Unloading the Trailer: Lab 3, Interest Approach

My performance in lab this week was not quite up to where I would hope it would be. Nevertheless I believe I continued to be strong in a few areas of delivery, and showed improvement in others. Here are my gems and ops as I unload the trailer to prepare for next week.

Gems

• As Cahill pointed out on Edthena, my lesson had lots of variability. I went from Google searching, to a video, to a powerpoint in the first ten minutes. I don't feel like it was too much too fast either. It all flowed together. The challenge would then be keeping the variability going as the powerpoint starts to get pretty heavy. 
• The daily Google. This is a strategy I remember hearing from an ag teacher many years ago, and it has stuck with me to this day. The idea is that you start by having students google search a basic question, one so basic they may have never considered it before, and have them record and share their findings. It is almost like a mini interest approach in it's self. It is designed to spark follow up questions that will relate to the day's content. I had some mixed feedback about it, but I believe it will go smoother if I introduce it better at the beginning of the year, and make it a regular part of class.
• Including vocab. I included essential vocab at the beginning of the lesson as a way to foreshadow the content. Vocab on the board is a common practice at Central Columbia. My peers liked this and thought it made me come across as more knowledgeable, which is always nice.
• My peers and I agreed that I had a good strategy for Snyder when he started to doze off in class. I used proximity to make him alert, and then asked him a question, all without missing a beat.

Opps

• My interest approach in general was a little "ehh". I feel like these kind of things are supposed to come to you, highlight Dave Burgess when he talked about buying golf balls in the middle of the night after a cool idea laying in bed. This one came to me on Monday when a friend shared a Red Greene video on facebook. I took it and ran with it. There was mix of positive and negative feedback on the video. I feel it would have gone better if I would have scaffold better questions and content around it.
• I did not make sure technology worked before designing the lesson and had to adapt day-of.
• For some reason I decided not to correct Miranda even thought I saw her on her phone during the video. Perhaps I didn't want to interrupt the video? I should have taken action here.
• I need to be more creative with how I ask questions and accept students responses.This was also peer-mentioned. I believe class this week will help clear this up.
• I was a little under the weather, but it was noted this week and last that I should bring the energy up. That is something to continue improving on. 

Weekly Web Wonder 5: Asking Questions and Letting Students Know They Matter

Questions

Questions are the key to education. There is no other aspect that we can control more, or use to have a greater influence. Most of the time we think of questions as an assessment of learning, but we can't overlook how important they are to guiding learning. Questions will naturally happen in the classroom, but if we question ourselves on how we ask questions (see what I did there?) we can start asking at higher levels and some pretty cool stuff can happen.


Here are a few ideas (according to James E. Dyer) that I want to document because I feel are important to keep in mind:

• There are low and high levels of questions, and both are important in their own right. Low level questions Evaluate comprehension/preparation, diagnose strengths and weaknesses, and Review content. Higher levels of questions encourage deep/critical thinking and discussion, solve problems, and stimulate self-directed learning. 
• Questions can be open or closed
• Wait time is a thing. It refers to how long you wait to solicit a response after asking. A good wait time is 3 seconds, but shouldn't be longer than 5-7 seconds. 
• How you handle response to questions is just as much of a craft as what you ask. 

I know that asking the right questions is a matter of practice. After a while, we will be asking appropriate questions with little conscious effort. Nevertheless I still want to consciously improve this skill, specifically responding to answers correctly. (If you watch my labs, you will see I could use work on this). I will continue to dive into this and work on it with my peers and Mr. Brown.

Students Matter

While the first part of our weekly investment was important to developing my pedagogy, I feel the second part was equally important to developing my passion. More than any other piece of information my students will learn in class, I want them to know they matter. One of the main reasons I went into ag education over anything else is that ag teachers have such a unique opportunity to work with students as people as well as learners. I have had many good talks in this matter. One example is taken from a recent email with Mr. Brown. He said: "I had a class of 9th grade students today make a statement that said, Mr. Brown we wish all teachers were like you and Mr. Turner-teachers that get to know us as people not just students and that really care about what we do on a daily basis." 

This comes back to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. As the Ted Talks pointed out, if students feel like their ideas matter, they will create wonderful things! Also, this feeling of importance is more than a facade that we construct as a tool to achieve an end result. It has to be real! I know this because I experienced this as a high school student. 

My senior year, I had Mrs. Hyde for English. The classroom engagement was pretty average as far as English classes go, but I will always remember the custom poster she had at the front of her room. By this point, I knew I wanted to teach ag, so before I knew any of the theories behind it that I know now, I wrote it down and promised myself that I would have a similar one in my classroom one day. I will leave you with a similar copy below. Remember: we are more than simple teachers. We have the ability to make a positive difference in the lives of students by developing premier leadership, personal growth and career success each and every day while we instruct our curriculum to the future of the agricultural industry!

Weekly Web Wonder 4: Writing Objectives and Grouping it Out

I believe I entered my weekly readings at a great time. Behind me, I have my first attempts at lesson plans and units. With me now I have the writing and execution of lesson plans for National Teach Ag! Day and FLC. In front of me I have countless more lessons to write. Relating to Primary level of interest #2, I see how these subjects will effect myself and others in the near future. Here are my take-aways and questions.

Writing Objectives

1) Objectives are more than a road map for you as the instructor to stay on topic. Providing objectives are also a way to decrease student's anxiety towards new information by allowing them to see how it connects. We as teachers need to balance the uncomfortable strain put on the mind needed for growth (shout out to Rider's blog) and leaving students feeling completely lost. Learning is a journey, not a "thrill of  not knowing what is next" type of adventure.
2) We can stretch student's cognitive processing (as eluded to above) by ensuring that write objectives, teach, and evaluate consistently at the same cognitive level. We can ensure that by carefully selecting the right action verb in our objectives. I love lists, and the list of verbs Whittingotn provided is seen to the right. I have seen lists like this before, but I will keep this particular one on file to help me in the future.

My clarifying question is: "How can we best measure the cognitive level of our students so that we can write the best objective to challenge them?"

Group Work

I am a big fan of students working and learning together in groups. However, despite all the benefits, group work can fail when all students are not engaged and a few people end up carrying the group. Last semester I took a small group leadership class with Brad Olson. It gave me great context for how groups interact together, and Myers/Groseta provided great framework to back up what I learned. Just as some quick clarification:

In Brad's class we completed tasks in our own in-class groups. Our heterogeneous groups were assigned for us based on our own personality tests. I read that it is very important to take learner's skills into consideration. However you most often see groups formed by the "count off by 4" method. In Brad's class, much effort went into forming our groups and our groups were in place for the whole semester. How can we properly form groups if we want a heterogeneous mix, but are only in groups for a lesson or two or one project?

Final Thoughts
As we plan our lessons and units of instruction, we need to carefully consider our student's intelligence and cognitive levels. We need to make sure our objectives provide a road map that challenges them but does not make them feel lost. We also need to keep these things in mind when we assign, monitor, and evaluate group work.

Unloading the trailer: Lab 2, First Day of School

In racing, you anticipate Saturday night (race day) more than any other day of the week. That is the day you get to show the world the results of your long hours of preparation in the shop. You may win, or you may crash. Either way you take the results, notes, and seat time back to the shop to make the car better for next week. And so it is with AEE412 lab. Everything else we do is to hone our teaching craft, and on Wednesday we get to show it off. I am pleased with the benchmark I set this week. Here are my takeaways as I head back to the shop:


Gems: My peers came at me full force with their assigned roles. I believe I handled their questions and attitudes with grace and without letting it throw me off. For example, Michael noted that he was impressed with how I handled him walking in late and being rude. I feel good because this moment felt the most natural to me. There were other questions that threw me, but it gave me confidence in my ability to think on my feat. With more prior preparation, I feel I can really rock this out in the future. I believe that I was able to command the room while still making students feel comfortable, and that I had a good representation of what the first 10 minutes of the first day of school would look like

Ops: I came into this lab with the belief that it was most important for me to have as much direct instructional time as possible. With that, when it came time to do an activity I broke character and explained what I would do now instead of actually doing it. I had my peers get out of their seats for bingo only so I could demonstrate how I would re-focus the class after the activity. Going off of that timing note, I should not have transitioned from syllabus to procedures so quickly. In doing all of this I lost the ability to gauge the timing of my lesson. I see now that I should come to lab prepared with all components, that way I can gauge how long activities will take. This is meant to be real teaching, not a simulation of real teaching!

Weekly Web Wonder #2: Planning it Out

When we are students in high school, very few of us realize the preparation required to teach. We take for granted that at our scheduled class time, we will walk through the door and our teacher will have materials ready. Now that we are on the other side of the desk, it is important that we know what to teach before we worry about how to teach. This is one of the big parts I've been waiting for. Even the world's greatest actors refer to scripts, so I am ready to prepare myself for the big production in the spring.

In Dr. Fink's "A Self-Directed Guide to Designing Courses for Significant Learning", I truly got a grasp on how important preparation is. It points out that preparation is half of what it means to call yourself a teacher, with the second half being student engagement. I was also first introduced to the idea of the "backwards design" process. To help explain this, here was how I found myself designing lessons in the past:
-Here's the subject I need to teach. This would be a cool way to do it!
-So from what I am doing, what are the main points they should know?
-How will I assess that they learned these points.
This often frustrated me. I was caught up in the overload of information that was out there on the subject, and I didn't know how to go about pulling out main points, or "learning goals".

The next reading, "Understanding by Design Framework" by McTighe and Wiggins, helped me by supporting Fink's ideas and presenting a easier-to-digest 3 stages of backwards design. 1) Identify desired results 2) Determine assessment evidence 3) Plan learning experiences and instruction. My favorite takeaway from this is the fact that a good teacher views textbooks and other materials as tools, not the curriculum it's self. Also, in the past I have heard peers complain that the teacher "teaches to the test". In a way, I now see that this is necessary. I believe that when teachers fail in this aspect, they view the exam as the curriculum to teach. They teach the student to regurgitate the information they present on a written test, and that's it. In doing this, they rarely exceed the remember and understand levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. A good teacher is able to watch the student's zone of proximal development grow throughout these different stages, and assesses the learning goals at the student's highest level.

I am really looking forward to class this week to dive into these ideas deeper. (Hey, wait a minute, I want MY students to say that one day!) Here's to this critical step in #psuaged17's #teachag journey!

Check out my Cooperating Center

Follow this link to view the video I put together about my cooperating center: Central Columbia!! It was an enjoyable challenge to learn how to edit a video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6VRR6VBRnQ