Abstract

The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to examine how 64 student teachers at one mid-sized rural Midwestern university identified their students’ needs and perceived the ways in which they met their students’ individual needs. The authors used constant comparison methods and focused coding to examine, verify, and draw inferences from 4,668 student teacher journal entries. The student teachers met their students’ needs in 27 different ways across four themes: cultural, behavioral, social, and curricular. Though student teachers described a variety of methods for addressing classroom management and learning differentiation, they exhibited deficiency in meeting students’ cultural needs.