No, no, no! This is not my last blog! Nice try though! I say that because, this is the last of many contextual lab reflection posts. In case you were wondering, time really does fly when you're having fun. It also flies when your to-do lists are miles long, when your calendar is full and when your a senior. Here were are ready to embark in the last week of the fall semester, a month or so away from our student teaching internship, how crazy?!
Today I'm taking some time to look back on my contextual lab experiences. So, in true fashion, I will reflect like normal. I'll share my Gems (the good stuff), Opps (the okay stuff) and my Targets (what I'm striving for).
Gems -
- Purposeful. Everything about the design and structure of this contextual lab course is incredibly purposeful and designed to help complete our teacher preparation experience to the best of its ability. I am thankful for the instructional team and their intentionality to do so. For example, what better way to kick off a semester then to assign a lab assignment for day three on day one? Immersion by fire? A little bit.
- Application. Lab is very much so designed to create situations that can be directly applied to our student teaching internship and beyond. The lesson plans that are written for lab experiences are encouraged to be some of the same that will be turned in for our final presentation and be used at my cooperating center in the spring.
- Delivery. I can leave this semester and this contextual lab, confident that I have experienced growth in my ability to deliver content to my students. Lab has allowed me to "practice" in low-stakes environments, to develop and refine and learn from my peers. Of course, growth also occurred in other areas, but in my case, I believe lab accomplished its purpose.
Opps -
- Classroom Management. As per the syllabus, the contextual lab experience is to be supplemented with classroom management role-playing. The few lab days that we did the role playing, was a great experience and allows for constructive feedback and reflection. I wish; however, that this would have been implemented more heavily. The addition of the role playing really rounds out the "real-life"experience.
- Feedback. The constructive feedback from my instructors and my peers is incredibly valuable to me; it is what makes me better. I strive to always provide my peers with the same level of feedback that I would want them to provide me. I wish that the lab would be designed to incorporate some type of coaching or training that would help students have a better understanding of how to give, and receive, constructive feedback. Using the same rubric for all labs would also help increase the consistently of feedback.
Targets -
- Reflective Practitioner. The instructional team I have the privilege of working under is incredibly intentional about developing my peers and I into reflective practitioners, so that we can continually be growing and developing into the best agricultural educators. Though at the time, they were not ideal, I am thankful for blogs, rubrics and learner satisfaction forms. All of which played a role in helping me develop into a reflective practitioner, a skill I plan to maintain throughout my professional career.
- BECOV. Be who?! BECOV, you know, like Rosenshine and Furst essential qualities of an effective teacher. B - Business-Like/Task-Oriented, E - Enthusiastic, C - Clarity, O - Opportunity to Learn, V - Variability. The contextual lab experience works hard to develop all of these in #psuaged16. Below, you can watch my lab reflection video that features my employment of clarity of instruction and directions, an area I feel that I grew and excelled at. I want to keep working to better in the area of Business-Like/Task-Oriented and Opportunity to Learn during my student teaching internship.
Simply put, lab has been a stretching experience, one that surely made my teacher preparation program complete.
Simply put, how is it really the end of my last fall semester in college?! But seriously, time does fly. Don't blink.
Until Next Time, K. Janae
