Professor, Department of Elementary Education, University of North Alabama

My name is Lisa Clayton and I am a professor in the Department of Elementary Education here at the University of North Alabama. I teach courses that deal with early childhood language arts and reading, so basically I teach people to be teachers. So I have students throughout different courses. I teach, like I said, reading courses, I teach reading assessment courses, I teach undergraduates and graduate students. I also supervise interns in the field. So basically, a semester for me looks like teaching 12 hour loads, so that's teaching, basically, four courses, or if one course is more than three hours then that adds up. Whatever adds up to 12 hours and being in the classroom with my students, providing instruction in that traditional setting, but also providing an online environment for them to have discussion and then also being able to supervise them out in the local schools and in our laboratory school here on campus. So, our students have a lot of opportunities to, of course, learn about how to be a teacher in the classroom. But we want to put them in situations that are real life. We don't want to just keep them here on campus, we want to go take the knowledge that we have given them and put them right out into the schools and so I will teach something to them and then we go implement that in the classroom, and so we will work with cooperating teachers in the schools and let them see if what they thought worked really does work. So as a professor we should all excel in teaching and scholarship, research, which goes with scholarship, and service. And so, yes I teach approximately four classes sometimes that can be a little bit more if I take on a overload or if I teach a Freshman Experience class, but sometimes it's right at that 12 hour mark. And so then, yes as a professor, we also have to hold office hours each week for our students. Those might be held on campus or they might even be held online as well, but we want to provide that face to face exposure for our students to feel that they are welcome in our office at any time, and it's just an awesome experience to work with students because we're there to help guide them as an advisor through their college career. From freshmen all the way to their senior level and into they're getting a job themselves.