Microteaching

Last week, I embarked on my microteaching adventure at Bellefonte High School. We were tasked with creating a 3-day unit taught during one period for three days with two fellow cohort members. This assignment is to give us practice teaching to current high school students before student teaching in the spring. Mrs. Poorman was kind enough to welcome my group and I with open arms into three of her Ag classes.

I was tasked with teaching during Mrs. Poorman's Ag Mechanics class. When I first received this information, I was excited but nervous. I wasn't sure where to start when creating my lessons for only three days. After some time to mull over my options, I decided that I would not use Mrs. Poorman's shop during my lessons as I was not familiar enough with the equipment available and the shop set up. This left me with doing lecture type lessons with some hands-on activities in the classroom that would not require the use of any equipment. After making this decision, I decided to seek advice from Penn State faculty member John Seaman on what fun hands-on activities I could do that did not require the use of machinery. He was able to direct me to many resources and ideas that I took and adapted to work in the environment I would be teaching in.

On the first day, I chose to teach about safety and some equipment identification. I geared my lesson towards welding as the students had just started into this unit with Mrs. Poorman. Overall I think my lesson went very well. Students stayed engaged and asked questions throughout the lesson. One student even said he would recommend me as a teacher! I was glad that my first day was a success! While everything went smooth, there are a few tweaks and minor changes that I plan on making to lesson in order for me to use it in the spring for my student teaching internship.

With the first day being a success, I was pumped for the two remaining days. Unfortunately, the weather had other plans. A terrible snowstorm swept through the State College area which forced schools to close both Thursday and Friday.

I had a great time microteaching even though it was only for one day. Mrs. Poorman offered me feedback which I plan to use when tweaking my lesson that I taught.

Project Design Elements: How Do They Work In Real Time?

According to the Buck Institute Books,  Project-Based Learning enhances instructional units showcased in the photo above. I really enjoy Project-Based Learning and I am looking forward to  implementing Project-Based Learning during student teaching.

I hope to incorporate several different Project-Based Learning opportunities during my student teaching internship. I plan to incorporate projects to some extent in all of my units for the spring. 

I am planning on incorporating problem solving into my wildlife units and my ag mechanics units. I feel that problem-solving will work best within these units. I plan on using inquiry to some extent for all of my units but right now I know it will be incorporated into my greenhouse management unit.

These methods of project based learning will facilitate student learning through the project rather than teaching them first and asking them to apply the knowledge later. This allows for deeper learning and understanding by the students. 

RTL Lab Reflection Week 5

This week, we were tasked with teaching an inquiry-based lesson for 30 minutes. I was really excited to teach this lab after seeing examples of inquiry-based instruction in action!

Gems

I think some gems that I had for this experience was having multiple layers to the inquiry activity. For the interest approach, I read a story prompt that had students engaged before the activity started. I also had students analyze sticky cards on their own and then discuss their findings with each other. Finally, I had students analyze an article in order to justify their conclusions. During this activity, I had students utilize a data sheet which they found very helpful for the activity.

Opps

I think some opportunities I had for this lab are to pose deeper thinking questions to the students either verbally or on the data sheet. Another opportunity that I noticed would be to fix the prompt so that is does not come off as childish but rather a more serious case that the students are supposed to figure out. Finally, the last opportunity that I saw would be to slow down my directions and the activity to include checks for understanding. 

Final Thoughts

Overall I think my first inquiry-based instruction lesson went well. I plan to incorporate the opportunities I listed above in order to make the lesson better for my student teaching internship.

Literacy Strategies

How can we demonstrate inquiry-based instruction?

 Last week, we were tasked with doing our own research on inquiry-based instruction that ended with an amazing lesson taught by Mrs. Pontius. This week is a continuation on inquiry-based instruction by taking it one step further by looking at literacy strategies.

Literacy Strategies

Literacy strategies can be used for any school subject. They are useful tools that enable students to make connections between concepts, organize their thoughts, and retain important information. There are many literacy strategies to pick from. A few that I found during my research are:

1. Paragraph Highlighting
2. Chapter Tours
3. Prediction Pairs
4. Double Entry Diary
5. Think-Write-Pair Share

Why are Literacy Strategies important?

Literacy strategies are very helpful in all situations. They are especially important for inquiry-based instruction. Students will need literacy skills in order to be successful with inquiry-based projects. By implementing different literacy strategies before inquiry-based instruction, you are setting your students up for success!

Implementation 

I think that all the strategies I listed above would be very useful in the classroom. The one strategy I plan to implement during my student teaching internship is the paragraph highlighting. This strategy can be used with news articles where students first read the article individually while highlighting important passages as they see fit. The next step is to have students work in pairs to see which passages are highlighted differently or the same. Finally, students talk about why the chose the sections they did to highlight. This strategy allows students to look at the same piece of information three times and in three different ways. By utilizing this strategy, I believe that students will be able to contextualize the information and allow them to generate their own thoughts on the material in an organized fashion.

Virtual Mentor Interview 2

For the second virtual mentor interview, I was tasked with asking how my virtual mentors encourage cultural diversity in the classroom and what strategies they use for English Language learners. I was able to have empowering conversions with each of my virtual mentors regarding these important questions.

Global Perspective

I found through my discussions that one popular strategy was to provide global perspectives to different agriculture issues. This opens students up to different cultures and allows them to see the similarities or differences between their own culture and other cultures around the world.

Leading By Example

Another strategy that I found quite useful is to lead by example. By not tolerating exclusion-like behavior in the classroom, students will adopt appropriate behaviors when discussing sensitive topics such as religion, race, language, and culture.

FFA Involvement

Paying attention to FFA involvement is very important. It is important to recognize that all students involved in the agriculture classroom have the opportunity to be involved in FFA. Another way students can interact with different cultures is to participate in a chapter exchange.

English-Language Learners

There were a few very exciting strategies shared regarding this topic. One is to utilize Google translator for difficult questions. Another strategy is to encourage students to ask questions when something is confusing. Finally, there is a really cool program offered at Ms. Kane's school where they have a "Spanish in CTE" program. Once a month, a Spanish teacher will come in and provide vocabulary and content that is the same as what is being taught, except in Spanish. This is a very unique program that allows students to become familiar with Spanish in agriculture.

Conclusion

I am very thankful for Mr. Faber, Ms. Slates, and Ms. Kane to take time out of their busy schedules to answer these questions. I greatly enjoyed the conversations we had and the strategies and resources that were shared. Stay tuned for our final interview recap!