Individual Teaching Techniques: 412 Weekly Writing #6

The past few weeks we've learned about effective teaching characteristics, planning and designing curriculum, interest approaches, and student engagement. We've discussed the multiple intelligences, learning modalities, learning styles and cognitive levels (good ol' Bloom's). Most recently we've discussed how all of our learners are different, and how different teaching techniques can best reach all of our different learners, specifically the use of effective questioning and group teaching techniques. This past week we introduced individual teaching techniques.

There are many different reasons to utilize individual teaching techniques, but they all stem from the same important principle - all learners are different. As educators, even if we had a specialized class where all of our students are homogeneous in some characteristic, they are never going to all learn 100% the same way. Even students characterized at the same academic level (track) will all learn differently based on the multiple intelligences and multiple modalities, and multiple cognitive levels will be addressed throughout your content so your students can learn the information you want them to. Students also need variability just to comprehend what they are learning. Students can typically only pay attention to a specific topic for approximately 1 minute per age (so 10 minutes for a ten year old), capping out at about a 15 minute attention span so you as the teacher have to switch things up just so you're students can naturally pay attention, so avoid activities that take longer than 20 minutes if there's no variability because students will zone out and lose focus (just ask anyone in my cohort who went to the almost 5 hour CPR and First Aid training....).

This need for variability, differentiation, and individualized learning is why a variety of teaching techniques are needed, and the individual teaching techniques can not only address this need but also other needs of our students and other accomplishments we want them to strive for. These individual teaching techniques encourage our students to become more independent, and dig deeper into what they're learning. They learn how to utilize multiple opinions - knowledge transfer is not a one-way street from teacher to student, it should be a multi-lane highway where students are teaching and learning from each other and the teacher (and the teacher can be learning from their students as well). They should learn how to analyze and evaluate information, including what they gain from their peers and teachers, and what they discover on their own, and finally teaching students how to learn. 

Teaching student how to learn through the use of individual teaching techniques may at first sound a little crazy (then again you find me an agricultural educator who isn't at least a little crazy), but to me it also makes perfect sense - the best expert on how we best acquire knowledge and comprehend learning is always going to be ourselves. So once you teach your students how to learn, they can discover what works best for themselves and learn how they can be active in their own learning and gain the most out of any learning experience.

So once we understood the goal of individual teaching techniques, our textbook discussed five different techniques: supervised study, experiments, independent study, student notebooks and sheets (information, assignment, and skill). All of these strategies can be utilized in various ways in your agricultural education program but what stuck out to me was how all of these techniques are utilized through the Supervised Agricultural Experience (SAE) portion of our program. The SAE itself is primarily an independent study conducted by the student, and allows a student to dig deeper into whatever area of agriculture they are interested in, but the student is also under the supervision of either an employer or parent in addition to the teacher, through SAE visits to check student's progress, making it also a supervised study. SAE projects can be experimental in scope, but students also incorporate experiments whenever they have to make decisions about a project, from which feed or equipment to use or which record-keeping system to utilize. Record-keeping also brings in the techniques of the student notebook and the various sheets that can be used as students keep track of their activities, their skill development, their finances and their day to day contributions towards their projects.

After reading about these various techniques, I know that it is important to utilize all of them in the classroom, in cooperation with the group teaching techniques, but I also know that in order to have a fully integrated intra-curricular program, we have to encourage our students to participate in FFA opportunities and develop their SAE projects because those are the pathways where they can dig deeper and discover their individual passions. To help with this and encourage more discussion on these topics, check out the National FFA website to learn more about SAE's and check out this Pinterest Board link for lots of creative ideas on how to use interactive student notebooks in your classroom.