I will be student teaching this upcoming spring 2017 semester! Any advice helps :)

Congratulations, that's so exciting! I was a student teacher last semester, although I wasn't a typical student teacher. :/ Even though I was called a "student teacher," my role was a little different since my major is Speech-Language Pathology, so I was at a school where I did speech therapy and saw kids in my speech room (and went into a few classrooms weekly to teach specialized lessons specific to language concepts).

What grades will you be working with? I worked with primary school kids and high schoolers. I absolutely looooooved it. I don't know exactly how your program will work, but my supervisor eased me into the process so I wasn't taking on all the kids from day 1. It was a gradual process where I added more kids to my caseload over time until I was seeing all 50 kids a week by the end of the semester. Will yours be sort of similar in that you'll gradually teach more lessons as time goes on?

I can't really offer advice from an education major standpoint, but know that you have people there to support you. It can be overwhelming and some days are super stressful but take it one hour at a time. Always have a back-up plan, too! One time I went in to teach a lesson on prepositions and the PowerPoint file wouldn't open. I totally freaked out but I ended up using the white board instead and it went well. Also, know that no one is going to expect you to be perfect. This is a learning experience and you're meant to make mistakes because that's the only way we can truly learn and grow and fine tune our skills. The experiences you'll have will be invaluable. Don't get too down on yourself if you make mistakes or think that you could have done something better -- that just means that you know how to make your next lesson even better!