My Ag Ed Journey

This week during student teaching I taught two different classes. An eighth-grade class and a seventh-grade class. I also got to assist in facilitating a dissection in two advanced animal science classes. Each of these experiences was interesting in its own way. During the dissections, I found that I am still not completely comfortable with dissections. While I know anatomy fairly well and can point out different organs in images that of dissecting something makes me uncomfortable. I know that depending upon what school I end up at I may need to lead some dissections on my own. Due to this, I will need to work towards becoming more comfortable dissecting things. For those of you who perform dissections with your students, what have you done to become more comfortable with the process? What other similar activities would I be able to do with students until I get more comfortable? I enjoyed teaching the middle schoolers, as for the most part they seemed more enthusiastic about ...

During this past week, I had my first experience actually teaching at my cooperating center. The middle school students overall seemed to enjoy the first day of my teaching where they got to use Nearpod to learn interactively during their lecture. Due to this, I think that I may use Nearpod more often in future lessons, as the students enjoy it and they are not overly difficult or time consuming to make. The second day however they did not seem to enjoy the lesson very much as they didn’t seem to be paying attention at times, I think this is due to the lesson being dry. I played clips for them about three of the different agricultural career pathways, which admittedly were likely meant for older students. I am working on making a more interactive way to teach them about the remaining pathways. While I know that not all lessons are going to be fun ones I would like to have as many interactive lessons as possible. I feel that this will help my students learn as this way they are d...

During this past week, I attended my pre-internship seminar and began my observations at Northern Burlington Regional School District. During my observations, I got to see how the teachers that I will be working with interact with their students, and so far, I am enjoying the teacher-student interactions. For the most part, there seems to be a good teacher-student atmosphere where the students have fun in their learning. Especially in middle school, the students seem to actively engage in their learning environment and give examples of personal experiences related to the topic of discussion. As I progress through this semester I will continue to observe and learn from the teachers I am working with to build myself to be the best teacher I can be. I also hope to adapt different aspects of each teacher's methods to create the best learning environment possible for my students. While I don’t know yet how this semester will go, I hope to maintain a similar classroom environment a...