Final Lab Reflection

When I started out in AEE 412 lab, I was pretty confident in my abilities to teach. I have quite a bit of experience teaching in non-formal settings. In lab I had a large wake up call when it comes to teaching in a formal setting! I learned about making sure it is all planned out and being able to move through the content at a steady pace. Before starting this class, I was highly unorganized, but because of the layout of the lessons, and content of the course I learned quickly that organization is key! I think that lab time was largely beneficial to my education in teaching. There are a lot of things that you don't realize teachers do, and this really opened my eyes to a lot of those things. It was challenging to teach to our peers with lessons designed to high school students. I noticed that some of our lessons were so engaging that the audience didn't matter. It would be really beneficial to have more time in a classroom, but that is what student teaching is for! If there was one thing I would change about AEE 412, is more instruction on the topics. We were always very rushed with learning about a topic and presenting the next day. It made it difficult to plan ahead when we had no idea what the next topic was, especially when it comes to Inquiry and Problem-Based Learning. Overall I really enjoyed lab and thought it was beneficial.

Creativity and Retail Therapy

The end is near and the stress is great, but for our last lab we got to have a little fun! We were tasked with using our favorite unit plan and designing a lesson using items that we purchased at the Dollar Tree! My favorite unit so far is my Wildlife Management unit. Without too much struggle, I had a couple of ideas going in to the store. Once I got there they didn't have exactly what I was looking for. To spice up my Wildlife Marking Lesson, I picked up a set of Christmas dove replicas, and some colored zip ties. My plan is to have students "color band" the birds with zip ties and have them look at them from afar to see if they can tell their birds apart with their unique color bands. To do this the whole class will have to create a spreadsheet of each individual bird. The other items I bought were plastic toy sets of snakes, frogs, and lizards, a long with a role of brightly colored wrapping paper. These are to bring my Survey Techniques Lesson to life! I laid out the wrapping paper and scattered the wildlife around it. I will have one group of students set it up, take a picture of it, and give the picture to another group. The students will have to analyze the photos to estimate population size. If the description doesn't cut it, check it out down below! Can you guess how many critters are in the picture?!

Micro Teaching

I completed my Micro Teaching experience at East Juniata HS under the supervision of Cortney Booher. I taught her 2nd period, Agriculture Education class. After some discussion with Mrs. Booher, we decide that I would teach a 3 day micro-unit on dairy cattle. Day one focused on learning about the breeds of dairy cattle in the U.S. I tasked the students with creating a promotion for their breed and convince me that their breed is superior to other breeds. I was expecting students to be engaged and excited about the project, however, they were not. I had a real struggle keeping them engaged. On the second day I did hands on activities, we made butter from heavy whipping cream, and we "painted" with milk, food coloring and dish soap. We talked about butterfat content of the breeds and talked about non-food products that we use everyday that contain dairy in them. On day 3 we talked about dairy judging and briefly went over the scorecard. I had to rush through the judging exercise because we were running short on time. I think if I were to do this in the future I would try to cover dairy judging over a 3 day lesson.

Life Knowedge

I completed my life knowledge lab under the supervision or Mrs. Kellogg at Coundersport Area HS. I taught my lesson to her 2nd period, 8th grade class. I taught them about the importance of SAE and how it can lead to career development. I asked the class what an SAE was and they gave me blank stares. I had no idea they had never been introduced to this idea. Because I did not know the SAE procedures of Mrs. Kellogg's program, I started to panic. I made very general characteristics about aspects of SAE and told them about the opportunities that SAE could provide. I spent more time than I originally planned for to go over SAE. When transitioning into career development, students seemed to be more engaged. We did group work to identify the difference between jobs, careers, and tasks. After completing that assignment, I had each student write a short-term goal, long-term goal, and a career goal. I gave them some time to come up with ideas, several of the students had trouble thinking about what they might want to do when they were older. I was surprise to learn that many of the students were not thinking about careers in agriculture. This really helped me to realize that not everyone in an ag class is necessarily interested in the subject, and as the teacher I need to make sure I am engaging those students.