Micro-Teaching and Parli Pro #psuaged16

I now call this blog to order! Welcome to the only blog of my micro-teaching experience from Bald Eagle High School! I had the opportunity to teach an FFA Leadership class on Parliamentary Procedures last week.

If you haven’t heard about micro-teaching, it is awesome program that gives preservice teachers a chance can go out into the “field” and get some experience teaching in a different classroom environment than where they will be student teaching in the spring. It is the chance to create and implement your own lesson plans in the classroom and see if they work. I was under the supervision of Mr. Todd Biddle teaching to his class of 13 students. Let’s jump in and see what happened!

Day One:

- I opened up the class with an introduction of Parliamentary Procedures with a PowerPoint and guided notes.

- Emphasizing different aspects of Parli Pro and making them relatable to their experiences really helps their understanding

- Repeat after me, is not as childish as they think! They learned a lot of the terminology and how to say motions this way!

Day Two:

- I needed to get their energy up, so we did a recap and then proceeded to play a GAME!

            - If your students need debate help, I played a game where they had to debate about a topic positively or negatively and include the three parts of a beginning statement, a middle statement, and then the conclusion! PLUS: if you make it into a competition the students get really into it!

- Talking was a little bit of an issue today, but the students were just really excited!

- I need to be aware of the amount of time! We all got into the class that the bell rang and surprised us all!

Day Three:

- TEST TIME! The students took a test about what they learned. I also allowed them to use Roberts Rules of Order and their notes from the week because it was more important for me to have them understand the subject matter than memorize it!

- Debate Time: The students had the opportunity to debate about two things that Mr. Biddle wanted to talk about regarding Farm Show and their Secret Santa Party that they have every year

- Getting the students talking was a little hard, but once I put motions on the floor that the students didn’t like/like they got really into it!

So what did I learn over these three days?

- My energy and passion for what I was teaching did not go unnoticed! The students were engaged most of the time while they were there and liked the games that we played

- Preparation! As a student, it is hard to understand what prep goes into each lesson and how I need to be on top of my game all the time!

- Being Flexible! There were some instances where the lesson before me wasn’t wrapped up and I had to switch the students to think in different gears to what we were learning next.

- Just have fun! When you are relaxed and having fun, your students will too! They pick up on bad energy and feed off of that. Just relax and have fun!

 

 Overall, I had a blast teaching and learning about where I am about and how I am progressing for the spring semester at Walter Biddle Saul High School!

Thanks for reading Ag Ed Fam!

Let's Teach IBI! #labchat #aee412

One of the senior courses that pre-service teachers are required to take is AEE 412 also known as “Methods of Teaching Agriculture.” During this class, students are able to prepare lesson plans and teach to practice their classroom management and work on their teaching skills. During the course of this class, I will be reflecting on how my lessons went to help better me as a teacher. Enjoy!

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Flashback to my senior year of high school where my Ag teacher laid out three different types of mystery meat and we had to guess what was what. There was the famous Spam, overly enjoyed hotdogs, and the salty Scrapple. We as a group had to determine what was what even if that meant that we had to…eat it. Now I know that you may be thinking (YUCK!), but the one thing that I took away from the lab is the hands on experience and the amount of fun I had with my group.

After learning about teaching strategies, I learned that my teacher tricked me into learning by getting me engaged in the class and up out of my seat for an Inquiry Based Lab. This lab is a little different in the fact that students form their own questions and create procedures to answer the overarching question of the lab. In my lab for my IBI, I wanted the students to see just how much their lifestyle was effecting the planet as well as how many trees it would take to offset the amount of carbon dioxide that they produced due to their lifestyle.

PROS:

I pushed the students into connecting their math and science classes into one lesson to get the overall picture of measuring trees

I had students work together as a group and I only allowed them THREE post-it notes! These symbolized the amount of questions they were allowed to ask the teacher

The students received hints AFTER they gave me a general idea about what their procedures were to figure out an formula for the trees

CONS:

I frustrated the “students” I think in the beginning of class because they were unaware of the terminology that I was using. Due to the fact that I will be teaching this to a class that has had this verbiage before, they will be more likely to understand the material than my colleagues in the lab.

Preparation. For this lab, you need to be really up to date on the information that you want to teach to answer any students questions and to help them out when they have clarification questions.

Overall, my “students” grasped the concept fairly well and they understood where I was going with the class. I think that in the real classroom students will enjoy it because it not only includes them getting out of their seats, but it allows them to go…OUTSIDE! Hopefully more information is to come when I get in the classroom but that is all for now!

Thanks for reading Ag Ed Fam!  

Inquiry Based Instruction #weeklyreflection #aee412

You know as teachers, we all have some tricks up our sleeves for our students! One of those tricks is IBI. So what is IBI you may wonder? Well let me tell you! It is called Inquiry Based Instruction. It is a type of instruction that allows students to think through questions to solve a problem at hand. It is also a type of an instruction that can be difficult to teach, but it provides a lot of opportunities for students to learn by solving things themselves and thinking through problems.

Inquiry Based Instruction is interesting as well when it comes to processing the problems at hand. There are five steps that can help any student through IBI. Those steps are as follows:

1.       Question

2.      Investigate

3.      Utilize Evidence in order to describe, predict, and explain

4.      Connect evidence to previous knowledge

5.      Share Findings
 

The reason why this is so effective, according to some studies, is because it is a logical way that we as humans think through out problems and try and find solutions. In a study by Warner and Myers in an article titles “Implementing Inquiry-Based Teaching Methods” it outlined a new system that all teachers should use when putting IBI in their lessons. The list is:

1)      Start the Inquiry Process

2)     Promote Student Dialogue

3)     Transitioning between small groups and classroom discussion

4)     Intervening to clear misconceptions or develop students understanding of content material

5)     Modeling scientific procedures and attitudes

6)     Utilizing student experiences to create new content knowledge

 

Wow what a list right?

After reading all of the articles this week it is interesting to see what type of facilitation for learning can happen in the classroom and lab setting. I am excited to develop my lessons in to push my students to think through problems to facilitate in their learning!

That’s all for this week Ag Ed Fam!

#TeachAgChat Reflection: Gems and Opps

Social media can be a funny thing. It is a chance for us to share information about ourselves with friends, share out important dates for events, and even lets us share information regarding questions that we all have. That is exactly what I wanted to do with my Twitter Chat. I wanted to ask the public on Twitter they thought about technology in the classroom and what resources they could share with me.

The twitter chat was called, “Opportunities and challenges with technology regarding School-Based Agriculture Education.” The questions were fairly simple with an objective to share information and get peoples personal opinions about what they thought technology in the classroom entailed. Check out our graphic below for the questions!

 

So lets talk about the event!

Gems:

My teammates were awesome! Janae Herr and Jenna Timmons, both members of the 2016 senior class, they helped in the collaboration of creating the questions and sharing out the information on their personal twitter feeds.

We were prepared for the event by having our graphic ready to go and finding resources to share out! We even had a dinner ready to go! It was great!

TweetDeck was our lifesaver! It allowed us to tweet and retweet the responses and questions and even let us pre-create the tweets with the questions and time them out to keep the conversation going!

Assigning roles to people is definitely important as well when completing a twitter chat. My teammates and I worked hard to assign roles of the greeter, retweeter, follow up question giver, and many more to make this chat possible! It was great to know that we all had each other’s backs in this assignment!  

Opps:

I believe that we had a lot of questions for a short amount of time. Altough I believe all of our questions were important and we did want to know answers to all of them, it was hard to get them all answered in the short amount of time that we had.

More Experts were needed! In our Twitter Chat we are challenged to find experts to help us out with the chat and to be there to help answer any other questions others may have that we may not have the answer to. The role of the expert was not defined as well as it should so that would be an improvement that I would stress to the other Teach Ag Chat people that are next!

 

Overall, I thought that it was a great opportunity to get our names out there and to find out answers to our questions that we all have. I was impressed by the amount of people that came to the chat and I also enjoyed that they pushed us in our thinking as well! Thank you for reading and good luck to the next Twitter Chat leaders with their chat this coming week!

 

Weekly Writing: Did ya get it? #psuaged16

With large amounts of reading assignments in various classes, reflecting on what I read is vital for the understanding of the subject matter. By blogging each week about the various readings, I will be able to think, reflect, and the share with my peers! Hang in there with me as the reading assignments come, just know that I am making it short and concise for you instead of your reading them all! Enjoy!

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Teaching can be funny sometimes. You plan out your lessons, create engaging hands on activities so that your students can connect ideas from the classroom to the activity, but how do we know if our students “got it”? Besides juggling being a teacher, being prepared for every lesson, having all of your materials ready, it can be very overwhelming and you may make the common mistake of not going back and checking for your students understanding of what you are teaching. So this week’s weekly writing was ALL about ways we can check for understanding to make sure our kids “got it”!

Hinge those questions

One great technique that I learned was called “hinging your questions”. What this means is that checking for understanding from your students, you can check to see if you want to take a step back and go over material again OR keep moving forward because your students understand what is going on. It is important to make sure that everyone is on the right page to leave no one behind.

Why not reflect about yourself?

It is interesting to think about letting students have time to actually think back and reflect about what they learned instead of what you thought they learned. This reflection is key for students because they can actually evaluate how they are doing and can carry that strategy with them in their careers.

Student Portfolios

My mom always told me that it was never too early to create a resume and create a portfolio of all of my achievements. Although I was 5 years old when she said this (just kidding), it stuck with me and I have been able to track my growth. How awesome would it be if I could do that in MY classroom? Where students can have hand held materials tracking how they were their entire time they were in agriculture education classes. Infinite possibility can happen and can you imagine what type of portfolio those students can have when trying to find a job? I mean WOW!

Rubrics

This is such a stable in education. Teachers use rubrics to let the students know what they are being graded on and also help teachers effectively grade students work. These rubrics need to show that what students are learning is purposeful and it is building them up for what is yet to come. This is a very important tool for the teachers as well as the students!

 So where do I go from here? Simple! During my student teaching I need to be intentional and creative with my students to help them “understand” the subjects that are being taught. Hopefully, it will create a healthy learning environment and my students will be engaged during all lessons!

Thanks for reading Ag Ed Fam!   

Problem Based Lab: Soil Texture #psuaged16 #labchat

One of the senior courses that pre-service teachers are required to take is AEE 412 also known as “Methods of Teaching Agriculture.” During this class, students are able to prepare lesson plans and teach to practice their classroom management and work on their teaching skills. During the course of this class, I will be reflecting on how my lessons went to help better me as a teacher. Enjoy!

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ _ _

I am going to tell you a secret…. Are you ready?

Not all your lesson plans are going to go the way you think.

WHAT?!?! Weird I know right? You plan, think of every little detail of the lesson, and then when it is your time in the classroom, a kid comes left field and could potentially throw you off your game for the entire rest of your class period.

My Ag Ed family, THIS is what happened to me during my lab on Wednesday.

This week’s lab assignment was to create a lab with a problem solving approach for our students. I decided to do a lab that was based on soil run off, our soil texture, and practice using the Soil Texture Triangle. I included a lab to get the students thinking about the different soil textures that were out there and they were even allowed to create their own soil texture! So using granola, cornstarch, and flour, they created their own soil texture and then try to find it on the triangle. Lots of fun, right? Yet after my lab concluded I still felt that my lab was sub-par to what it could have been.

When the lab began, I had them do several exercises using the Soil Texture Triangle just to get their minds in gear for the lab. We did role playing where students were a farmer and others were soil researcher and they had to help each other out to find out what type of soil the farmer had. The class did great with the exercises even though there was a lot of excitement in the room and lots of questions we kept trudging through!

When it was time for the lab portion, I was really proud of myself for chunking out the directions and waiting for all the students to be engaged and listening. They were able to make their own soil textures and through a trial and error process figure out what exactly it was! It was a great learning experience for me and even the students who were participating. It all turns around to asking the RIGHT questions to promote the conversation and problem solving approach.

So what is down the line for me in my next lab?

-         - Breaking away from the facilitator role into the teacher role (tone down the excitement just a little!)

-         - Actively improving my delivery of instructions and questioning

-         - Continuing finding more ways to address all three modalities of learner in my classroom!

Overall, these labs keep getting better for me becoming a “Master Teacher”! With the help of my cohort and my professors I am on my way to improving these skills for the future!

Till next time Ag Ed Fam! 

Planning in teaching is KEY

If you are like me, planning may not come easy to you. I used to struggle with thinking ahead, making sure everything is ready, and sometimes as bad as this sounds, I used to just “wing it” when it came to planning for anything. But boy has that changed since I have been a senior this year preparing for my student teaching in the spring. I have had to prepare and make sure that all of the little details are ready so that when I go into student teaching I can make the classroom the best it can be for me, but more importantly, my students!

So how did my first unit plan go? I will be listing out some “Gems” for the great things in my lesson and then some “Opps” for some opportunities that I want to focus on for the next time I create the unit plan!

Class: Small Animal Science

Year: 10^th Grade

Unit: Small Animals as Pets

Unit Length: January 25^th through February 4^th (10 classes each 103 minutes)

Unit Goals:

1) Students will plan and execute a budget plan and resources list for people interested on owning animals

2) Students will identify skills and procedures to own a service animal

3) Students will identify the importance of organized committee work with others

Gems:

-         I FINALLY found a font and style that I liked for my unit plans that is easy for         me to follow and teach from.

-         I created interesting lessons for my students that each grab their attention           different ways and will hopefully spark interest in all of my students

-         I created lesson objectives that can help guide my discussion in the classroom

Opps:

-         Finding more standards to fit into my unit plan

-         Creating a more unique unit rationale defining why this unit is important!

-         Rewording some of my objectives to fit the standards here at Penn State

Where do I go from here? That is easy!

I want to focus on making my lesson plans unique and interesting to make sure that my students are able to focus on the lesson. By doing that, I hope to keep all of my students wanting more in the classroom! That is not all though! I want to get more peer checks to make sure that I am getting more peer feedback for each of my units and even some of my lessons because they may be able to point out things that I can’t see.

Overall, this exercise of creating unit plans helped me look back over the small details and push myself as a teacher to make those lessons clear and understandable for all parties! I am also so grateful that I have a cohort that is willing to help me improve myself and my lessons! 

Let's shake the world together! #psuaged16 #aee412

When we were younger, the world felt like it was in our control. We felt powerful, significant, and we meant something more to others than just a social order. As we got older, life started to get in the way. Some felt as if there were choices that were already made for their future versus others who felt lost and in need of guidance to keep their heads above water. When looking back at my childhood, I knew that I was put here on this planet to make a difference. BUT, I didn’t just want to make a difference in my hometown. I wanted to push the "average status quo" and help out communities that were strangers to me because I knew that I could help make a change.
 
Traveling and supporting others have both been passions of mine since I was little. I was raised in a family lifestyle that forced me to move around every couple of years and start all over. Making new friends, starting new schools, and pushing myself to be a better person by  helping others. I was able to break out of my comfort zone at a young age, but have taken it upon myself to help others find their way as well.

This year, the #psuaged16 cohort has been asked to create innovative ideas and to ask others for help in the annual #TeachAgGenius Hour. Our professors have literally let the leashes go and they are letting us explore avenues that WE are interested in learning and letting us ask for guidance from others! So, are you ready? Here is what I want to learn from you:

1) How can I bring international agriculture to my classroom?

2) What can I do to bring a “global perspective” into EVERY lesson?
 

3) How can I create an environment where my students feel respected and comfortable in the classroom?

4) How can I, as one teacher, impact the lives of students in my classroom and in classrooms around the world?

 

Whew, let’s bring it back in! I am asking for your help and your perspectives. How do you push yourself to be the best person that you can be? Who is your inspiration or what is your drive? Inspire me!

I can’t wait to learn more from you! Who knows, maybe we can help each other!

Stay Golden Ag Ed Fam Jam

 

I speak like an Italian: Lab Numero 2 #labchat #psuaged16

One of the senior courses that pre-service teachers are required to take is AEE 412 also known as “Methods of Teaching Agriculture.” During this class, students are able to prepare lesson plans and teach to practice their classroom management and work on their teaching skills. During the course of this class, I will be reflecting on how my lessons went to help better me as a teacher. Enjoy!

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The first day of school brings back so many great memories. Reuniting with old friends, back to school shopping, looking your best to impress, and of course the new classes that you are able to take! It is an opportunity to start out the first day as one of the BEST days as a student.

In our lab this week, we had to demonstrate what we would do on the very first day of school with the new students! I learned a lot about my teaching style when I want to show my energy and excited but the down fall is..... I speak like my mother. Yes, that day has come where I can watch myself and see the similarities of the women that has been an inspiration in my life.

I speak like an Italian.
 

From a young age, I knew that my family was special. When I was able to see them, they were loud, exciting, and of course just loved spending time with each other. Growing up in a family lifestyle like that, it is surprising to see how much I have brought that into my teaching. Watching myself walk around the room, being loud and obnoxious, even flailing my arms during some points. After watching my lab, I have learned that I can be exciting BUT I need to slow down and stop using hand signals constantly. It led to be more of a distraction than an aid in the class.

I need to SLOW down with explanations
When explaining directions to the students about the activities we were going to do, some were hesitant and unsure with what was actually happening in the class. After the second time they did the activity, they were ready to go and confident with what they are doing. They suggested that I slow down with the directions and explanations for better understanding about what was going to happen in the class. I took this matter seriously and I want to try and map out a "script" of delivering a message across to my students. I believe that if I give direction, explain/demonstrate an action, and then repeat the directions, students will have a better understanding of what is going on in the class.

Future Expectations
I enjoy these labs because they help me focus on growing as a learner and a teacher. So, where do we go from here? I want to practice delivering directions and messages to others on a day to day basis. Whether my peers need help or they have a question I want to be slow and concise so that they understand. I also want to bring out my Italian flare in a more centered energy that does not have me bouncing all over the room like a cannoli! I need to direct that energy towards my students for their learning and growth.

Overall, I had a great time delivering this lab to my students! I look forward to perfecting my teaching strategies as the labs move forward.
 

Knot Your Average Lesson #aee412 #psuaged16

One of the senior courses that pre-service teachers are required to take is AEE 412 also known as “Methods of Teaching Agriculture.” During this class, students are able to prepare lesson plans and teach to practice their classroom management and work on their teaching skills. During the course of this class, I will be reflecting on how my lessons went to help better me as a teacher. Enjoy!

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Class Lesson: How to Tie a Bowline Knot

Students: 6

Objectives:

• Background Information on Bowline Knots
• Effective Strategies how to tie the Knot using a Mnemonic
• Successfully tie the Bowline Knot

For this lesson, I had an end goal for my students to learn how to tie a bowline knot. When looking at this task I thought that it would be too easy for my students to complete the task and I would have a TON of time left. Turns out, I was wrong. With only 10 minutes for instruction and 5 minutes for the evaluation, there was a lot to do. I created a simple PowerPoint as well as included pictures step by step on how to tie this knot.

During the class session there were some hiccups on how to show the students how to tie it as well as trying to give them all individual attention without losing them to side conversations. My classroom management while I was with individual students was lacking during this lesson as well. After all of the students had free time to practice tying their knots, I went around individually watching them complete the task. This part I also wish I can go back on because I wanted to bring the group all back together to go over it one more time.

Overall, it was a great class and I learned a lot as a teacher when doing a demo. I look forward to the rest of the semester in this class and working on my teaching strategies.