the creation of a teaching journal. Use a standard notebook or journal, and jot down your thoughts, feelings and ideas daily. Make specific reference to lessons that worked and flopped, as well as discussing ways you might do things differently in the future. Uncertainty and confusion are both natural emotions for beginning teachers. Allow these feelings, that you almost undoubtedly experience, to come through in your journal, creating a true testament of your student teaching experience.
Show your students' progress by creating a student work showcase. As you move through your student teaching experience, keep copies of work that is exceptionally well done. Place these works in a notebook along with the activity sheet that explains the activity that the student completed. Keep this work organized for easy reference. At the end of your student teaching experience, explore the work in the student work binder, and compose a written response explaining what the work shows and how, through viewing the work, you can see that students are developing an understanding of the content knowledge being taught. Use this student work showcase as a demonstration of your effectiveness as a teacher.
Provide a peek into your student teaching experience by creating a photo essay. Take snapshots of your students throughout your student teaching, capturing them while hard at work or engaged in play. As your student teaching experience draws to a close, organize these photos into a pictorial essay. You can organize these photos chronologically, showing your progression as you moved through student teaching, or thematically, exploring different aspects of teaching as you move through the photos. Using a poster board or notebook, glue your images in your selected order and add annotations, explaining what each image is showing and what you learned from the experience depicted. Compose a short, written response to accompany your pictures explaining what you learned from your student teaching experience and how you will use that as you enter the field of professional teaching.
Create a project that you can actually use by building an effective activities binder. As you move through your student teaching and work with your cooperative or mentor teacher, keep copies of activities that you find particularly useful. Add to the activities projects or lessons that you develop. Organize your materials in a binder, ordering them by subject or topic. Create a table of contents, allowing for easy access to the lessons within the binder. If your whole student teaching class is completing this project, trade your binder with others and create copies of their activities as well. When you enter the classroom as a first year teacher, you will be grateful for all of the previously created and tested lesson material.