Abbey Wiggins is a teacher at heart.
There are few experiences as gratifying as seeing a student reach the proverbial A-HA! moment, she said, where a seemingly foreign concept suddenly comes into focus.
She experienced many such moments in her 11 years in education, teaching primarily science in schools of all sizes.
She’s shifting gears a bit, priming her students today to become the teachers of tomorrow.
Wiggins, 34, is Allen Community College’s new education instructor, for students interested in pursuing teaching careers.
She has 69 students under her wing this semester, 15 of which have already progressed enough to become classroom observers, through a partnership with USD 257.
There, the Allen students will sit in on classes aligned with their future career plans. (The students are required to have 30 hours of observation as part of their course work.)
“They’ll have some assignments that go along with it, to help them look for different instructional pieces and classroom management techniques,” Wiggins said. “It’s all about helping them to decide, ‘Am I interested in this grade level,’ and help them start to think about what classroom management and instructional strategies they’d want to use in their own practice.”
An ability to (a) connect with students and (b) adapt to changes in the classroom are paramount, Wiggins said.
“I’m big on hands-on learning,” she said. “We’re working on practical tools they can use in their classrooms.”
WIGGINS grew up in Maryland, but has taught entirely in Kansas — her husband is a rancher — after earning her bachelor’s degree at Oklahoma State University and her master’s degree at Baker University in Baldwin.
From there, her teaching career took her to some of Kansas’s largest (Free State High School in Lawrence) and smallest districts (Class 1A Hamilton).
All of the stops were enjoyable, she admitted, “but small schools have my heart,” where individual teacher-student relationships and a breadth of opportunities abound.
“A good teacher, in my opinion, is someone who knows their content, and cares about the students, and is willing to put in the hard work to help their students learn. Ultimately, any good teacher wants to see their students succeed.”
Wiggins, who lives in Greenwood County, sees parallels, even after shifting from a K-12 setting to Allen.
“Obviously, the content shift has been big, but I feel the students are the same,” she said. “They’re just older.”
