MERRIAM ? Teacher-in-training Jennifer Arthur circulated among her first-graders one afternoon earlier this year as they worked in groups to solve a problem involving a fictitious Uncle Harvey and his sandwiches.

Arthur had told the children Uncle Harvey had two kinds of bread, as well as peanut butter and cheese. She wanted the students to tell her what four combinations can come from his sandwich-making if he put one sandwich spread on one slice of bread.

But more importantly, Arthur wanted her charges at South Park Elementary School to think about how they solved the problem. She discovered that the suburban Kansas City students sometimes struggled to explain themselves.

Arthur is a Kansas University student, finishing her teacher training with a full year in the public schools.

For decades, aspiring teachers sometimes did not set foot in a classroom until they took over duties in their last semester in college.

But, as Kansas legislators have struggled in recent years with providing adequate funds for schools and trying to keep qualified teachers in the classroom, the way those teachers are trained has changed. More aspiring teachers are getting into classrooms earlier in their training.

And there’s little doubt that being in the classroom is helpful to aspiring teachers like Arthur. She picked up important information about her students from her lesson about Uncle Harvey and his sandwiches.

“They showed that they can do more group work than we originally thought,” she said. “First grade, we thought, ‘Cooperative learning, that’s something they may struggle with socially. They aren’t at that age as developmentally ready to be able to handle a group.’ But they are doing great.”

Medical model of training

A growing number of aspiring teachers and their young students are benefiting from a so-called medical model of teacher training.

Eighteen of 22 Kansas colleges and universities that train teachers have revamped their education programs during the past decade to give education majors more time in schools, said Martha Gage, the state’s director of teacher education and licensing.

Also, last summer, the state switched to a system that gives first-year teachers a conditional license. Teachers must complete a project that displays their ability to teach a lesson and demonstrate that students have learned — or if the students haven’t learned, explain why — before they are fully licensed.

“It’s a whole new model from when I was in teacher training and we used to just talk about what was happening,” Gage said. “Obviously you have to have the theory, but you just get more understanding when you’re there where it’s occurring other than reading about it in a book.”

Instead of spending just a single semester student teaching as seniors, education majors are spending time in schools as early as their freshman year.

Learning by doing

Though the programs vary, education students typically start out observing and eventually begin practicing what they’ve learned in classrooms as a professor or classroom teacher watches and critiques.

With all the time spent in schools, education majors experience fewer surprises while student teaching and after they graduate and have their own classroom.

Janice Wissman, associate dean of the College of Education at Kansas State University, said in the past education majors sometimes found out, “I may have been a straight-A student, but I don’t like working with students.”

Now, she says, “we don’t have too many people who come to student teaching and say. ‘this isn’t for me.'”

Advocates also say education majors who complete these hands-on programs are better prepared to met the demands of the No Child Left Behind Act, the federal law that requires all students be proficient in math and reading by 2014.