Reading Reflection 1

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Reading Reflection 2

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Writing-Reading Reflection 2.5

The first article for this reading assignment was about field trips. This is an important topic for an ag teacher because there are so many field trip opportunities in ag education to enhance the learning for the students. Because I have been in ag ed, I have went on a lot of field trips in high school and college, which was always a blast and proved to be very educational but I never really realized why they were such great learning trips until I read this article.  I like how field trips can be broken down into three simple steps. The pre-trip stage, trip stage, and post-trip stage. By doing this it helps the field trips go smother and allows the students to learn more because they will be prepare to learn on the trip, do the trip, and have a wrap up to recap what they learned.

The next article was on cooperative learning.  Cooperative learning is where students work together in small groups on a task.  There are several things you have to consider when doing cooperative learning in order to make sure it is a success and the students learn from it.  Some things that you have to decide are; how many learners do you want to have in a group, do you want to have similar or different groups, is the room set up properly and do you have the appropriate materials for the activity, how do you facilitate learning through monitoring group work, and what did the students accomplish.  This was a neat article and helped me learn understand cooperative learning and what to do as a teacher instead of just doing whatever as group work. Im sure I will use this knowledge often because I like cooperative learning because it can be a fun way to learn.

The third article that we had to read was on effective questioning. Questions are very important for teachers because it allows them to do several things.  They can asses where students are at on understanding material, develop student interest and thinking skills, and establish connections between different concepts.  There are different levels of questions that you can ask.  Lower level questions are less complex and simpler while higher level questions are more complicated and require more thought. Teachers can also ask questions that are open ended or closed as well as general questions to the whole class or a directed question to a specific student.  There are lots and lots of things teachers can do differently when asking questions to maximize the participation of the students giving answers.  The wait time for teachers before they call on a student for an answer to a question is 5 to 7 seconds so the students have a chance to formulate an answer.  It also gave a lot of ways for teachers to handle the responses that students give when answering questions.

Lab Reflection 2 - Interest Approach

So we had the second teaching lab and for this lab, we were assigned to teach an interest approach for a lesson.  It was a fun lab because interest approaches are fun and exciting in order to pique the learners interest so the will want to learn and focus on learning.  I got to see a variety of interest approaches from the other teachers in my lab be performed.  That helped me kind of see what I want to try and shoot for time wise with interest approaches.  I feel that some of them were a little to long, especially if the class is only 45 minutes like I will have at James Buchannan.  A ten minute interest approach just seems to take to much class time for a 45 minute period but it may be about right for an 80 minute period. 

I feel like I liked my interest approach of throwing a stuffed cow to the students and having them point to a body part on it and say the name was a good interest approach for a few reasons.  I liked it because it was short, sweet, simple, and to the point.  It didn't go to long so it didn't use much of the class time.  Another reason I liked my interest approach was that it served as a pre-test for the students.  If they can identify a lot of the parts already, you as the teacher will know to move fast through the material.  If they don't know many parts, that is a sign that you should slow down as you teach the material and make sure they grasp the concepts. 

I think this was a great lab for us to think about so we will get good at doing interest approaches, because without a good interest approach there isn't much of a point to teach the lesson if the students wont be focused on learning.

Lab 1 Reflection - Expectations

Getting this blog started!

We began our lab teachings as if we were just beginning a career as a new teacher at a high school.  It was kind of cool to start out with this for two reasons. The first reason was because it made me realize that the time is near that I will have to be doing this on my own, in my own classroom.  The other reason that I really liked it was because it really made me think of what I want to do on my first day student teaching and teaching once I get hired at a school because I want to make a good impression right away.

The expectations component of this lesson was helpful because it allowed us to thing of how we wanted to run our classroom and what the consequences will be for infractions. This is something that could have caused problems at the beginning of the school year for a new teacher because it is something that could easily be overlooked.  By thinking them through and going over them the first day of class, the students will see you have the authority from the get go and help with that first impression.

The lessons went fairly well for being our first ones although we learned a lot about presenting.  With everyone fulfilling their duties of being a different type of student, it made it a little difficult to manage the classroom with so much going on.  I have had quite a bit of experience presenting before so I was fairly comfortable with it, or so I thought. But all of the students acting out through me off guard from what im used too. It is difficult to deliver a successful lesson with so much disruption going on.  It made me realize how important it is to have good expectations and receive respect from your students if you want to be an effective teacher.

With a lot more practice this semester, we will all get to where we need to be!

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