Growing the Extra Mile

 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...

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 ...

It is crazy to think that we are this far into the semester already! So many great opportunities have been taking place in the past few weeks, and this week was no exception! This week, I had the opportunity to participate in a "microteaching" experience at State College Area High School. This experience consisted of 1 day of observing the class that we would be teaching and three days of actually teaching a mini unit that we designed.  For this experience, I was teaching a Natural Resources class that was currently in a Forestry Unit, so I decided to teach timber measurements as this related closely to what the class was already learning. While I am not a forestry expert, this teaching experience was great way to stretch out of my comfort zone, teaching content that I am not 100% familiar with to a group of actual high school students. Throughout this blog post, I want to highlight some of my biggest takeaways from this experience.  Always prepare for cold weather.  Havi...

     It is crazy to think that we are less than 40 days away from our final presentations! As we gear up for our student teaching experience, we have had so many great opportunities to grow as future educators by participating in experiences such as National FFA Convention, microteaching, and the Agriscience Inquiry Institute.      The Agriscience Inquiry Institute was a two day professional development event in which the PSU Ag Ed '24 cohort and 8 preservice educators came together to do a deep dive into inquiry based instruction. Inquiry based instruction is a student-centered approach in which the instructor guides students through activities that encourage them to ask question, develop methods, analyze data, and make real world connections.  We has the opportunity to learn from two phenomenal educators, Sherisa Nailor and Krista Pontius, who are also workshop leaders for the National Association of Agricultural Educators (NAAE). They walked us...

     This week in AEE 412, we discussed Culturally Responsive Teaching and how important it is to be culturally responsive in the classroom. This consisted of a "Main Idea Monday" focusing on individual discussions of our "whys" and hearing stories of seasoned educators who have done a great job of incorporating Culturally Responsive Teaching within their classrooms. We also had the opportunity to attend The Batschelet Conference on Intercultural and Intersectional Competence for School Learners which was held in State College this week. Both of these experiences were very impactful as a preservice educator who strives to ensure that all students are welcome within my classroom.      One of the biggest takeaways from class on Monday was the idea that I need to find my 'why'. For many people, their 'why' comes from personal reasons that are related to family or close friends. For me, I think my 'why' comes from some of my close friends and als...

 The Task Over the past two weeks, my peers and I have been preparing to deliver our "problem solving approaches" to our cohort in lab. The problem solving approach is a systematic way to approach real world problems that allows students to work to solve the problem. In 412, we learned 4 types of problem solving approaches, they are: the forked road problem, the possibilities factor problem, the solutions to be improved problem, and the effect-cause problem.  For this lab, I decided to add the situations to be improved problem into my global agriculture unit. The title of my lesson was "How can we address the four pillars of food security?". During this lesson, I would introduce students to the four pillars of food security and then ask them to determine while pillar of food security is being affected in a given scenario. After students identified what pillar was being affected, I would then have them create a plan for how they could help alleviate the problems with...

Hi everyone! It is crazy to think that we have officially made it 1/3 of the way through this semester. This semester has been, and will continue to be, filled with high-impact learning experiences that have helped me grow as a future educator. These experiences have kept me busy, however, I know that this will all serve me well in the future.  In Week 5 of AEE 412, we focused our lab experience on interest approaches. An interest approach is a brief activity, typically used at the beginning of a learning experience, to stimulate students' interest towards a topic. Interest approaches are a very important part of any lesson, however, for me, they can also be the most difficult.  For this lab, I decided to highlight the interest approach from lesson 7 of my Rabbit Production Unit, titled "What are common rabbit breeds?". This interest approach was an observation activity for my students. I had posted pictures of various rabbit breeds around the room and tasked students wit...