Fall Leadership Conference

What did we do?

Monday, we were at the Blair County Convention Center with the goal of teaching FFA treasurers from all across the state about their position, responsibilities, and skills which a leaders should possess. our workshop had a total of 20 students, many of which had never been a treasurer before this year. Overall the workshop went very well and the students seemed to really enjoy it. This was our first real experience as a facilitator in our journey to becoming agriculture teachers, and it was a great one. 

Highlights:

Towards the end of our lesson, we had the students create a "reflection sandwich" the goal of the activity was to have the students reflect on what they wanted to take back to their chapter, whether it was skills of a leader, duties of the treasurer, or engaging students in their chapter. After giving the students time to think and write their plans down. I explained to the students that they may not have all the qualities of a leader, but they may still be good leaders, just like you may not have the cheese on a sandwich but it is still a good sandwich. when this was discussed, Sam chimed in with "be the bacon on the cheeseburger" and the students absolutely loved it (especially because it was so close to lunch). For the rest of the workshop the students decided our motto was going to be "be the bacon".

At the very end, we had enough time for a Q & A. The Students were extremely interested in our past experiences as officers, and different ideas that we had to improve our chapters engagement.

How could we have improved?

So there are a few ways we could have improved according to the students. The majority of the suggestions were to bring bacon (or another kind of food). But another idea which I really liked was to give them time as officers to discuss their own ideas and give each other suggestions.

After our own personal reflection, We came up with a few areas we could have improved on. The first is getting the students excited. At first we were having some real trouble getting the students excited to be in the workshop. We tried getting them out of their seats and being active but nothing was working. So this is definitely an area we need to work on.
   
The second area we needed to work on was our timing, Now to be fair I feel like if the students had been engaged we wouldn't have had as much of a problem with this. At around 11:30 (half hour before we were supposed to be finished) we completely ran out of materials. So Sam came up with two more activities to do with the students. The first was basically outlining a map for the students to follow to improve the officers and engagement in their chapters. The second activity was to create an acronym of the different duties of a chapter treasurer.

Overall:

The workshop was great, I believe the students learned a lot and definitely had fun. One teacher came up to me after and was telling me how all of his students could not stop talking about the different workshops. I consider this to be an amazing thing. I cannot wait to start teaching!