The Teac{HERR} Way - Real Deal, Real Life, Real Close

I share with you almost every week about my experiences in my contextual teaching lab. These lab assignments are fairly low-stakes, I teach to four of my peers and one of my professors. As our lab assignments progress, things get a little more intense. We teach for longer periods of time, we implement role-playing to practice classroom management skills and performance expectations get higher. Our "capstone" lab, if you will, is our micro-teaching experience.

Micro-teaching is a three-day lab assignment, where I am placed at a local high school and teach a class period a day to their agriculture students. I had the pleasure to work alongside two of my peers at the Central Pennsylvania Institute (CPI), which is a career and technical center, who's agriculture program is focused on Horticulture and Landscape Management. I taught three lessons on asexual plant reproduction and plant propagation.

And yes, you are correct. I got to teach some real-life kiddos this week. And yes, you are still correct. I still am so very excited to have my own agriculture classroom.

That hype aside, like always, I'll share my Gems (the good stuff), Opps (areas where I need to work on) and my Targets (my goals for next time).

Gems- 

• Check for Understanding. I've been working to be very intentional in this area. Whether it is distinctively pausing the learning to see where we've been and where we're going or if it's using it as a tool to help rein the students back in or to call them to a higher level of thinking, I've found this to be a very powerful tool, that I pride myself in working hard to master.
• Effective Questioning. Again, this is another area that I want to excel in. I want my students to confidently answer questions, but in the same vein, not be afraid to ask them and actively seek responses. 
• Preparation. I was super thankful that I spent some extra hours to prepare all my needed materials for all three days of teaching the day before I started. Interestingly enough, crazy things happened and I ended up not needing a lot of them; however, because of that preparation, I was able to be much more adaptable and flexible when the need arose.

Opps- 

• Technology. It will fail. Time and time again. I know now the importance of test runs on my technology. I wanted to use this week formative assessment tool called ExitTicket to evaluate my students learning throughout the three days I was there. Well, slow internet, different versions of phones and a pile of other things, made this technology usage quite challenging. 
• Timing. The nature of my micro-teaching placement made designing "class periods" a little difficult for my peers and I. I struggled to plan well for the 50 minutes I was allotted. On the bright side, I had plenty of content that I still could have covered, which is surely better then being short, I need to continue to work at judging the amount of content I have, the abilities of my students and the minutes I have in a class so that I can better serve my students. 
• Higher Order. Though I felt good about my ability to ask effective questions during this three day early field experience, I was challenged to keep seeking out questions that call my students to a higher level of thinking. This too, will come with practice. But it will also come with more familiarity with the content that I am teaching. 

Targets- 

• Adapt and Overcome. This should probably be the anthem of my micro-teaching experience.
  Flexibility my friends! It's a teachers key to success! (That and lots of coffee) There was a serious of somewhat-but-really-not-that unfortunate events that came to my peers and I during these past few days. Power outages, technology failures and mandatory assemblies just to name a few. But sometimes, all you can do is roll with the punches - adapt and overcome.
• Teach to the Modalities. I was pleased with my ability to incorporate variability into my lessons this week, but even still I want to make sure my various learning activities in my lesson are reaching the needs of my audio, visual AND kinesthetic learners.
• Lifetime of Learning. Here's the thing, I will never know it all. My knowledge of agricultural topics may only always be an inch deep and a mile wide. But the important part is that I devote myself to a lifetime of learning. I need to constantly be seeking professional development, current events, emerging technology and the list goes on and on. I want to stay relevant so that my students can stay relevant.

Simply put, I am super thankful for a program that makes this early field experience part of our course work. I learned some really valuable lessons, but even more so, I left refueled, ready to knock out these last 30 days (holy cow!) until the big final presentations.

Simply put, I just really like high school agriculture students. They really are the coolest. 

Until next time, K. Janae