Visiting Conrad Weiser *Post written February 28*

Today I visited my cohort member Amanda at Conrad Weiser High School. Amanda seems completely in her element even when she may not know exactly what is going on. She knows her students well and knows what their SAE projects are, or at least has an idea for what they are.
Today the students, in the first half of her Intro to Ag classes, used Flipgrid to create videos relating to asexual propagation methods and how to use them with radishes. Upon completion of these videos, they were watched in a mixed tape format so that the students could see each other's videos. Once they finished watching the videos they discussed the topics before moving onto their SAEs. The students were all engaged and appeared to enjoy creating and viewing their Flipgrid videos. I got the chance to listen to the students to explain their SAEs and they sounded pretty interesting. They mostly have research-based SAEs as Conrad Weiser is a highly science-based school. During the second class, the students also participated in a review Kahoot as Amanda had been out the previous day.
Amanda's current topics class, on the other hand, was exploring what SAEs are by using the AET. Amanda and her CT Adam gave an in-depth description of how the AET from journal entries to how the AET is used to apply for proficiency awards.
Conrad Weiser has a relatively small area devoted to their agriculture department but within that area, they have a large variety in what students can do. On-site there is a greenhouse, a barn, a paddock, an animal lab, a biological science lab, an agriculture library, and a food science area. Some of the students in the biology course are included in the FFA program here as well.
This diversity allows the students to gain a thorough understanding of what agriculture is and the science behind it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Running the Classroom

Image
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
Read more
Back to School Week Fall 2019 RTL Reflection This has been an exciting and stressful week back to school. During this week we did our first pre-teaching lesson of the semester. I was feeling alright before my scheduled lesson but as soon as I started my mind went blank and I forgot what I wanted to say. I knew what I needed to say but I felt like I couldn’t get the words out. Through my classmates and instructors, I found that I did better than I thought I did. I know that I still have a ways to go but I look forward to seeing how I progress through this semester. One of the things that I did notice rewatching my lesson is that I appeared less stressed than I felt during the lesson. However, in spite of this, I had trouble deciding what I was going to say and how I was going to say it. Due to this, the main question that I have is how do I keep myself calm while I am giving a lesson? Even when I feel I know the material well or I am simply very interested in the topic I have troubl
Read more

First Days of Teaching

Image
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
Read more