Week seven has been another rollercoaster ride! With a two and a half day week during National FFA week, we were still very busy!
In Overdrive
With so many cancellations, delays, and early dismissals it has been hard to stay on track with my unit plans and lesson plans! Adaptability has been a necessity during my student teaching experience to combat these conflicts. Since I am in week seven, the urgency has struck on making sure that my other assignments apart from student teaching are being completed. It is time to kick it into overdrive to get everything done!
National FFA week
Even though we had some set-backs this week with our activities, we were still able to get a lot accomplished! We had teacher appreciation breakfast on Tuesday, FFA trivia and meeting on Thursday, and Chapter breakfast and Middle School recruitment on Friday! The chapter officers and members did a great job of planning and executing all the activities!
Questions
- How do you instill the importance of being a leader in younger members?
- How do you combat immaturity?
- When dealing with weather set-backs, do you cram in as much information as you can or do you select which information is most important even if it means leaving out content you had planned for?
Glad you had a great FFA Week with your students. As far as developing leadership in modern youth, this is a tough one. I feel as though students today are much less mature and responsible than when I was that age. In my FFA days WE (the student leaders) balanced the chapter checkbook and paid our own chapter expenses, as well as organized all of our own chapter fundraisers. Vastly different than the way many FFA chapters are operated today. I have no real good answer to that question other than to try walking them through actual responsibility/leadership activities. As far as weather set-backs, again, there's no real good answer, however, you can try to condense topics/lessons together whenever possible. I hate cutting stuff out, because it makes it seem as though that stuff you're cutting out was never really as important as other stuff anyway. If you have planned for it, it must have been important/necessary. I think you're learning the valuable lesson that the approach to planning isn't "how can I fill up this time", but rather "how can I plan effectively in order to cover everything I need to/get the students as much time on these topics as possible" Good stuff.
ReplyDeleteOlivia,
ReplyDeleteWhat is the purpose of instruction? To just stay on schedule? Remember, we should never just "cover" material, our goal is to help student learn (ie change in behavior); therefore as the instructor you have to make nuanced decisions about time-sensitive/critical instruction (or nice to know versus need to know)
These decisions can be influenced by end-of-course exams that are critical (ie NOCTI) and of course helped with consultation with your cooperating teacher.
What is the value of "cramming" if no learning occurs?