Ava Murawski is spending her final year in the Rockwood School District in one of her first classrooms.
The 18-year-old Eureka High School senior is enrolled in the cadet teaching class this year and has helped teach in Diane Dressel’s kindergarten class at Pond Elementary School.
Murawski of Wildwood was Dressel’s student at Pond, and she jumped at the chance to return to her kindergarten classroom.
“I chose her (Dressel) to be able to come back here,” Murawski said about requesting a classroom for the cadet teaching course. “The room looks the same. Everything is still NASCAR with a few new things because Jimmy Johnson changed his number.”
Dressel, who will retire at the end of this school year after teaching kindergarten in the district for the last 36 years, said she has actively sought to have cadet teachers come to her classroom for the last eight years. She said she enjoys having high school students like Murawski to mentor and to get additional support cadet teachers provide for her students.
“There are times like with Ava, who was one of my former students, that I get to see where they are now,” Dressel said. “All of the students are patient with the kindergartners and they can work with kids who need some extra help. They can review something or help with something they are struggling with to build their confidence. It is another TLC. They are someone the kids can look up to as role models.”
Cadet teaching is part of the district’s Welcome Home Rockwood program, which helps students pursue a career in education. Cadet teaching is a class offered every semester that splits students’ time between teaching in an elementary or middle school classroom and receiving traditional instruction at their high school.
Welcome Home Rockwood also guarantees that the district will find a place in Rockwood for a former student to student teach, a requirement to earn a teaching degree.
“Our job as educators is to prepare kids to go out into the workforce,” said Kati Reboulet, assistant superintendent of human resources. “Specifically, we want to encourage good, talented young people to think about education. As they advance through their course work at a university, we stay in contact with them and try to get them to come back and student teach with us. The ultimate goal is to hire them as teachers. We have had that in place for many years as an effort to try and support our young educators.”
Knowing early
Murawski said she has wanted to be a teacher since she was 5 years old.
She said playing school with her younger sister, Vivian, 15, and helping younger children with her swimming team led her to want to be a teacher.
“I just love helping people and teaching,” said Murawski, who also has an older sister, Matty, 21. “I just loved playing with my sister and doing the whole teaching thing. I have thought about other things, but I always go back to wanting to be a teacher.”
Murawski said being in her old kindergarten classroom helped solidify her ideas on how she would pursue a career in education.
“I didn’t know if I wanted to teach high school or elementary,” she said. “Being here in an elementary room has given me a glimpse of what it will be like when I’m a teacher. I have experienced different kids and how they act in different situations. That helped me figure out I want to teach elementary students.”
Dressel said helping students figure out what kind of teacher they want to be or if they really want to be a teacher is one of the biggest benefits of cadet teaching.
“I think a lot of people go into teaching and after a couple years they realize teaching is not for them,” said Dressel, who has mentored 10 cadet teachers over the last eight years. “The benefit of this program is they can go into college knowing their dream. They don’t just sign up for college and by their junior year decide they want to be a teacher. They can go into college knowing what courses they are going to need to be a teacher. Also, anything they learn in college classes, they can think about how they would use it in their own classroom because they have experienced being in the classroom.”
The class
Janice DeNure, who teaches cadet teaching and French at Eureka High, said cadet teachers typically spend two days a week in either an elementary or middle school providing instruction to students and one day a week receiving instruction from her at the high school.
She said she has 27 students in her cadet teaching class this semester.
DeNure said she believes only about 2 or 3 percent of the students who enroll in cadet teaching know they want to be teachers while still in high school, and while that number is low, she also sees many of her former cadet teaching students return to the district.
“We have hired a lot of Eureka (High) grads at Eureka,” said DeNure, who has worked at Eureka High for 27 years. “I don’t have statistics, but I would venture a guess that many of them have gone through the cadet teaching program.”
Murawski said cadet teaching opened her eyes to the amount of work teachers put into developing lessons for students.
“I see how much time it takes for (Dressel) to find an idea and how she has to make it fit for kindergartners,” Murawski said. “(Dressel) will create these bags with all of these little things in it to teach a lesson. I didn’t realize how much work and effort goes into each activity.”
In the room
DeNure said she typically observes her students in classrooms about twice a semester. She said she has been impressed by how Murawski has handled herself with the kindergarten students.
“The thing that has impressed me the most is how she has the ability to get students to do things,” DeNure said. “There was one kindergartner who downright refused to do an activity, and she was able to work around it. She said, ‘I will do this half and you do that half and we will see who gets done the quickest.’ I thought that was a great way to push a student to do something she knew the student could do.”
Murawski said she learned very early about the challenges a teacher may face that are outside the realm of instruction.
“I had a kid cry on my first days here during the first semester,” she said. “I had to learn how to be quick on my feet to calm him down. I ended up taking him out to the hallway because he was absent from the class before and was behind on the videos the class had watched. I caught him up on the videos, so he could go into the class and watch the videos they were watching.”
Dressel said after seeing how Murawski works with students, she would hire the student as a teacher after college, and she would volunteer to help in Murawski’s future classroom.
“She is caring, patient, thoughtful and reassuring,” Dressel said. “She is a good listener. She is a role model and a leader, and she can develop friendships with the students. Ava is one of those people that if students have a problem, they can go to her.”
Welcome home
Reboulet said one part of the Welcome Home Rockwood program that is underused is the scholarship component.
She said juniors may apply for the Welcome Home scholarship, and they find out if they are selected before entering their senior years. She said one student from each of Rockwood’s four high schools receive scholarships each year, and the students receive $1,000 to help them pursue an education degree.
“I would say about five students per school apply,” Reboulet said. “It is not a high number.”
She also said while Rockwood has not seen the effects of a national teacher shortage that has developed since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, district officials understand the importance of helping foster future teachers who may return to the district.
“We continue to support young people, specifically our graduates, through cadet teaching and the Welcome Home program,” Reboulet said. “Anything we can do to continue to get people to want to go into education is wonderful.”
While Murawski didn’t need the program to convince her that she wants to be a teacher, she said cadet teaching is playing an important role as she pursues a career in education.
“I am truly grateful for this,” she said. “I wouldn’t know where I want to be for sure without this. I would still be thinking about either high school, middle school or elementary school. I have learned so much from this, and it has locked in what I want to do.
“I hope to come back to Rockwood (to teach), but I would be happy anywhere.”