DIY - CDE Resources

One of the assignments during student teaching was to develop a DIY project (Do It Yourself) that would aid to our development as teachers but also benefit our cooperating centers. To figure out what I should do for this project I decided to go back to the three-circle model. I believe that student teaching in general will help me improve upon the circle of classroom & laboratory instruction, and that my experiences working with students throughout the semester would help with SAE, so now that leaves the circle of FFA.

As a student I was very involved in FFA in my local chapter and took part in several state and national activities, but my time in FFA was very focused – I picked one or two things and I worked on them again and again each year to improve. One such example is in the Career Development Events and that is where I got my idea for my DIY. I decided to develop “CDE’s-In-A-Box,” resource kits to help train and prepare students to compete in several different Career Development Events.

When I was a student I only competed in the Livestock Evaluation CDE, and while I have helped judge and facilitate a few different CDE’s during my college career, they have mostly been the public speaking contests and not technical skills, so that is where I decided to focus. I planned to compile resources for at least three different CDE’s to help serve as a starting point for ag. teachers when beginning to train a team.

Based on the preferences of the students at Tri-Valley the CDE’s I compiled resources for were: Livestock Evaluation, Poultry Evaluation, Veterinary Skills, and Wildlife. These resources were compiled from a variety of different sources including Communities of Practice, various State FFA Associations, the National FFA Association, and several state universities and extension services. My students were also involved in the process, as they complied resources for the Poultry Evaluation CDE through a group project.

The original idea for the project was to create boxes and/or binders of the various resources; however, after discussing it with my cooperating teacher we decided that digital versions would be much more helpful and easier to distribute amongst students. So before I left to head back to campus I left her a binder full of the physical hard copies of the resources the students had found for Poultry Evaluation, in addition to a USB drive full of digital versions of all of the resources found for the various CDE’s, among other helpful documents. 

Hopefully, the resources are helpful for the students and Mrs. D and they will be used quickly as some of the students will be competing in several of those CDE’s at the regional contests at the end of the month with state convention in less than two months. At the end of each school year the FFA members also host and participate in an Ag Field Day, a daylong Ag Olympics event and sometimes one of the events is a portion of a mock CDE, possibly one of the ones they now have training resources on.