#TransformationTuesday - Poem: Where I'm From

Earlier in the semester, in my AEE 311 course on Youth Organizations & Leadership, we wrote poems to describe where we were from, because without understanding where we are from we can never truly understand where our peers and/or future students are coming from. The below poem, Where I'm From, is just one way for me to describe the non-agricultural aspects of where I come from, and to describe the beginnings of what has transformed me into the person I am today.

Where I'm From

I'm from the land of hoagies, 

wooder ice and "Yo Adrian"

I'm from tiny two walls, sometimes three, 

full of furballs, games and music

I'm from haunted rooms, records, 

binders and photobooks of memories long gone

I'm from brick walls, concrete patios, 

closest park is full of headstones

I'm from Mommom and Poppop, 

the house of Peats and RePeats, 

Elf's, Squirts and Mountain Man

I'm from sweet potato casserole, 

coleslaw and mincemeat pie

I'm from the red, white, and blue 

sirens, guns, uniforms, and badges

I'm from the smell of hay, leather and dirt 

mixed with packed bodies on buses and EL's

I'm from yelling, screaming, 

crying, and laughing

I'm from Bells and Bridges, 

Rivers and Marble Steps

I'm from 

brotherly and sisterly

National FFA Convention Advisor Edition

Just A few weeks ago I got to enjoy one of my favorite parts of the year, the National FFA Convention, only this time it was a little different; instead of wearing my familiar blue corduroy jacket, I was wearing my blue blazer, my unofficial advisor jacket. 

I got to spend over 10 hours each way with a great group of five students from the Tri Valley FFA chapter, where I will be student teaching this spring. I learned a lot on this trip, not only just about how to fill the advisor role and how to work with these five students who will be some of the many I'll be teaching in the spring. I also learned how much of a family Ag. teachers can be, and how welcoming most of them are to new people in the field like my cohort and I.  

But this convention wasn't like many others, I've gone on other trips as a chaperone with FFA members, so chaperoning my five kids was not much different than chaperoning any of the other trips I've gone on with my own chapter. But what was different this year was I made a point of looking through a multicultural lens when I looked back at my National FFA Convention experiences I had over the past week. 

As someone who comes from a pretty diverse FFA chapter, the lack of diversity that we see in the FFA is not that surprising to me; for me that was the most depressing part. While other members of my cohort are amazed at the lack of diversity that they can see when they look at FFA members I'm not. For me it's something I've been dealing with for the past 10 years, ever since I first put on my blue corduroy FFA jacket. 

However, when I look at convention through this multicultural lens, while I am depressed at the fact that I don't see more diverse FFA members, I am impressed by how much the National FFA is pushing the "We Are FFA" program and how National FFAand agriculture industry partners and supporters were pushing the "#myAgStory" in order to show FFA members and others, that agriculture is a very diverse field, and with a wide range of people working and living within this diverse industry. 

What was most interesting to me, was how the stories I would hear from advisors saying how their students really just need to get out of their county every now and then to learn that there is a great big world around them are not just stories, they're serious. There are students who need to travel outside their county in order to realize that there is a bigger, wider world out there. The funniest example I have of this is when we were traveling in our van back to Tri Valley, on the last leg of our journey home. We're on the homestretch and we were discussing with our students what they did and did not enjoy about Convention, what stood out the most to them and if there was anything they were really going to miss or were really excited to get home for, and right away one of my students said he was really excited to be home and not have to eat any more of that "city food." For me this was really funny and I asked him what he meant because I knew where they been eating all week and they had mostly just been eating convention food, which is mostly burgers, chicken tenders and fries and one night I made a point of taking them out to dinner at an Italian restaurant. 

This is when I learned some of my students really need to get out of Schuykill County every now and then because my student went on to say that he didn't like the city food because it was fried and it was Italian and Italia is a city and he was just really glad to be home for home-cooked food. Well we all had a chuckle at this when we reminded him that Italy is a country and not a city, so he couldn't put Italian food from the restaurant into that category of "city food." But it also made me realize why did they think convention food was city food when it was the same type of food you get at any fast food joint. While only one student made the comments the other students were nodding their heads  along with him in the van when he was saying this and so for me I know that I want to try to make it a point to find out from my students if there are any of these "city myths" that exist in the school and see if I can break down any of those barriers that already exist. 

This is really important for me, not only because I think it'll help my students get a better understanding of where I'm coming from but also because my students will be attending a leadership conference at my high school in the spring in the city, and I want to make sure they are both prepared for that experience of going to Philadelphia and then also looking forward to it and knowing that the students that they meet at that conference are not going to be any different than them even if they might look a little different. 

While those comments related to the "big city mouse, little country mouse" were quite interesting for me and I think that they're going to make for very interesting spring and lots of really great experiences with my students, what I was most impressed by was when my students went to the opening session and watched the motivational speaker Nick Vujicic. The motivational speaker was great and he used humor and real-life stories to show that everyone is the same and everyone should be loved and appreciated for what they bring to the table, even if they don't have any arms or legs. As soon as Nick came on stage and started talking my students' eyes were glued to him onstage and I understand why because I was the same way. Even though when we were reflecting later that night on what the speaker was saying most of what my students mentioned was the jokes and the funny stories he had I was impressed that they were still getting his message. 

They all seemed to understand the anti-bullying and appreciating everyone message behind his stories and I hope that when I'm with the students all the time in the spring that I'll see the evidence of it and see that they brought this message back to their school or at least that they are encouraging this message within their FFA chapter. 

Overall, I had a great time serving as the adviser for the tri-Valley FFA and I can't wait to get to work with the students on an every day basis and knowing how much work needs to be done and seeing that I think my students already have an open mind they just need to be exposed to more I'm really excited to see how much I can do with the students when I am with them all the time and see how much I can encourage them to grow when I'm exposing them to other sides of agriculture and culture that they may not be used to. 

Inquiry Based Instruction: AEE 412 Weekly Writing #9

This is what we want to avoid by using
strategies like Inquiry Based Instruction.

Inquiry Based Instruction focuses on making your students the real directors of their learning. While the Problem Solving Approach allowed students more ownership of their learning, the Inquiry Based Instruction teaching technique takes it one step further and has the students in charge of the content delivered and the delivery method (depending on the implementation, and the constraints set by the teacher). Inquiry Based Instruction relies on and fosters high levels of student engagement and provides opportunities for teachers to incorporate other subjects into their classroom, enhancing their students' reading, math and science skills.

Based on the scientific method, Inquiry Based Instruction utilizes 6 stages of the Inquiry Cycle: 1) Inquisition, 2) Acquisition, 3) Supposition, 4) Implementation, 5) Summation, and 6) Exhibition. Students can move through this cycle several times depending on the content taught and the delivery method chosen, and it makes them engaged in each part of the learning, from deciding what they will be learning (the question they will inquire), brainstorming how they will acquire the knowledge/solution needed for the situation, the planning and implementing of an experiment, and developing and sharing their findings.

Since there is no one correct way to incorporate Inquiry Based Instruction into your classroom, there are many different methods for implementing it into your classroom, but the commonality among all the methods is the importance of student engagement. On paper, Inquiry Based Instruction lessons may appear unstructured, and this can be true, which is also why some teachers may struggle with implementing this technique. While many teachers agree that Inquiry Based Instruction increases higher order thinking in their classroom and provides connections between their classes and their students' other core classes, it has the stigma of only being appropriate for advanced students. Due to the focus on moving towards higher order cognitive levels I can easily see where this stigma comes from, and I know that thinking about how I would incorporate this into my classroom, I struggle as to how I would prepare my students for this technique. But I believe that this is an important point - Inquiry Based Instruction is not just for advanced students, but there needs to be proper set up before between the teacher and students for it to be effective.

Need to make sure your students have the correct 
safety equipment when conducting wet labs!

To try and better prepare myself for attempting to implement Inquiry Based Instruction in my classroom, I attended two of the NAAE Teacher World workshops while at the National FFA Convention this past week in Louisville, KY. These workshops were sponsored by DuPont and facilitated by agricultural educators from across the country who have completed their National Agriscience Ambassador Academy.

My first workshop was "Chicken Little, Chicken Big" and taught how to determine the optimal, threshold, and detrimental levels of a substance using the scenario of feeding nutritional supplements to a flock of chickens. In this workshop, each of us (the students) were given a random sample of 10 chickens of a specific age out of a flock of 1000, and had to determine what the optimal, threshold, and detrimental levels of the supplement were based on the data we had on their growth rates each week. This activity teaches a student how to use given data points to determine the answer to a more abstract question before the answer is not necessarily important, but the reasoning behind the chosen answer and the process used to determine it are important (depending on the context this is being taught, if you are actually raising animals the correct answer would be important).

My second workshop was "Vet Detective: Tracking the Spread" and I really enjoyed this workshop and am excited to use a variation of it in my classroom this spring. This activity focused on determining which student had the original infected animal, Patient 0, based on the recorded interactions of all the animals found to be infected after a set number of interactions. I really like this because of the higher order thinking involved, the many variations it could be spun into, and also in the simplicity of its delivery. Each of the animals assigned to the students had its own scenario or biography and these could be utilized to varying degrees in the students' deductions of who was infected based on the teacher's level of questioning. The workshop provided the lab handout for the activity which included the materials needed and procedures utilized, but the teachers facilitating the workshop demonstrated several teaching strategies that I think can really increase the level of Inquiry in the lesson. While we (the students) were given the handout with procedures, we had to read it and then create pictorial versions of the procedures, which taps into the visual modality of learning and also requires students to analyze each step instead of just rote reading. They also had us develop our own data tables before showing us the example that we used during the workshop, which provides students the opportunity to decide what is the important data points you are looking for and the importance of labeling data.

Overall, while I am still nervous about developing my own Inquiry Based Instruction lesson plans and implementing it into my classroom, I can see the potential for all the different ways it can be utilized and how it can increase the amount of higher order cognitive learning I am using. I am looking forward to learning more about the topic this week and watching some Inquiry Based Instruction experts in action when we take our field trip to Greenwood High School.

Teaching Problem Solving Approach: AEE 412 Lab #3

The Problem Solving Approach lab was the hardest lab to teach so far, as it's a technique that many of us are still learning how to implement. We've all seen it used before but with varying levels of success. While this lab was the hardest lesson to write and implement, for me it was also the first lab I felt really comfortable teaching even though it was for my hardest to formulate unit.

For my Problem Solving Approach lab, I tackled several topics I was most nervous about - the Problem Solving Approach, my Community-Based Unit of Instruction, and (hypothetically) my Ag Practicum class students. To give a brief explanation of the latter two topics - in the spring, my 6th period class is Ag Practicum, which is a class my students who are enrolled in Ag Science I-IV can take concurrently. This course provides them with additional time during the day to work in the two ag. shops and complete individual projects and is a great resource for students to complete tasks related to their SAE's or school events (for example, the ag. students last spring helped build the large anchor decorations for the nautical themed prom).

This class is where I am incorporating my Community-Based Unit of Instruction, where I am using the forested land on the school's campus and the school's forest stewardship plan to teach my students a little bit about forestry, native wildlife, incorporate their woodworking skills in creating "bat boxes" as habitats and create a form of educational material for the community. To address these areas and incorporate the  Problem Solving Approach, my lesson set up the transition of my unit from learning about native wildlife to creating a local solution to the problem of a declining bat population.

What I liked about my Problem Solving Approach lesson:

• I felt really comfortable delivering my lesson. I think this is because I wasn't actually delivering any content during this lesson, I was just setting up the questions so that my students thought about the right topics and directed the learning, it felt like some of the pressure was off of me. 
• For this lesson plan I created a 1 page handout for myself that pulled out all the parts of my lesson plan that I was actually going to be demonstrating during my lab. I utilized this handout to teach from instead of my full lesson plan because it broke all of my content and steps down into just a few key words or phrases that I would understand what they meant and so that I wouldn't get lost in all the words in my actual lesson plan, where I have everything written out in more detail so that someone else would understand what I am thinking.
• I liked that while my students were developing the answers to my various questions about the problem of a declining bat population, I was able to focus them back towards my end goal of the students suggesting we build "bat boxes" by directing them to agree on a solution we can implement at the local level.
• I also really liked how I handled behavior issues in this lesson. None of my students acted out but I did have side conversations that I was able to pull into the wider class discussion, and while we did have tensions rise at one point because of conflicting student views, I think I was able to sideline that tension before it developed into anything.
• I liked that I incorporated the "Go Get It" e-moment into this lesson so that the students were able to get up and move since a lot of the content of this lesson would require them to work at their desks either individually or in groups, and I like that this e-moment also provided me a way to teach the students some content about bats and get them thinking about facts and issues related to bats before I gave them the email scenario setting up our problem.

What I can improve about my Problem Solving Approach lesson:

• I need to increase my enthusiasm - while I felt more comfortable during this lesson, I am still struggling on showing my students that I am enthusiastic about being there with them. This is a trait I think I am constantly going to have to focus on. 
• I need to avoid giving students too much of the information right away and instead provide them the time and opportunity to tell me the information, including having them actually state what the problem is that we're addressing and not me telling them and having them agree with me.
• I need to be careful that I always have clarity in my instructions and expectations, both verbally and when writing them on the board for students to follow.

Overall, I'm really happy with how my lesson went and I hope that I can find multiple ways to incorporate the Problem Solving Approach into my classes because I think that my students will really like it and I think that if I set it up correctly it can relieve some of the pressure I feel in front of the classroom and allow me to be more comfortable and enthusiastic.