What an Experience! Reflections on 15 weeks of craziness.

I can't believe how quickly 15 weeks have flown by. Wellsboro and my cooperating teacher have taught me so much through this experience. This experience is supposed to help us become better educators... It has done so much more than that! Student teaching has helped me grow as an educator, learn the importance of communication and collaboration, learn how to adapt, and how to reflect on situations - all while running from sun-up to sun-down on minimal sleep for 5 days a week!

Looking back on the 15 weeks has brought up so many emotions. I have connected with many of my students and gained so much knowledge on how to run a classroom. I started out being too easy on students - which I think is a pretty common mistake among new teachers. Over these 15 weeks I really found my voice and confidence in the classroom. I found I had to be stern less than the beginning anyway because of those connections I was building. Having that positive classroom environment helped the behavior of the students as well as my confidence in dealing with students. In the last few weeks I was able to push students to behave appropriately in class - specifically with being on laptops. Technology is beautiful thing for the classroom, but some students use it when not permitted and I found that balance near the last few weeks to be stern with students who were using it inappropriately or at the wrong time.

This time with students also helped me find my footing with teaching in various ways. Public speaking was never one of my strengths, but I was able to develop my confidence to speak in front of courses. By far the smaller class sizes were my favorite to teach, but the larger classes of students really pushed me to gain confidence and share my knowledge with students.It forced me to be over prepared with my classes so I could be ready to answer any questions that might come up.

My experiences in the classroom helped me grow, but so did all the various experiences I had outside the classroom. I had the opportunity to visit students SAE projects, review their records on AET, participate in FFA events, and even received the Honorary Chapter degree at the Grand Canyon FFA Banquet. It provided em the opportunity to get to know students outside of the classroom. When you get to know student interests and personalities you can bring that into the classroom to relate to them. I felt that I developed the relationships with many students which helped me relate examples to their interests in class.

As I went through these crazy 15 weeks I watched my students grow. As I reflect back I realize how much they have helped me grow as well! I will always look back fondly on my experiences at Wellsboro and all the great people I had the opportunity to meet.

Home Stretch!

As I prepare for my final week of student teaching so much is running through my mind... Did I accomplish what I wanted over these 14 weeks? What can I do this last week that I haven't done already? How can I leave an impact on these students before I leave? I feel so lucky to have spent my student teaching experience at Wellsboro and I want to make this last week impactful. For them and me.

2016-2017 Grand Canyon FFA Officers

This week had so much impact on me. Mostly because of the Grand Canyon FFA Banquet that took place on Wednesday. It was stressful to lose a night of planning and grading, but it was well worth it. I felt so much emotion in just a few hours to see all the members recognized for their hard work and accomplishments. It warmed my heart to see so many FFA members proud of what they have achieved... and sad to see the school year coming to an end. Students were recognized for their SAE projects, Chapter/Greenhand degrees, scholarship awards, and some even received a "spark plug" award for providing that extra spark to the program for their innovative ideas, glowing personalities, or dedication. I felt so much pride to receive an Honorary Chapter Degree for my student teaching effort as well!

Plant Sci creating centerpieces

Positives:
I'm feeling more confident every week with the material and flow of my classes. Plant Science (which I have little experience in) got hands-on experience this week by preparing the centerpieces for the banquet. It was great to get students the experience, but also help out the FFA by providing the centerpieces. Natural Resources also had more experiential learning with another field trip this week. They helped plant trees around the Wellsboro area with DCNR and others in the forestry industry.

Natural Resources planting trees

Improvements:
With my last week in Wellsboro my main goal is to go out with a bang. I want to make sure that students grasp the concepts this week while I wrap up assignments for Penn State. I have the same number of lessons to prepare for every day, but also need to finish up some other things. This last week will be the true test to see if I can balance so much work with little time. Here's to the last week!

Make it count! #psuaged16

Community Based Unit of Instruction

I designed a community-based unit of instruction in my Plant Sciences course. I implemented community in all of my courses, but the Greenhouse Management unit in Plant Science is designed to implement all of the requirements of a community-based unit of instruction. Unfortunately, because of season timing I will not be present for all of the unit implementation. With the help of my cooperating teacher I contacted Lisa Ward as a guest speaker in the class. I also designed the unit so that the Plant Science course can put their knowledge of vegetable growing to the test by setting up a garden for the Tioga County Homeless Initiative. The funding for this project was secured through the Hunger Heroes Mini-Grant where the FFA gets $500 for the completion of this garden. Bringing together the funds, guest speaker, and setting up the garden are all critical to showing the students how essential community involvement is.

Lisa Ward is the Northeast Area Sales Manager for Sakata, a wholesale vegetable seed company with a long history of breeding and producing breakthrough vegetable varieties. Lisa lives in Wellsboro because it is central to her area that ranges from PA up into the New England states. She graciously accepted to come into the Plant Science course and give them an insight into opportunities in plants and a little about breeding. She presented to the students about the company which breeds varieties to get ideal vegetables through trials to eventually commercially sell. Students had the opportunity to learn how different products are created to cater to producers and also about Lisa and her experience. She shared about opportunities and how to take advantage of them. She encouraged them to never doubt themselves and to find a job that fits them. She used herself as an example and talked about how she gets to travel and do what she loves.

The next part of the community-based unit of instruction has to do with the success of the garden. Students will develop an understanding of the status of homelessness in their community by working with the Tioga County Homeless Initiative. I filled out the Hunger Heroes Mini-Grant to secure $500 for the supplies to successfully implement a garden for the homeless. I met with the manager who intends to have the residents maintain the garden, consume the vegetables, and donate any unneeded vegetables to the food pantry. Starting in the beginning of May the plant science course will start preparing the garden. They will be designing the area where the garden will be put in and start planting the purchased seeds. Throughout the rest of the school year the plant science class will be maintaining the garden.

Student Teaching Week 13

Natural Resources class stocking fish

It is unbelievable how quickly this experience has been flying by. Only 2 more weeks in the Wellsboro classroom before I continue my journey elsewhere! The more time that goes on, the more involved I feel like I am with the students and community. This week had some great highlights including my first (ever - not just at Wellsboro!) softball game. I went to support a student and the rest of the Lady Hornets. Another great highlight was a half day field trip for the Natural Resources class to stock fish nearby with the PA Fish and Boat Commission. It was a great experience for them... and also myself!

Positives this week:

This week I felt like I improved my organization and communication with students. For most of the classes, I developed a weekly objectives/bellringer sheet. This gave students the opportunity to check our progress through objectives on a daily basis as well as answer the bellringers for each day. I felt like this gave me a goal to finish that content throughout the week as well as it kept the lines of communication open between myself and students.

Improvement:

This week coming up I want to focus on preparation of lessons a little more. Having all the classes has been proving difficult for me and I need to spend more time prepping exactly how I want my lessons to flow.

Field trips galore this time of year! Looking forward to Tractor Driving CDE and Tree Planting this week for field trips!

Is there really only 3 weeks left?!

Week 12 was another short week for me. Not just because Wellsboro had off Monday, but also because We had a field trip Wednesday, I visited Janae Herr at Midd-West Thursday, and then we had another seminar at Penn State to prep us for job interviews on Friday! So it was a short week with only one day of teaching, but no lack of interesting things to blog about!

Ms. Herr's Forestry class
plus a goat visitor!

I really want to highlight my positive for this week which was the visit I had at Midd-West! With my minimal teaching this week, observing Ms. Herr for the day allowed me to reflect on how I run some of my classes and gave me ideas on some techniques to integrate into my classes while at Wellsboro.

 Observing at Midd-West made me realize I need to focus more on organization in my daily lesson plans, specifically with bellwork. Some classes had very simple bellwork that had them open up a link or something similar. I normally have a specific question for students to answer so it made me realize that not every class needs to have an elaborate bellwork and it will still work just the same.

Ms. Herr facilitating the 4-stroke
engine dance!

I also took away from my visit that I can continue to work on my clarity of instruction. That has always been the one point I see as needing more work within my teaching and it is something I would consider a strength of hers. It's an awesome experience to see a fellow classmate switch over to that teacher role and rock it!

Week 11

Animal Care Sanctuary presentation

This past week is a bit blurry for me because so much was going on and I feel like I didn't even have time to breathe. The week started out normal and ended early because of Easter which is lucky for me because I need this long weekend to plan an awesome week for the students next week! Especially since I won't be around much at all next week due to a field trip, visit to Midd-West, and a trip to Penn State.

Like I said though, a lot of stuff happened this week! A few highlights included a visit by the Animal Care Sanctuary to talk to Animal Science Students about animal shelters, planting some new plants in Plant Science, and making butter in Animal Science II.

An Sci 2 made butter while learning
about the dairy industry

 I feel like I have improved with my planning of lesson plans. Planning ahead of time made it possible for some of the students to make butter and I got rolls so we could have some food to eat the butter with.

It was a great, short week that made me realize some of the things I need to improve on. My cooperating teacher ended up very ill this week and missed a day of school that was planned for her to take some students for parliamentary procedure and public speaking for the area. I realized that day that I do not work well under pressure and I struggle with recovering from that. I was stressed with her being sick and I felt like I just could not pick up my confidence in my teaching the rest of the week. I want to try and work on my

Plant Science students planting

confidence and independence for the rest of the experience.


Special shout-out to Kelsey Henry for visiting Wellsboro this week.. and looking forward to visiting Janae Herr at Midd-West this week!

What is SLO?!

The Pennsylvania Department of Education defines a Student Learning Objective (SLO) as a process to document a measure of educator effectiveness based on student achievement of content standards.  Basically, SLO's are used to evaluate teachers based on student achievement. While at Wellsboro I have been implementing some SLO research by trying to determine if online or paper homework is more effective for student completion.

SLO research data

I realized in my first few weeks that I struggled getting my students in Animal Science I to complete homework assignments on time. I decided that I could look deeper into this. Specifically, if I understand how I can provide homework assignments through the most convenient platform then maybe I could increase the amount of students completing homework assignments.

At the start of this research I thought that online assignments would have a higher completion rate. I thought this mostly because Wellsboro is a one-to-one program meaning every student has a laptop. I thought with such easy access that there would be more students completing homework. I know there are various variables that could affect the outcomes of my assignments, but I found that my students more readily completed the paper assignments.

Over 2 weeks I recorded the homework assignments I assigned and how many of the students completed them in each class. I have 2 periods of Animal Science which gave me more data to work with (another reason I chose to work with Animal Science). My findings really have me interested in why I had better completion of the paper homework copies. Just reflecting on it, I have a few theories: 1) Maybe those homework assignments were shorter and easier for students to complete or 2) Having a paper on them reminded them that there was an assignment instead of having it on their online portal that they may not look at again for the rest of the day or 3) They had multiple days to complete the online assignments and not the paper assignments so maybe it gave them more time to forget the assignment. I'm really not sure if my data was accurate because of the varied assignments, but it really has me thinking of how I might want to communicate with students about homework completion. I may have to assign more paper than online and maybe implement a process to remind students of homework!

10 weeks down... 5 to go!

First, I encourage you to take 2 minutes out of your day to watch this awesome video one of my students put together!

One of the 5 FFA members that went to SLLC also missed 2 more days of school (total of 4!) for a horse expo. She was responsible for the notes in class, but wished to do something different for a project. I told her that the other students would be doing a project and that she had to do a project worth similar weight and time put into it. She has expressed interest in vlogging in the past so this became the perfect opportunity to assign a similar project. She was assigned the task of reflecting on SLLC... and the above video is the outcome! (which she gave me permission to publish and she posted on youtube).

An Sci II students created head bands,
notched an assigned number, and then
had to read/record their classmates notches

I only just received my final class this week, so I'm working on a full teacher schedule now! 5 weeks to go and this teaching thang is in full swing. With that comes stressful days, sleepless nights, but also endless smiles. I'm used to working with theses students and they're getting used to me which (I think) has done wonders for my classroom environment.

Positives:

Plant Science were assigned certain insects
(caterpillar, butterfly, etc.) and had to eat food
using only their assigned part - one student had
a straw while one student could only use teeth!

I felt like my creative juices were flowing this week and it made some interesting class sessions! This week ranged from developing (and playing) board games on wildlife in the Natural Resources class, having a game show style eating contest where the Plant Science students had different insect mouthparts, and making a pig ear head band to notch in Animal Science II. Reflecting on the week I feel like I had some great activities that engaged students in the content!

Natural Resources students designed
and developed a game board (per student)
 to test their knowledge of PA wildlife!

Points of Improvement:

My biggest goal this week is to further challenge my students. I have tried to make sure I'm testing their knowledge, but I do want to implement more quizzes and other evaluation techniques to ensure that they are being rewarded for learning and not just for doing their assigned work. I think a part of me is assigning more projects and work to reward students who work hard and neglecting to reward those students who are retaining the information because of who I was as a student. I easily passed tests and quizzes so I want to reward those students who actually put the time and effort into work - not necessarily those who remember things easily. I realize that I need to assess students on their actual knowedge. This will evaluate how much they are learning, stress the importance of studying/learning the material, and also help me evaluate my lessons. Knowing how they do on their assessments will tell me where I was lacking with assisting them in learning about various subjects.

Week 9 Student Teaching Adventures!

Grand Canyon FFA at Hope Spring Farm

What a week my experience had to offer! From SLLC (my first time!), a school lockdown, a guest speaker, to docking and tagging lambs - there wasn't a dull moment this week! 

State Legislative Leadership Conference (SLLC) was definitely my highlight of the week. It's so great seeing all the great things that happen at FFA Conferences. The highlight of the highlight (if you will) would be the community service that FFA does. The Grand Canyon FFA chapter was assigned to Hope Spring Farm where we spent the afternoon assisting with various farm tasks. This was rewarding because Hope Spring Farm is a farm for disabled adults to come and do work. This is a place that they can enjoy the outdoors and completely be themselves.

Because of SLLC, I only taught for 3 days this week. In a way it was a nice break even though it was still work - it was just different! There were many things going on in just a short week, but I have the following thoughts on my week...

Tagging a lamb in the Animal Science II class

Positives:

• Being at SLLC with a small group of 6 students gave me the opportunity to get to know these students outside of the classroom!
• Leaving a lesson plan for a substitute is not what I thought - Simple is best! 
• Spontaneity can be a good thing - Bringing 2 lambs into the classroom wasn't planned until the day before when the opportunity presented itself. Ending a 2 day lesson on sheep was complete with tagging/docking lambs! The hands on aspect really stuck with the students!

Point of Improvement:

This week I want to improve my communication with students. Having a sub in the beginning of the week for SLLC caused some confusion with assignments. To accomplish this I set up a bellower/objective template. I'm going to try it with one class this week and then implement it in other classes if it goes well. Basically this sheet contains the objectives for the week and the bellower for each day with a box to fill in their answers. At the end of the week they will submit their filled in sheet back. I'm hoping this way that the objectives for each day are clearer for students and having to submit their bellower this way will ensure they look at the sheet and make the bellower purposeful!

#psuaged16 is halfway finished!

The weeks feel shorter and shorter as the student teaching experience passes by. Every week I feel like I can't believe how far into this experience I am! Week 8 has passed and there were ups and downs just like any other week.

Not directly related to teaching, my highlight of this week was the opening night of Legally Blonde Jr. The Musical at the high school. It was an amazing event put on by the students. It was highlight for many reasons:

This poster for the musical can be seen throughout the school

• I love legally blonde, who doesn't?
• A student I have in class had a substantial role - it was so interesting seeing him in a different role other than seeing him in the classroom. In the classroom he is a very outgoing, intelligent student. He played the very serious and intimidating lawyer so it was very different than the student I have seen.
• It was heart-warming to see so many other students go to support classmates. I ran into a handful of students I have in class that either came to watch or helped throughout the semester with sets and other tasks. Wellsboro really supports the arts and I loved being a part of it for the night!

As I reflect on what I can do to make the next week (and future weeks) spectacular, there are a few things I would change to further improve in the classroom...

Things to improve on

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I really want to work on organization. From day-to-day I tend to get lost in papers to grade, worksheets to hand out, and lesson plans that should be filed neatly in binders. I really want to start spending a part of my afternoon filing away paperwork in an organized manner to keep track of things. This would mean putting my lesson plans in the appropriate binders, having a set pile of worksheets for students that are absent, and a folder or binder of the paperwork I need to go through at night. Although I file every week - it's not enough to put those papers away once a week (especially now that I have all but one class that I'm teaching).

Along with organization, I want to get ahead with planning a little more so I can be best prepared for lessons. I'm not as far ahead in planning as I would like to be and I hate feeling like I'm not doing my best for the students because I ran out of time to pick up materials. I'm getting better at planning ahead, but there is plenty of room for improvement in that area!

Positives

I feel pretty confident in my teaching abilities - more so than I have in previous weeks. I don't get nervous presenting a lesson in front of students or get thrown off by certain behaviors. I think as time has passed I have developed many of my teaching skills and I find that I don't need to spend as much time practicing how the lesson will go. I still plan it out so I know what questions I will want to ask or what activities - it's just that it comes more naturally in the classroom than it had in previous weeks. My highlight for teaching this week was judging donut holes. Mrs. Berndtson told me that she sometimes does that with students to get them used to the judging process so I gave it a try. I felt like students really enjoyed it and it gave them the background they needed to get ready judging classes of market animals. They put their note-taking and reasons to the test!

FFA Week!

Students preparing the teacher breakfast to kick off FFA Week!

My 7th week of student teaching has come and gone faster than I could've imagined. With #FFAweek this week it went by so quickly because there was always something going on! I've had the chance to reflect on how this experience has been going even with all of the craziness in the ag room!

Positives this week:
As time goes on I get closer and closer with students which has made this experience especially rewarding. I didn't even realize how happy I was getting to know this students until I was driving in my car and I started smiling as I was thinking about how much fun students were having out the FFA meeting/movie this week. Smiling like a dweeb in my car made me realize that these students are having quite the impact on me! I hope that I have been making a positive impact on them as well. More related to teaching, another positive this week was a successful lesson. My Natural Resource class comprises of 6 rambunctious teenage boys. I had them participate in a bird beak activity where they had different shaped "beaks" or utensils in this case and had to pick up food. I provided candies for them to pick up with their tools and it could've gone horribly wrong. I imagined the possibility of them getting too competitive and whipping candy around the classroom, but they were excited and responsible at the same time!

Points of Improvement:
This week I realized that I really want to work on my preparation. I have had multiple lessons that I was last minute getting supplies for or setting up. I've had a hard time keeping up with the day to day lesson prep, but I do feel like I'm getting better. With all these classes I want to make sure that I'm prepared so the students get the educational experience they deserve!

What happened to week 6?!

My sixth week of student teaching was more "off" than "on" in reference to days in school. We had a great weekend at ACES and had an already planned Monday off. I experienced my first snow day Tuesday (even though I went in anyway!) and #psuaged16 reunited on Friday which meant I only had 2 days of teaching this week! Even in just 2 days, I was forced to reflect heavily on how I've been running a few of my classes.


Points of improvement:

I learned this week that I've been too nice to some of my classes. Almost all of their grades have been in-class assignments like guided notes or worksheets that they have been given full credit if they hand them in. Although these are not bad to have, there must be variety and I have been lacking with that. I realized that I'm not pushing them to really learn and grow in their academics. To fix this I will be focusing on varied assignments as well as grading some of their assignments on accuracy and not just completion like they mostly have. Being nice is great, but my main goal as a teacher is to maximize their learning and they are not giving me the effort that I want... Since I can not change their actions I must change mine! Putting more emphasis on the importance of hard work and learning (instead of just getting it done) I think I can encourage them to work hard and earn their grades.


Positives:

Picking up my Ag Leadership course has been the most excited I have been since starting student teaching. I find that this class has such a positive environment and students are willing to do their work. I have been getting them excited about Public Speaking with fun activities and bellower such as playing simon says and saying tongue twisters. The first assignment these students did were impromptu speeches where they only prepared for 15 seconds and spoke for a minute. Students were nervous, but everyone felt comfortable enough to do it and were laughing and engaging in their peers stories. I hope that I can continue the trend with this class because right now they have showed me that they can work hard, be productive, but have fun at the same time and this is exactly what I want their learning to be about!

Happy FFA week to everyone out there! Check in to hear about some awesome things @WellsboroAg is doing to celebrate!

SAE Visit #2 - Entrepreneurship

The Wellsboro Agriscience department has opened my eyes to a whole world of agricultural education. I had the opportunity to visit another successful student and his SAE project. One thing I love about Wellsboro - you can stop at the local feed store on the way to an SAE visit and end up "visiting" 3 students at their SAE project. Such a fun trip to basically visit 4 SAE projects in one day whether you mean to or not!

Back to the SAE visit on purpose - tonight we visited an active FFA member who plans on showing animals at the fair. With how active this student is, there's no limit to what he takes on. He's had experience with pigs and this year decided to try his luck with some beef animals. His SAE would be considered an entrepreneurship (there are 4 total types - research, exploratory, and placement are the others) since he has purchased these animals to show at the fair. He is putting in the time to prepare these animals for fair and feeding/caring for them throughout this process. At the end of this project he would ideally make money from his project when he sells his animals at the fair.

It is great seeing the different projects students get involved in and how they use their resources. This student doesn't live on a farm so uses family properties to keep his animals for the most part. The steer he's using for his project are actually staying inside a dairy farm that his grandfather runs. It was such an experience to walk down the center aisle looking at all the dairy cows and all of a sudden see some giant beef animals at the end.

We asked various questions including his goals, improvements, and what he still needs to work on regarding this project. His mother was also there for the visit so sometimes she shared the information and pushed him to look deeper at his tasks. He sometimes runs into issues with getting to this barn to work with the animals so realizes he needs to start coming more regularly. I love seeing how students can develop and evaluate their goals! I hope to see him with his animals at the Tioga County Fair in the summer!

@WellsboroAg takes on #FFAces16!

Opening Ceremonies

 On February 13th and 14th, the Grand Canyon FFA and about 500 other FFA members from around the state attended the second weekend of the Agricultural Cooperation Establishes Success (ACES) Conference. This conference focuses on enhancing students leadership, team work, and social skills so they can develop personally and  utilize those skills to benefit their FFA chapters.

Workshop time!

It has been a very different experience for me than in the past. Although I never had the opportunity as a student, I travelled to ACES to present to students with other Penn State students and the State FFA officers. Although I had to prepare lessons for ACES in the past, being an advisor was a different level of being prepared. Being in charge of more than 30 students for an over-night trip is no easy task to conquer. I learned how essential it is to have everything organized including all the necessary forms and schedule planning. Luckily, this time around my cooperating teacher was there to guide the process. It was nice seeing my students in a different environment and being an advisor in a different environment as well!

Breakfast - Rockin' the pink shirts!

In the past I had never stayed over for the second day so it was interesting to see more of what the students experience. My favorite part of the conference was the reflection put on by the state officers. Reflection is essential to grow - in any aspect of life! To see a reflection take place for these students was great. It was impressive to me that they could get a huge room of rowdy teenagers to be quiet and focus on what was going on. Although I'm not an FFA member, it really had me reflecting. I may have been reflecting on different things than the students were, but it really had me thinking about my student teaching process and what I want to accomplish before it's over.

It was a new experience seeing the students I have been encountering these last five weeks have so much fun while developing these new skills. I hope they got as much out of it as I thought they did... or as much as I got out of it!

SAE project visit - Placement

Although I visited 2 students over the Summer to see their SAE projects, this is the first SAE visit I had since I've been student teaching this semester. Mrs. Berndtson and I spent our Friday afternoon visiting student SAE projects! This particular student has a placement SAE where he works at a community dairy farm. He assists with various farm activities with his main role consisting of milking the cows (usually with another person).

The student sharing about his SAE project.

This particular student is a very outgoing and dedicated worker. It was clear in how he talked about his duties, is willing to try anything, and how he interacted with his boss. Mrs. Berndtson doesn't have a set schedule for SAE visits, but tries to see as many students as possible. She admits that she just can't get to every student because it is a single teacher program with a lot of students. Because she can't see every student she doesn't give a grade for the visit itself.

Grades on student SAE consists of presentations and journal entries on theAET.com where she moderates how students are progressing. Students are required to have at least 5 hours in every month which she stresses to students is important because SAE should be a process - not working the yearly required hours in one month and finished. Although they don't have grades tied to the visit itself, she evaluates student progress.

SAE visits in Wellsboro consist of asking questions and getting students to set goals for their project. For this particular project, the questions consisted of the following:

• How many hours do you work?
• What kind of work activities have you been doing?
• What have you learned while working here?
• What do you hope to learn yet

With this project there was also various questions asked about the routines and what animal care is being done. The SAE visit is an important part of student development and really gets these students thinking about what they are doing and what they strive to accomplish.

Student Teaching Adventures... Week 5!

Natural Resources studying pelts, sounds, and prints of PA wildlife

The fifth week of student teaching has come to an end (sort of!). I should really say the classroom part has ended for the week, but my week is longer this week because of the excitement of ACES weekend. I write this as I think about what I need to pack to prepare for a few more days with Grand Canyon FFA members in Harrisburg. There have been some fun highlights of the week that make me excited to see how the rest of my experience will go.

I paid special attention to the Natural Resources class this week since I will start taking that class over next week. The subject matter is especially interesting to me (you may or may not know that I interned at the Carbon County Environmental Education Center), but the class seems to be more of a handful than I'm used to. They are not bad students in any way, just a very lively group of gentlemen that are always moving around and talking. I'm excited to have a small class in a subject area I like, but I will have to really stretch myself to make sure I can entertain these students!

Plant Science students designing a heart arrangement

Intro to Ag students designing a single rose arrangement for V-day

Many of the agriculture teachers (and student teachers) see this weekend as another weekend of ACES, but tend to almost forget that this weekend is Valentine's Day! Although I haven't started teaching Intro to Ag or Plant Science just yet (they're the last 2 classes I pick up!), I paid extra attention to their activities this week. To celebrate Valentine's, Mrs. Berndtson taught both classes briefly about floral design and allowed the Intro to Ag students to design a single rose arrangement while the Plant Science students designed a biedermeier heart out of carnations and other filler flowers. I will be teaching the floral design unit in Plant Science in a few weeks and paid attention to these activities because my experiences with plants and florals are limited. Students designing these florals was not only fun, engaging, and creative for students, but also showed just how important agriculture is. Some students might not realize the role agriculture has in some of these holidays!

Week 4 was a hit!

Students practiced subcutaneous and intramuscular injections

Student teaching is flying by and I (and the rest of #psuaged16) am already over a quarter of the way done. I feel as though every time I blink another day goes by!

This week I have been teaching 3 of the class periods and am teaching Animal Sciences I & II. With animal science being my favorite and most knowledgable topic, it has been great picking up these classes first. I don't need to focus too much on ensuring my understanding of the content and can completely focus on how my lessons are put together.

My highlights of the week including most of my Friday. Animal Science students had learned about diseases, vaccines, and related topics all week and were able to put their knowledge to the test with injections on Friday! Students were able to practice on bananas and oranges and then perform a subcutaneous and intramuscular injection on a banana for credit. Even with instructions (multiple times) on proper handling of syringes I still had a student poke herself with the syringe and need a bandaid. There were over 40 students that performed the lab, so I tried to look at the silver lining and realize about 42 students didn't run into any issues! I really think that with a lab like this that the preparation is worth it. They couldn't remember the names of injection sites from the day before, but performing the injections on  fruit helped them realize exactly how injections work.

Another highlight this Friday was my "field trip" to another classroom - this time a Chemistry class. I wanted to share (especially for my #psuaged16 cohort!) about one of her assignments. Students are assigned to work on a song related to the topic at hand using a song people are familiar with. Students had so much fun with the assignment and so proud of what they had accomplished. Most importantly, they now have those topics memorized! Learning can exist in various forms, and seeing her approach opened new doors for me! Of course at Penn State we were encouraged to appeal to multiple intelligences of students. I do not excel with musical and I have been struggling to appeal to that modality for students that can benefit from it. I'm thinking involving an assignment (with reflection like this teacher implemented) can really get students learning and being creative! Check out her one class video below (not the one I saw in class, but a past assignment):

Third week has come to an end

Grand Canyon FFA participated in a mock hunger banquet

The third week of student teaching has come and gone quickly as I expected. This week I experienced my first Activity Day where students have shortened classes in order to make time (about 40 minutes) to meet for various organizations. This makes it easier for some students who can't stay after school. The FFA had time to conduct a mock hunger banquet with members since the Chapter President wants to have a Hunger Banquet later in the year. There hasn't been an opportunity to witness a Hunger Banquet by another chapter so this served as a practice run. Although my classes were shortened by a few minutes it was beneficial to see the different students that came to the meeting. It was eye opening to most students, in my opinion, especially since most of them didn't have a lot of rice krispies to eat. At a Hunger Banquet you are assigned a country (and maybe a name and story along with it!) and get your portions based off that countries resources and population. This frustrated students from Asia (pictured) that only had a small square to split 22 ways compared to the 3 students from  North America that had a whole plateful.

Animal Science students conducted a fecal analysis

This was my first full week of classes since students were wrapping up presentations of their SAE's from the week before. To end off my week students in my Animal Science I class conducted a fecal analysis on goat fecal samples in an attempt to understand parasites and their life cycles further. Students had been learning about parasites for most of the week and I thought it would be a great end to the week! Some students were mortified about working with fecal samples, but most students were engaging the way I had hoped.

Being my first full week of teaching experience I had a lot of ups and downs. Some students would talk while I was talking or not listen while other days/classes would be vibrant and engaged in activities. It gave me some time to reflect on exactly the types of things I need to work on.

Points of improvement:

First, I really want to add more detail to my prepared lesson plans so I can manage class time efficiently and better prepare transitions and questions. I found that some of my lessons seemed jumbled and students sometimes needed further clarification.

Second, I need to be more aware of the class dynamic. The 2 periods I'm teaching are rather large and I don't even have all the names down yet. I need to make sure I look closely at interactions of students so I can pinpoint where any issues are between students. This can make it easier for me to fix talking or other issues.

Third, I want to put more focus into the objectives I have set for the classes. I want to make students more aware of what they will be doing and make sure to check that they are obtaining the objectives I have for each class.


I really felt this week like I have more to work on improving than I thought. I'm trying to stay positive and realize that I can't be perfect in my first few weeks of student teaching. Just to stop on a positive note though, I think something I do well has everything to do with my passion for animal science. Since that is the only class right now I enjoy teaching students about the animals and bonding with students about their own experiences with animals. I'm sharing my love of animals with students and they are sharing with me so that is something I'm proud of!

Student Teaching... Week 2!

The principal's puppy visiting the Ag Room

It's crazy to think about how much happens in just one week as an Ag (student) Teacher! It was still just my second week so there are new experiences every day. This week (although it is the second week) was the first week I got to experience being the teacher. I picked up periods 3 and 4 this week - The Animal Science I classes. They are 2 separate classes, but the same lesson is done in both classes so it's still not too much work. Teaching the same class twice in a row is a new experience for me and it was interesting to see the differences in the flow of lessons. I started with this class since my background knowledge is heavily in animal science.

The very first day went well in my opinion, but it was also frustrating because I got everything done right on time for the 3rd period class, but had to cut out 2 different activities in the 4th period class. Yes, the periods are the same length. And no, I have no idea how I did perfectly in the first class, but messed up the second class! It still went well and I noticed time running out so I made sure to go through everything important (like expectations!). I need to be aware of timing for the duration of student teaching and I figured that might be a challenge for me. This is also a challenging class to start off in because both sections have 20-28 students enrolled. Having minimal experience in a "real" classroom makes it a little nerve-racking having to control, educate, and entertain that many students.

Committee Work at the Grand Canyon FFA monthly meeting

It is also worth noting that this week was the first Grand Canyon FFA meeting I was able to attend. Students run the meeting efficiently using parliamentary procedure (the best they can anyway!) and most of the time was spent diligently working in their committee groups. I'm excited to see how their planning pays off for the various events and activities such as the FFA Dance, FFA Week (where they have mini events everyday and themes to dress for), Farmers Breakfast, Hoss's Night, etc. The Farmer's Breakfast is especially exciting for me because my parents are going to be visiting to support the FFA and then explore Wellsboro!

Week 2 down and can't believe how fast it is already going!

Exploring other classes at Wellsboro

Today was the day to see what else Wellsboro High School has to offer! I spent the first period of the day observing the College Prep Biology class down the hall as they started their Genetics unit. It was very beneficial to see how other teachers do things and Mrs. Davis sure knows how to run an efficient Biology class!

Like I said, it was first period so business had to be done (like attendance). It's clear she has a consistent class where students know what they are to be doing at different points in time. For instance, she asked students where they were as far as assignments and everyone was at different points, but no one done with the chapter. She said, "Well that means...." and students finished her sentence without thinking "We all have something to do!". So students know what they are expected to do and spent the next few minutes quietly doing work while Mrs. Davis took attendance and quickly reviewed their vocabulary homework (Which they passed to the front in alphabetical order as instructed). When you have a great class it is clear in just the first few minutes!

I don't want it to sound like a military base either - Mrs. Davis has these expectations for students to follow, but does her best to have fun with her lessons and relate it to students. For instance, while learning about genetics she played a youtube video of the Gregor Mendel Song (to the right). I think having a song to reference will help students remember various content as well as lighten up the class environment.

Although I have observed some great teachers, Mrs. Davis was one of the best. It was clear that she balanced having expectations, consequences, and a comfortable environment for students to learn!

Student Teaching.... Week one complete!

Students presented SAE projects: raising
Pekin ducks and teaching a deaf, mostly blind dog basic tricks

I can't believe the first week of student teaching has flown by already! Since I've arrived Sunday, I've gotten to know so many great students (yes, I even saw students Sunday!) and have really gotten a feel for what it means to be an agricultural educator. Teaching Ag never has a dull moment and in one week I've had my fair share of animal encounters in the classroom (snakes, guinea pigs, dogs, ducks, etc.), attended my first faculty and department meeting, and tended student CDE practices for Parliamentary Procedure and Forestry. It was a busy week!

Forestry CDE practice: The guinea pig is learning too!

Although it is only week one and I haven't been put in charge of any courses yet, this week has been eye-opening for me. I'm seeing first hand how much an ag teacher does for the students. I even told my cooperating teacher, Melanie Berndtson, tonight that I respected agricultural educators before, but now it's a whole new level! It's funny how you believe some things, but it is taken to a whole new level when you see or experience it yourself.

This week I became aware of how passionate some students can be. Although I was tired this week, I thoroughly enjoyed the time after school spent with students who wanted to learn more about their subjects to excel at CDE's. Having never attended an ag program while I was in school, it was refreshing to see these students. I am so envious of them since I haven't had the same opportunities they have, but I am so grateful that I can be a part of this process on the advisor side. Observing the Parliamentary Procedure and Forestry practice was the highlight of my week and I am looking forward to coaching my own team. I may even assist the Parlia Pro team!

My week in school is over... but I get to go back to farm show tomorrow with students for the second time this week!