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Attending a Regional PAAE Meeting

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One of the best parts about student teaching in the state of Pennsylvania is that we have a tremendous amount of support from the Pennsylvania Association of Agricultural Educators (PAAE). PAAE has supported us through many opportunities including the Summer PAAE conference, the National Association of Agricultural Educators Conference, and throughout our student teaching experiences.  This semester, I was able to attend the South Central Regional PAAE meeting held at Cumberland Valley High School. This meeting was a great opportunity to meet with other agricultural teachers in the area and learn more about the various professional development opportunities that are offered to inservice agriculture teachers. Attending these various PAAE and NAAE events have been a great reminder of how important it is to continue to stay connected to other professionals in our content area. By making these connections, we are able to share resources, discuss new and upcoming trends in the agricultu...
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Visiting Another Ag Program for a Day

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As future educators, it is important that we use our student teaching time to explore what we want our future programs to look like. In order to do this, it is important that we get exposure to as many other programs as possible. During my time student teaching, I thought that a good way to experience other agriculture programs would be to visit another student teacher. This week, I decided to visit Emily McGowan at TriValley who is student teaching under Ms.Gretchen Dingman.  TriValley is a rather small school district in Valley View, PA that has a very active and growing agriculture program. they are currently a single teacher program, however, they have gained so much interest within the school that they are looking to add another teacher so that they can offer more agriculture classes to more students. Currently, they offer the following classes: Agricultural Sciences & Mechanics I Agricultural Science II, III, & IV Agricultural Practicum II, III, & IV Forestry Elec...
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Reflections on my Second SAE Visit

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 It is crazy to think that we have just over a month left of our student teaching experience! Time has been flying by and we will be finding our own classrooms in no time. As I look back on the experiences that I have had at Biglerville, I am very thankful that I was able to student teach at a program that is involved in such a wide variety of Supervised Agricultural Experience projects. One of the most interesting projects that I was able to visit was a student that had a placement SAE at the local dairy farm.  Dairy is not a huge industry here in Biglerville, in-fact, there is only one dairy farm in the area. This dairy farm is very supportive of the agriculture program at Biglerville and even hires a handful of students to help with milking.  While visiting the dairy farm, I was able to see all of the aspects of the farm that our students are involved in. This included milking cow, feeding cow, cleaning barns, and taking care of the calves. As someone who does not have...
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Reflections on my first SAE visit

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Throughout my student teaching experience, I have really strived to ensure that I am implementing all aspected of the three circle model into my agricultural education program. One of the main components of an agricultural education program is Supervised Agricultural Experience (SAE). An SAE is an agricultural related, student led, work based learning experience. This can look different for every student. It can include working at an agricultural related business, doing agricultural related research, or becoming an entrepreneur in your own agricultural business. The possibilities of an SAE are truly endless.  Throughout my time student teaching at Biglerville, I have been fortunate enough to work with students who have a wide variety of SAE projects. The first project I go to visit involved a student who was raising puppies that they had recently rescued. This student worked to record time that they spent working with the puppies, the expenses related to raising puppies, and the ov...
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Attending the ACES Conference

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 This semester, I've had a lot of great opportunities to watch students grow as leaders. One of these opportunities has included the chance to travel to the Agriculture Cooperations Establishes Success (ACES) conference in Harrisburg. This is an overnight conference where students attend professional development workshops and have the opportunity to interact with other FFA members from across the state of Pennsylvania.  As a former FFA member, I was able to attend ACES four times throughout my high school career, however, this was my first opportunity to be on the advisor side of things for this experience. If I am being completely honest, I really had no idea what my FFA advisor did while I was in my professional development workshops. (I kinda assumed that he went shopping or something.) However, I've realized that ACES is an opportunity for teachers to learn and grow just as much as it is for the students. While our students were in their workshops, we were also able to att...
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Observing a Science Classroom at Biglerville

 One of my first changes to "branch out" while at Biglerville was the opportunity to observe a science classroom. The class that I observed was an essential science class for grades 11 and 12. The lesson of the title was "What is the water cycle?" and the objectives were that students would be able to demonstrate the process of the water cycle and understand the importance of water. The teacher tried to clarify the goals of the presentations by presenting the learning objectives to the students at the beginning of the class.  During this lesson, the teacher gained students attentions by having them vote on various, kinda silly, questions. Such as "would you rather live under water or under ground?". She then gave students directions for the class activity. Students were tasked with completing their water cycle activity from the day before and tallying their results on the board for the class to see.  The teacher tried to capitalize on student experiences b...
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Teaching a LifeKnowledge Lesson at Biglerville

Last week, I was fortunate enough to teach my first official lesson at Biglerville! It was a LifeKnowledge lesson, adapted from the Educator Resources Section from the National FFA Website. For this lesson, I chose to teach the lesson on S.M.A.R.T. goals to a class of 12 9th graders. Overall, this lesson went really well, however, from these 48 minutes alone, I learned so many things. In this blog post, I will be sharing the main takeaways that I gained from teaching this LifeKnowledge lesson.  Always remember the power of close proximity.      One things that I really struggled with during my LifeKnowledge lesson was that, when students were working in groups, they would often get off task if I was not right next to them. Obviously, it is nearly impossible to be beside every group of students all the time. However, I did notice that many of the issues I was seeing significantly decreased if I was consistently staying within close proximity of each of the groups. In ...
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