An outstanding first year

On 9 March 2023, 33 enthusiastic student teachers from SDU Takeover visited St. Knud’s Gymnasium (upper secondary school) in Odense. It was the last visit of the project’s pilot year before this year’s 58 talented student teachers can take a well-deserved break. 
But for many of them, it will only be a break, because they have chosen to continue and are ready to start a new round of visits in the school year 2023/2024. 

From 12 to 18 visits

There has been a great demand from upper secondary schools for visits from SDU Takeover. To that end, during the first year of the project the Executive Board has decided to expand the planned 12 visits for 2023/2024 to 18 visits. And it has turned out to be a good decision, because the programme is currently almost sold out – in fact, there is only one visit that has not yet been booked! The visits extend to upper secondary schools throughout Southern Denmark based on the following distribution: seven in South Jutland, six in West Zealand and four on Funen.
But the faster scale-up also requires even more talented students to join the team and represent SDU and their study programme.

Demand for more student teachers

As a result, new job advertisements have recently been posted in the search for 40 new students, which will bring the SDU Takeover team up to a total of 80 students.
‘There are many factors to consider, and it is only possible to get exactly the right students from the right programmes because our collaboration with the faculties works so well. We’ve found a model that we can use in collaboration with the faculties to decide which programmes should be represented and how to select them. So now we can only hope that lots of students are interested and can see the relevance of a student job like this,’ says Anne Søndergaard, project manager for SDU Takeover.

During the year, the student teachers completed a compulsory basic didactic training course. The course provides the students with numerous didactic tools, enabling them to put together a teaching programme and to manage teaching an upper secondary school class of up to 30 pupils. After completing the course, the student teachers can then sign up for the secondary school visits, and most of them have made four or more visits during the school year.
This has given the students relevant teaching and dissemination experience that they can use in their further studies and professional lives. At the same time, it has given more than 2,500 upper secondary school students a glimpse of life as a student at SDU, and 89% of them thought that the day was good or very good. Hopefully, in the long run the visits will also encourage even more young people from all over Southern Denmark to apply for their dream study programme at SDU, following their encounter with Takeover and all the other good bridge-building activities going on at SDU. Our current student teachers are certainly doing their part to show that being a student at SDU is worth striving for.

Would you like to know more?

You can read and find out much more about what SDU Takeover is on the website (in Danish), where there is also a direct link to the job advertisement as well as an overview of which upper secondary schools have booked visits in the next school year.