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!