Trusting The Process: Learning From Other Teachers

This week I will be teaching 3 days at Juniata Valley High School. The class will be an 8th grade into to agriculture class. I am very excited to work with the teacher there Mrs.Russell to teach her class about Pennsylvania agriculture and the differences between Pa and the rest of the country. As I prepare for this experience I am thinking of how this fits into my Teach Ag Journey.

How do this connect to my Teach Ag journey?

1.Real life experience with kiddos: Through this experience I get to try some lessons and pedagogies to see how they work before I try them with students who I will be working with for 15ish weeks. I can make small mistakes here with students who might not even remember I was in their class come the end of the semester. 

2. I can receive a different point of view on teaching strategies: I get to work with an awesome mentor teach and get great feedback from my cooperating teacher and university supervisors but, this gives me yet another resources to add into my teaching tool box.

3.Teaching middle school: My dream job would be teaching a middle school agriculture class. While I am student teaching I will work with 5-12th graders. This gave me an idea of what this class looks like.

How does this experience connect to other classes?

1.Agricultural and Extension Education(AEE) 412: I designed my lessons while micro teaching to be inquiry based instruction since we just got back from the Pennsylvania Future Agriculture Science Teacher Symposium in Harrisburg where we talked about inquiry based instruction.

2. Agricultural and Extension Education (AEE) 100: During my time in AEE 100 I observed a middle school science classroom in Bristol,Ct. I watched the lesson of the day which was "How do animal adaptations allow for survival?" This lesson was designed as an inquiry based lesson where students were researching different animals and creating a powerpoint on them. The teacher was very hands off with the class and let students figure it out on their own.
This is something I tend to struggle with. Before this lesson at Juanita Valley I will pull out some key characteristics of this teacher to help manage my classroom but, allowing growth of my students in the content.

What is one resource to help prepare me for this experience?

 This blog form Aj Juliani talks about how teachers learn best from other teachers because we experience similar things and can understand what the other one is going through. Relying on other teachers is a great way to reflect on your teaching and to do better for your students.