Unique teaching experience prepares students for managing classrooms while completing degrees

While commencement ceremonies for most Northwest Missouri State University students earning bachelor’s degrees this spring marked a bridge to launching their careers, two undergraduate degree candidates crossed the stage with full-time teaching experience already on their resumes.

Lonee French and Noah Johnson both completed Bachelor of Science in Education degrees in middle school education, and both are already working teachers after serving during the past year as teachers of record.

Teachers of record are contracted as employees within a school district who also are completing degree requirements as part of their certification process. They work as full-time employees instead of completing a semester of student teaching.

“A lot of them are just ready to take over their own classroom,” Cathy Barr, the assistant director of clinical field experiences at Northwest, said. “When they are a teacher candidate teacher of record, they have their own room. They don’t have a cooperating teacher in the room with them, so they are acting as the lead instructor of that classroom.”

To become a teacher of record, teacher candidates must go through a vetting process that includes a team of faculty meeting to discuss the candidate’s grade-point average, a degree audit and an evaluation of where the candidate may be best suited to teach.

“Our program has been successful with the teacher candidate teacher of record program because we do a very good job at vetting and not putting kids in situations that they’re not comfortable in,” said Dr. Gregory Rich, an associate professor of education at Northwest who co-authored a journal article about the growing number of rural school districts using teachers of record to cover teacher shortages. “In the end, our success has been pretty apparent.”

Rich added, “Northwest has quite a reputation of preparing teacher candidates. In the four-state region, our partners know that our teacher candidates, when they come out of Northwest, they’re ready.”

For Johnson, accepting an offer last year from the superintendent of the Nodaway-Holt School District to serve as a teacher of record was an easy decision.

“Having a mock interview with him a couple of months prior, I already had a strong understanding of the district’s values,” he said. “I recognized the massive opportunity I had to jumpstart my career and begin my professional teaching journey a full year ahead of schedule.”

Johnson discovered Nodaway-Holt during his first year at Northwest, when he was hired as an assistant baseball coach. He spent the 2025-26 academic year with the school district as a history teacher for grades seven through 12 and will continue his work there next fall.

“I realized then that I could be a bright, energetic light for the kids,” he said. “Someone who is always in their corner, cheering them on.”

Johnson recognizes Northwest helps its students make connections with area teachers, and that equipped him with the necessary tools to be successful.

“The education courses at Northwest are outstanding,” Johnson said. “From classroom management techniques to research-based instructional strategies, I have taken the theory from those classes and directly implemented it into my daily teaching toolbox. The transition from the college classroom to my own classroom felt seamless because of that preparation.”

French, meanwhile, taught junior high math this spring in the Worth County R-III School District and will continue fulfilling the role for the coming school year.

She embraced the independence that comes with being a teacher of record.

“There’s many benefits like being independent, being your own learner and getting to do it on your own,” she said. “I have learned so much by just getting to do it on my own and learning the way I want to do it in a classroom.”

It was some of her grade school teachers who inspired her to pursue education.

“I had not only one but several teachers that I could have gone to if I was struggling,” French said. “There are a lot of kids that don’t have mom and dad or grandma and grandpa — someone there for them. Sometimes it’s a teacher. So being that light, being the person that they can come see in the morning with a smile on their face. It’s not necessarily always about teaching content, but teaching life. I want these kids to be prepared for life more than anything.”