My Ag Ed Journey

During my agricultural mechanics demonstration, I taught my family how to put together mini corn hole boards by putting in two hinges. Overall, this lesson seemed to go fairly well, with my brother being able to talk his way through the steps as he put one together. Then after the video, my mom put the last one together. Everyone seemed to know what was expected of them and how to complete the task, especially my dad who gave me a quick rundown on how to use his specific tools before my lesson. Ideally, when I taught this in a real school setting it would follow the students cutting out their boards and staining them. After this lesson, they would then put the bean bags together to complete their games. This lab may even make a good fundraiser as they are fairly inexpensive and easy to make, with the total work time for one set being roughly an hour or an hour and a half. One question that I do have though is how would you manage a large group of students in a shop?

During the NAAE Convention, I got the chance to talk with different agriculture teachers from across the country, or at least listen to presenters talk about what they have done for their students during NAAE. All of them seemed to have similar ideas on what their students needed during their absence. The teachers left mostly easy assignments or movies for their students in their absence. Some teachers had their students working on long term projects that they could continue working on during the convention. The most common reason that teachers attended the NAAE Convention was to attend professional development workshops. Another reason that teachers said they came to NAAE was that they were getting an award. Networking didn’t appear to be a big reason for why teachers attended the convention.

During my life knowledge lesson, I taught Dr. McLean’s eighth-grade year-long Introduction to Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources class. Prior to presenting this lesson, I thought I had it worked out nicely I had given what I thought was appropriate timing in my lesson plan for each activity. However, I found out during my lesson that this was not the case. I ended up having to much time left at the end of class and not knowing what to do with it, this caused Dr. McLean to need to assist me in filling the rest of the time. I also found that the students did not appear to be all that interested in the topic, which was Goal Setting. One issue that I feel was evident was that I didn’t have a lot of interactive activities for the students. This seemed to make the students less inclined to participate as they didn’t seem interested in this activity. I think that if I were to redo this lesson, I would add more fun activities to the lesson to maintain the students’ attention. What

Classroom management may be one of the more difficult parts of teaching to get the hang of. Some students may be very up-front distractions while others would be a bit more secretive in their activities. There are many ways to go about managing your classroom but some of the most common methods are, calling out the behavior, speaking to the student after class and proximity control. During my student teaching, I have no doubt that I will have at least one instance where I will need to use classroom management techniques with my students. I hope to minimize this by having my classroom expectations and consequences posted where the students can see them. By showing my students what behaviors are expected of them and what consequences they will receive I hope to discourage negative behavior in the classroom. I also hope to be able to use classroom management techniques that are as little a distraction as possible to the rest of my class, because if they weren’t distracted by the student(