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...

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(...