Week 3 of Student Teaching: Check!

This week I completed my first full week of teaching! State testing finished up on Tuesday, so I'm teaching a full 90 minute block now. I think I'm still getting used to the schedule of an ag teacher because I'm exhausted every day, but I'm learning lots! Here are my takeaways from the week:

1. Always stay one step ahead of your fastest students.

On Wednesday our goals for the day were to finish up the activity from the day before, set up AET accounts, and start the next activity. After the Warm-up, I talked about our goals for the day and had everyone get to work on finishing up yesterday's activity. Some groups finished much faster than everyone else. I was planning on doing a group demonstration on how to set up AET, but I realized that probably wasn't going to work out well. Thankfully, we were able to send kids who were done back to the back tables to work with Mr. Fellenbaum and set up their AET accounts. Some students who already had AET accounts also helped their classmates. After class I talked with Mr. Fellenbaum and while everything worked out, I should have probably had everyone set up their AET accounts first thing in class. After I could have briefly introduced the next activity so that when students finished the activity from the day before they could have immediately began their next task. This coming week my goal is to take my planning one step further and make sure there is always something for faster groups to work on. On the other hand, I also learned the importance of giving students time limits for tasks. Without time limits, students feel no pressure to stay focused and activities can often take longer than they need to. While you don't want anyone to get left behind, you  also can't make the rest of the class wait on one person/group to completely finish up. Including times in my directions will hopefully keep everyone moving and more focused.

2. Building relationships with parents is important.

Thursday night was Parent's Night at Penn Manor, which means that parents have the opportunity to visit the teachers their child has for the semester and learn about the classes they're in. I really enjoyed meeting some of my students parents and talking with them. As a teacher, parent's night is a chance for you to share about what ag ed is all about (aka - Intro to the Three Circle Model 101) as well as getting to know more about your students through their parent's perspective. At one point during the evening a couple came up to me to talk about their daughter, whom I have in my Intro to AFNR class. She is taking the class because she LOVES horses and wants to take the Animal Science classes offered through the Penn Manor ag ed program. They wanted to know more about my experience at Penn State, and if there are many job opportunities in the animal science/equine industry. I was so excited to share about various paths/careers you could pursue in the animal science, as well as share about opportunities at PSU for students interested in Animal Science. Ideally, teachers and parents should act as teammates that are trying to help a child grow and succeed. I'm looking forward to meeting more parents in the coming weeks!

#AEE412 Lab Reflection: Surprise Lab

This week's lab was a little different from our previous labs. One of the goals of this lab was to push us outside our comfort zones and help us practice quickly creating a lesson (perhaps if a teachable moment occurs, etc.) to teach the next day. So, on Monday we were given an AFNR standard and told to create our lesson based around that standard. The lesson was due by 5pm on Tuesday. While I was a little stressed out at first, once I started writing my lesson plan I realized how much I have improved because it came much easier than previous lessons. The lesson I developed was on food safety and the three types of contaminants. Everyone had really creative lessons this week and I think everyone has improved so much from the beginning of the semester. With that being said, here are some gems and opportunities for improvement from my lab this week:

Gems

1. I believe I kept the students engaged throughout the lesson. (ex. asking students to help me capture their thoughts and write on the board)
2. I used Questioning to help a student answer her own question and had her share what she learned with the class when it was time to share out.
3. I used a variety of learning activities.

Opportunities to Improve

1. I did not bring in real cider for one of my activities. I had real cider in my lesson but did not bring it to lab. I need to make sure I'm getting as close to the "real thing" as possible (can someone say contextual learning?!). Plus it would have made it more fun!
2. Although I was better this week, I still need to work on timing. Particularly, I need to push students a bit and give them a time frame to complete a task right from the start and not wait until I see everyone is done.

I'm looking forward to learning about Inquiry Based Learning in the weeks to come. But first...

IT'S NATIONAL CONVENTION TIME! 

#AEE412 Weekly Investment 3

Objectives are CRUCIAL.

Objectives (along with assessments) are the guiding force of instruction. Newcomb et al. states, "in writing instructional objectives, teachers make definite decisions about the content of the problem area. The force themselves to establish parameters that in turn help define and limit the scope and content of the problem area. ... they provide a basis for evaluation" (pg. 91). We learned this week that your objectives and your unit assessments should influence each other. This makes sense because like I said in last week's blog post - begin with the end in mind and everything needs to connect. I found it interesting to learn about the three domains of learning that objectives can fall into.

1. Cognitive - objectives that deal with the acquisition of facts, knowledge, information, or concepts.
2. Psychomotor - objectives that deal with using the mind in combination with motor skills.
3. Affective - objectives that have to do with attitudes, values, aesthetics, and appreciation.

I had never heard of affective objectives before, and found it to be a very interesting concept. My methods book (Newcomb et al., 2004) stated that the most difficult area of objectives to include are affective. I believe this, but after reading some examples and learning what they are I would argue that they, too, are very important to include. I think one of the main purposes of education is to grow up leaders and people with good morals and values, so including affective objectives is one way to work on this. I can definitely see myself including some affective objectives into the Biotechnology & Food Science class that I get to teach in the spring!

Interest Approach - Say What?!

Before this fall, I was always confused about what an interest approach was and why they were important. Over the past couple of weeks I've begun to get a better sense about what interest approaches are all about. Newcomb et al. discusses a variety of ways to go about creating a desire in students to know more about a topic. I think that developing interest approaches based on students' SAE projects is a neat idea. If students can personally connect with the interest approach the WHY of the lesson will be so much clearer.

However, in a research article I found concerning interest approaches in Agricultural Education, the researchers found that the use of an interest approach at the beginning of a lesson had no effect on the students knowledge/learning or student attitudes. But, the data did show that student engagement increased with the use of an interest approach. They did state that more data needs to be collected to further analyze the results of the study. I would be interested to hear what other ag teachers think about interest approaches!

References:

Johnston, T. L., Roberts, T. G. (2011). The Effect of an Interest Approach on Knowledge, Attitudes, and Engagement of High School Agricultural Science Students. Journal of Agricultural Education, 52(1), 143-154. Retrieved from http://www.jae-online.org/attachments/article/1537/52.1.143.Johnston.pdf 

Newcomb, L.H., McCracken, J.D., Warmbrod, J.R., & Whittington, M.S. (1993). Methods of Teaching Agriculture. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.

  

#AEE412 Weekly Investment 2: Designing and Planning Instruction

Maximizing learning and planning instruction. Planning instruction was (and still kind of is) daunting to think about. But, after gaining some new insight through the readings this week, I think I'm beginning to get a better understanding of how these unit plans, assessments, and lesson plans are supposed to fit together. Here are some major takeaways!

You have to know where you want to end up if you want to develop an effective plan to get there. I believe this thought is essential to effectively planning instruction. This ensures that everything you are teaching in your class aligns together and thus promotes deeper learning for students. So before you start planning your first Soil Science class you need to stop and think, "What do I want my students to be able to do by the end of this class/unit?" Realizing this was very helpful because the other day I was staring at my computer at a loss of how to begin writing my first lesson plan for student teaching. According to the framework by Mctighe et al., first start by identifying desired results, then determine assessment evidence, and finally plan learning experiences and instruction. I really appreciated that the framework takes the time to discuss different types of assessment - performance tasks and other evidence such as traditional tests and quizzes. While I think there is a time and a place for both types, the most important thing is to make sure that everything aligns and nothing is slipping through the cracks. Now, I'm quite excited to try out what I've learned on the unit/lesson plans I'll be writing in the coming weeks!

I know I briefly mentioned this above, but this was a really important area of discussion in all of our readings for this week. When I was in high school, I never really took much thought into why we learned things in the order in which we learned them. All I knew is when I was learning and when I was completely lost/bored. But now as I'm working on writing unit plans, lesson plans, and assessments for my student teaching experience, my mind is a little overwhelmed. There are so many ways we must look for alignment and connection. Whether it's making sure the scaffolding is actually building up towards a specific skill to making sure the assessment is evaluating what we actually taught. But as Reardon et al. state in Strategies for Great Teaching, "Learning happens when brains are connecting in meaningful ways with the subject matter. It occurs when learners make patterns based on existing schema as they seek to understand new content".

References:

Fink, L.D. (2003) A self-directed guide to designing courses for significant learning. Retrieved from http://www.deefinkandassociates.com/GuidetoCourseDesignAug05.pdf

Mctighe, J. & Wiggins, G. (2012). Understanding by design framework. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/siteASCD/publications/UbD_WhitePaper0312.pdf

Newcomb, L.H., McCracken, J.D., Warmbrod, J.R., & Whittington, M.S. (1993). Methods of teaching agriculture. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Reardon, M. & Derner, S. (2004) Strategies for great teaching. Chicago, Illinois: Zephyr Press

West Virginia University, (2010.). Bloom’s taxonomy. Retrieved from http://community.wvu.edu/~lsmong/Articulate%20Blooms%20Wheel/blooms_wheel.html