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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Before you begin reading this blog, I want to throw a question out there and I want you to reflect and think
about it. Okay are you ready?
What makes your
classroom interesting?
Tough question right?
This week in class,
our lab was to create an interest approach that would get the students excited
about the lesson that they were going to learn that day. The sky was the limit
with any creative approach that you wanted to do, but it had to pertain to the lesson
you were going to teach. For my lesson I wanted to communicate the importance
of agriculture in other countries and I choose to use a scenario where my students
had a plot of land, a budget, and then they had to feed a family of whatever
number was on their paper.
When beginning the
lesson, I thought that I had clear instructions about what the assignment was
and knowledge that it was going to lead into the next part of the lesson. What I
didn’t do accurately was ask the questions to my students about why this was
important and how it pertained to the lesson. That is when I thought, questions
make or break your lesson.
Questioning your
students forms a knowledge base about why we are doing what we doing in the
first place. Without them, students will think that we are jumping from activity
to activity not fully understanding that all of these objectives correlate to
one another. I need to do a better job in asking the RIGHT questions to help
build them up for the rest of the lesson.
After my students completed
their plot of land and they gave an explanation to the class, I read over the
objectives and we then were able to build our lesson. Overall, my biggest take a
way’s were that I need to ask clear questions and of course slow down again in
my delivery of my presentation. I have a clear mind for next week and I look
forward to more labs to come!
You're right. "What makes your classroom interesting?" is a tough question. We are required to prominently display our daily learning target (You are most likely learning about them as objectives) When my students come in, I have the "target" projected on the board. That is NOT what makes my classroom interesting. However, I try to find interesting graphics (visit Ag 101 on Facebook if you haven't yet) or facts related to the content for the day displayed with the target as well. Today, as I was standing at the door welcoming students, I heard from the classroom "Whoa 144" and another student follow up with "That's a lot!" The fact I had on display was related to 144 baseballs being made from one cowhide. This probably isn't the most interesting thing in my classroom, but today was verification that it can help pique some interest for the day.
ReplyDeleteRobin,
DeleteThank you so much for your insight and resources that you provided in your comment! I took a look at the Facebook page and can use that later on in the semester for my classes! As far as your interest approach goes, that sounds like an awesome idea to get the brains in your class ready to learn for the day!
Thanks again for your comment!
Olivia, I think we are all struggling with clarity of instructions and figuring out the flow of our lessons. It is great that you pointed that out as well as how asking the proper questions can set the class up. Great job!
ReplyDeleteI as well need to work on clarity of instruction and asking questions at the right time. I encourage you to reflect on Dave Burgess and how he incorporates content into his activity instead of after. This keeps student engagement at a peak and it has really helped me think about my next lesson!
ReplyDelete