Weekly Writing #2

Field trips are a great teaching tool that can help relate information learned in the class to real life examples. However, they have to be used correctly. Field trips should always have an educational purpose or objectives for the students to gain from.

Before a trip, the teacher needs to obtain permission from administration and make arrangements for the trip. Students should also be familiar with the destination they will be visiting. This will help keep downtime from happening and students will be more comfortable to a new location. During the trip, I would try to give students a worksheet or something physical for them to complete. This will allow for the students to have a resource to stay on track while at the destination.

Question can be a great tool to use during the trip as well. They can be used to develop interest or motivation for the students. It can also be used to maintain attention on the subject matter. By using Bloom's Taxonomy, teachers can develop student's understand with higher level questions. Questions can also be used to give confidence to a student as well.

I am excited to think about taking students on fields trips this spring. From my experience, field trips were the best. It was a change up in the day and you got to learn something right in front of you instead of seeing pictures of it. 

Interest Approach Experiment

Yesterday, I had my second trial run in front of the same group of students. On the first day of school the students had difficulty paying attention because they were given a task that could be answered with discussion. Seeing this, I wanted to plan something that would be hands on and that I could isolate the students to limit the off-topic discussion that took place previously. In order to do this, I had the students blindfolded and describe a sample of Play-Doh using their hands. They were asked to essentially texture the Play-Doh. This was to help them use their senses to identify components within a soil. I wanted to refine this skill and bring it to the attention of the students that you can be more observant with your hands than you think.

Overall, I believe it was perceived well as evidenced by the lack of behavioral issues and the students were not able to see what others were doing thus isolating them to the content at hand and limiting the disciplinary issues. Furthermore, I believe it was a success based on how the students answered questions that I posed with the activity.

One thing that I am not sure if I would change or not is having only a couple students do the exercise. I believe the benefits associated with having only a couple students do the exercise would be less materials but also fellow students could see what is happening. However, the downside of this could be that the fellow students would be more likely to get off topic with each other depending on the class.

 I would like to continue to use this as a agriscience teacher. It was a great activity to get the students focused on how to texture soil. The blindfold was key in limiting their senses to only feeling the sample.

I believe that it went much better than the first day of school, however, there is still room for improvement.

First Day of School

Yesterday I had my first trial run conducting classroom instruction with my cohort.

I was surprised how the role playing made the classroom feel very real to a high school classroom. Furthermore, I can see how it relates to students in my college courses now and I can pick out the personalities much faster.
 I don't feel like I was caught in an awkward position by my students in the trial run but I definitely saw that I need to improve on tasks/activities that make the students do writing. I think if I incorporate more hands on tasks, the students will be more engaged than as if they were to speak out. The speaking out that I had in the last class tended to have more negative classroom instruction than I would have liked to see.

I can definitely see how that when I become an agriculture teacher, I will have to tailor the lessons and activities to the students that I will be teaching.

Compared to the very first lesson I taught, this went MUCH better. I felt more relaxed, I was more prepared than the last time and just felt comfortable. I think that if I can keep having the same improvements between each trial, I will be comfortable going into student teaching.