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.