Mid-Winter Convention

Mid-Winter Convention:

Yesterday I had the opportunity to travel with West Perry High School to the Pennsylvania Mid-Winter convention at the Farm show complex. We brought 51 students along with us on the day trip. Several students were competing in the Ag Issues Career Development Event where they placed second out of 6 teams.

As this was only my third time at the farm show in my life, naturally I was still in awe of all the vendors in the complex. Let alone I was also trying to fill the role of a teacher for the first time.

This trip was my second real experience as a teacher at West Perry. The first being National Convention in Louisville. This was my first experience working to manage a large group of 50 students all at one time.

What did I take from this trip? Sometimes organized chaos is the best option. Once we got to the complex, the students had to be in groups of at least 3, but other than that they were free to roam the complex as they wanted. The only exception was that we all had to meet at the large arena to group back up and watch the convention.

Overall this was a great trip and a great way to get me used to have the responsibilities and disposition of an Ag teacher. The biggest challenge was getting the students back on the bus after the convention was over.

Lab reflection

This semester we had the opportunity to get real teaching experience through our AEE 412 lab. Overall this was a very good experience for me. Through my time here in college, the majority of my classes have been focused on teaching content knowledge, not giving me the opportunity to actually practice teaching the material. 

The only part of the labs that i would consider changing would be the amount of time we spend in an actual classroom (maybe because I enjoyed it so much). It was a great experience though. 

Through the experiences in this lab I have grown both personally and professionally. I have realized what areas of my teaching I really need to work on in order to continue to grow. Mainly I need to continue developing my skills when it comes to effective questioning. I feel as though I have grown the most when it comes to my clarity of instruction. 

I also feel like now I will be able to look the lessons I teach and reflect on them more effectively. Being able to reflect and see where you need to improve is going to be a huge part of my student teaching experience. In order for me to  continue to grow as an educator, I will need to continue to reflect. 

**I apologize for the odd formatting, there seems to be a computer error

FFA LifeKnowledge Lesson

On Monday I went to West Perry High School to do a visit with my cooperating teachers and teach a LifeKnowledge lesson. The class I was teaching ended up being the 3rd period Large Animal Science class (a class that I will be teaching in the spring).

Overall, the lesson went well. I chose the lesson "The Need for Leaders". This lesson is designed to teach students 3 main topics: what is a leader, why do we need leaders, and how can they be leaders.

As I was teaching the lesson, I felt as though I was extremely rushed to get to the next section. This lesson was intended to last 50 minutes the way they wanted it taught, but I believe this lesson should take an hour if we want the students to actually get the content and understand what we are talking about. It seemed like every 5 minutes we were doing something different.

After the class, Mrs. Miller told me that she was impressed with how engaged the students were, she was not expecting them to be as engaged for a few different reasons. One main reason was that the students were all ready to leave for thanksgiving break. Some of the feedback that the students gave me made it obvious that this lesson needed more time. The majority of the students wrote on their papers that they wish the lesson had gone a little bit slower, or they had more time to share out their ideas and plan out what they were doing more. The rest of the feedback I received was more focused on my own performance. A lot of the positive feedback was that I did very well projecting my voice in the classroom I was in (it was a back room of the shop where sound did not travel well) and that the instructions I gave were very clear and they knew exactly what I expected them to do.

Overall the lesson went well. I received a lot of good feedback from the students and Mrs. Miller; and I got the opportunity to meet the students in one of my classes for the spring. The only issue that I really ran into was that the lesson was very rushed to get finished and still have time to get the feedback I needed.  

Micro-teaching

In this blog post I am going to discuss my micro-teaching experience each day.  I was teaching the water cycle to the Natural Resources and Ecology class at Tyrone High School

Day 1: 

Today was a little bit rough, the students at Tyrone did not understand the materials as well as Mrs. Hoy and I thought they did. The students were also testing my classroom management skills.

During the class, the students were working well and responding to the lesson, I did not get nearly as much covered as I wanted to (less than half of the lesson that was supposed to take 1 day). After the class was over, I spoke with Mrs. Hoy and we decided that the students did not understand the materials and terms at all. I decided to take a different approach for day 2. 

Day 2:

Today I decided to start with a quick PowerPoint to teach the students all of the terms they needed to know to understand the lesson. For each term I gave the definition and examples for each. For example, deposition is the process of water vapor turning directly into ice. You would normally see deposition when you are either high up in the mountains, or on a very cold night when your windshield is dry but you come out in the morning and it is covered in frost. The students really learned the definitions from this. 

Next I had the students take the slips of paper they had (with the picture and definitions) and cut it in half so that the picture was separated from the definition. Once they were cut up, they had to put all the pieces back into an envelope. I collected the envelopes and mixed them up so they got one from a different group. The students then had to work to pair up they pictures and definitions, and also place them in order they might come in the water cycle. 

Once they students finished this they were given a sheet with 3 boxes on it. In those 3 boxes were the words: Water Vapor, Water, Ice. The students were then told to draw a concept map using all of the terms they had learned. This was meant to reinforce the way water changes during each stage of the water cycle. 

Day 3: 

Today we finally got around to finishing the lesson. This class was a great learning experience for me. I got to see the reality of teaching and see how a 1 day lesson could turn into a 3 day lesson. once we finished the conclusion part of the CASE lesson, I handed the students out a learner satisfaction form for them to fill out. The feedback they gave had a huge range. Some students wish I had gone fast and others wanted me to slow down more. This just goes to show that no matter what you do as a teacher, it is not going to work for everyone. 

Inquiry lab

This week we had to design a lesson around inquiry based instruction and present it for our lab section. This type of instruction is meant to have the students direct what they learn through questioning and the scientific method.

For this lab I had the students exploring the effects of pollution and methods of cleaning the pollution. To start the lesson, I had the students each "pollute" a clear cup of water with several different common items such as salt, pepper, hot chocolate mix, toothpicks, and vegetable oil. each student had the chance to pollute their water however they wanted to. This was to simulate what could happen when certain environmental laws and policies are not followed (previous lesson).

After their water was polluted, the students were directed to trade their water with someone else in the class. Once their received their water, the students were supposed to then make observations on their water, and come up with ideas of how they can clean the pollution. every student had their own unique method, some of which worked, others did not work so much.

Improvement:

After watching my lab, I realize where I need to improve on still. 

Although my clarity of the instructions I gave was much better than before, the clarity of the content I explained still needs work. I found myself struggling for the correct words when I gave explanations of certain concepts and ideas. 

I plan on improving on this during my micro-teaching experience next week. I have been reading up on all of my lesson plans and refreshing myself on the content that I will be teaching. 

How will I use this?

During my student teaching, I plan on using an improved version of this lesson with more materials for the students to use. This was probably my best lesson yet and with a little bit of improvement it would be a lesson worth sharing to other teachers. 

Teach Ag Chat

For our Teach Ag chat, Stacia Gouger and myself were taking a slightly different idea. We decided to discuss the integration of place-based environmental education into school based agriculture education.


As you can see, the questions we asked were very focused on environmental education and different techniques for agriculture teachers to use in their classrooms.

Prior to the chat, we spent the majority of our time advertising for the chat and calling out specific people on twitter to try to get them involved.

Our biggest success for this chat ended up being our professional guests. We specific contacted several people; only three of which responded back. We had the education specialist with NAAEE, A place based environmental educator from Canada, and an education resource person with the Elk county visitor center. All of our professional guests brought several resources to share with the people on the chats.

Overall our chat went well, although I do wish there had been more people involved, the conversations were a little bit slower than we would have liked them to be.

National Convention

What happened?

This past week I was at the National FFA convention in Louisville, Kentucky with my cooperating school. This was the first time that I was acting as a teacher with my cooperating school. Throughout the week we spent time at the convention center, visiting local industry, and even going on a dinner cruise. 

Day 1:

The first day was actually very unproductive. We spent 12 hours in a bus driving down to Louisville. The students all grouped together in the back of the bus as expected us teachers and chaperons were in the front of the bus. 

Day 2:

This was the first day we spent at the convention center. In the morning when we got to the center, half the group split off and went to the Ag science fair to help set up 2 boards that West Perry had entered in the CDE. The other half of the group (about 7 students and myself) went into the shopping area to see what all they had. This was the first chance I actually had to meet and get to know some of the students. This was cut short though when half of the students had to leave to go take the Parlia Pro test.

Day 3:

  Once again, half of the group was gone for most of this day. That half of the group was at the practical part of the Parlia Pro CDE. The rest of us were at the convention center. Most of the students that were at the convention center were off doing their own thing. I  took a group of students around the Career fair to visit different colleges and help them decide where they  might be interested in going to school at. All 3 of the students that were with me were interested in working in the veterinary sciences.

Around noon I had to leave the convention center to go be a part of the ATA quiz bowl. This quiz bowl was very competitive and Georgia ended up knocking us out in the first round.

At the end of the day we went to the Belle of Louisville for a dinner cruise on the Ohio River.

Day 4:

Today we went on industry tours, first we stopped at the Louisville Slugger factory and got to see how they make different bats, the entire processs from start to finish. After that (and losing the bus) we went to the Kentucky Derby to visit the track and the museum. 

At the end of the day, We all got together and we played cards in the hotel for a few hours. the students taught me how to play a few games, and I tried to teach them how to play cinch. which was a little more complicated than they are used to. 

Day 5:

 Another long day of driving, Today we were on our way back to PA. nothing really interesting happened today. When we got back I really got to talk to some of the students about student teaching in the spring and what I was excited about to see what was interesting to them.

Overall:

This was a great trip, especially since it was my first time acting as a teacher and getting to know these students. I would always recommend this trip to anyone considering teaching in a high school. given the opportunity to meet and interact with you students for the first time as a teacher is something that everyone should be able to do, and its something that I will never forget.