It's In My Nature

This past week at NAAE National Convention has been an incredible experience. I am so thankful to Penn State For this entire experience. I have had the opportunity to meet some of the nation's best agricultural educators from across the country. These are leaders who were once in my shoes and have done a phenomenal job at building their local programs. I had the chance to interact with current Class of 2020 Ag Ed students from a number of universities. It was really cool to talk to those students from other universities and hear about the struggles that they are having. We actually have the same challenges and were able to give each other advice on how to best work through those problems. It was also great to work with Ag Ed members from Pennsylvania. California is quite the journey from PA. But seeing their commitment, dedication, and attendance to this conference reminded me of the value. It was great to interact with them and learn some of their skills that they use! The n...

For my Week 8  Investment Blog, I am presenting 3 questions from our assigned readings.   1) For your future students and/or future school administrators As a student, how do you feel if your teacher goes to a week-long conference and leaves the classroom for a full week? 2) For your cooperating teacher and/or university supervisor Laura Metrick, do you apply for NAAE awards? Would you ever consider going to the NAAE National Convention? 3) For one of your current virtual mentors (be specific!) and/or your cohort To Team Witmer virtual Mentors, How do you determine the value of a conference? There are so many great conferences to go to, how do you pick the ones you go to?

I had an awesome opportunity to sit down with Conneaut Area Senior High School and talk to their FFA officer team about Parliamentary Procedure. The officers did not have a lot of experience with Parli Pro but neither do I! I was able to teach them the basics and at the same time, I was able to better understand it myself. They asked so many great questions and wanted to learn more. There were even two times that I was unsure of the answer so we dove into Robert's Rule of Order to find it! The first activity was going through the process of how to make a motion. I created a set of cards on each step of making a motion, from obtaining the floor to the chair announcing the results of the vote.  Their first task was to take those steps and put them into order. I divided the officer team up into two groups to complete this activity. Each group was able to put the cards into order after a few attempts! Once we completed this activity, we went through each step and looked...

For my Ag Mech Demo, I chose to teach it at CASH in Ms. Metricks Ag Mech class. Originally I was very nervous about the assignment because I have only ever welded twice before. I am by no means a professional welder.  I was demonstrating to the students how to lay a bead, which they all already knew how to do that. I accomplished this task the only way I knew how to have fun with it. I was straight up with the students and told them that this was only my third time ever welding. I also very confidently told them that they can all weld better than me! After I gave my demonstration and had two students do the same thing, turns out I was right! I think an important part of teaching that I have learned through my Penn State experience is being willing to learn with your students and being able to laugh at yourself sometimes. Welding is definitely not my cup of tea and I have so much to learn. But going into the class with a growth mindset helped me through it...

For my life knowledge lesson, I chose a leadership lesson from the FFA called defining leadership. I really liked this lesson and I think the students did too! There were a lot of handouts and a lot of different activities that took place but I think the students thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a great learning experience for not only myself but all the students that participated. I taught Ms. Metrick's period 6, Ag 1 and period 7, Ag Sci class. In the first class, Ag 1 was great. We got through all the learning objectives and went through the entire assignment. The class engaged and participated very well. At the end of the class, for the student's ticket out, they had to answer the question, What is leadership? and write down who they look up to as a leader. This was really cool to see all the different answers for who they look up too. They also all answered the question right in What is leadership? Leadership is influence. The second time teaching this class was a...

I had the privilege of completing my Micro Teaching at Tyrone Area High School with Mrs. Hoy. I learned a lot over the last few days. This was definitely a challenge but I had a lot of fun along the way. I got to teach about the water cycle for three days and the last day being a soil erosion lab. Even though we had fun and did some cool things, it proved to be a challenging time. The students were a rowdy bunch and that made it difficult to teach. It was challenging because the class is a very talkative group. With the group being so talkative, it made it challenging to keep students on task. That was the hardest part. It became frustrating at times when students were not paying attention and acting up in class. With that learning challenge, there was still progress made. On the first day, I gave the students a quiz before any content to see what they knew. The class average on that quiz was a 20%. On the final day, I gave that same quiz on the water cycle and the class ave...

I am extremely excited about this week and microteaching! I am teaching in Tyrone with Ms. Hoy's Natural Resources class. I get to teach a 3-day lesson on the water cycle and I have a lot of cool things planned. On the first day, we are going to go over and learn some essential vocabulary for the water cycle and the students are going to create their own flip chart. On the second day, we are going to play the water cycle game. I am excited for this game because it is going to get students up and around. They will have to name the proper process of the water cycle throughout the game. We will also be able to introduce water pollution into this step of the 3-day unit. On the last day, we are going to get our hands dirty and look at how water can influence and move soil. We are going to talk about soil erosion. I can't wait to teach this day. Here is a YouTube video giving an idea about the type of lesson, the third day will be.

This inquiry-based learning workshop was an awesome 24-hour experience. KP from Greenwood really drove this topic home for me on what inquiry-based learning really is. It was awesome to see how this learning model really can get students excited about learning. There is so much self-learning that goes into and I think that's why I like it so much. It follows a scientific model and allows for the learner to create their own questions, conduct their own research and then effectively communicate their findings. For my inquiry-based lesson, I had the students get assigned a source of alternative energy. Then the students were given a partner and then given the Case study: You have been selected by Penn State to find an alternative energy source to power the University Park Campus. The University is looking for three things, cost efficiency, eco-friendly, and most energy-efficient solution. Remember, each alternative energy source has pros and cons. The best solution may be a c...

For my Week 8  Investment Blog, I am presenting 3 questions from our assigned readings.   1) For your future students and/or future school administrators   When a teacher asks students to sit and gather your thoughts before a discussion, do you find that time productive or distracting? 2) For your cooperating teacher and/or university supervisor   Laura Metrick, how do you use the think-pair-share? Do you find it productive for students to gather their thoughts? 3) For one of your current virtual mentors (be specific!) and/or your cohort   To Team Witmer virtual Mentors, what is an effective way to use the think-pair-share approach? I think it would be a cool idea to introduce new topics but I'm not sure if that is the proper time to use this approach.

My national FFA Convention experience has been nothing short of awesome. This was only my second time ever attending national convention. Last year, I attended national convention with Penn State's LEAD Society and that was an awesome experience as a collegiate student. Competing in ATA (Alpha Tau Alpha) events and meeting other collegiate students. This year I had the opportunity to have the advisor hat on. Understanding and looking at all the different moving pieces with a different mindset. It was so cool to see all the different parts. This is all thanks to an awesome cooperating teacher, Ms. Laura Metrick, and being on top of everything. Beyond thankful for this opportunity. This is the point of the semester where preparing for student teaching is beyond challenging. There are so many different moving parts and it's hard to stay organized and keep everything in line. It can become incredibly overwhelming and stressful really quick. This trip was a great opportunit...

Inquiry-Based Learning is extremely important when relating it to Agricultural Education. You can implement this to all forms of Ag Ed. From the reading, we learn that inquiry-based learning starts with a problem or a specific type of information. Once the information is presented students dive deeper into the content and look at all the different parts that then help to create questions. Once those questions are addressed by students and the instructor is finished asking questions, students create. This is taking all that information previously gained and then apply to it. There are so many different types of lessons that inquiry-based learning can be applied too. The best examples that come immediately to my head are problems that students need to find a solution too. An idea is introduced to students, information is gathered, questions are answered and results are made. Now fit that into a problem such as climate change, disease in your greenhouse, or even solving in...

This past week, I had the privilege of talking to a number of different teachers from different states. I spoke to teachers from Iowa, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. I learned that most of the teachers do a lot of similar things for taking care of their students back at school during National Convention. They all explained that it depends on the sub. Some subs can be great and have a general idea of what is going on can successfully do lessons. Other subs cannot relate to the content and are almost hopeless when it comes to teaching Ag content. In situations of poor subs, then teachers will give students a lot of content knowledge from videos and they will be responsible for specific notes/vocabulary words learned from the lessons. Ms. Metrick gives students a packet for each day with the information that their students will learn from the resources. They then have to fill in vocabulary words throughout the week for a quiz on Friday. Other teachers such as Mr. Smith from Iowa brings in an...

Lab this week was an awesome learning excessive. We had to write a substitute lesson plan off a specific learning standard that we were given. I chose a food science standard since I will be teaching a food science unit during my student teaching experience. I wrote a 45-minute lesson on Egg Grading and Candling Eggs. This was a more challenging lesson for me to write since I do not have experience in this area. Since I have no experience, I was learning along the way as I wrote the lesson. This definitely pushed me in a new way. This taught me different strategies on looking for additional sources for content. Once it became time to teach, we switched lessons with someone in class. This is a super fun and an important experience. We were given 10 minutes to review the lesson plan and had to teach it. I really struggled with this task because there was not enough detail in the lesson. Due to the lack of detail in the lesson, it made it hard to teach the lesson on a topi...

Individualized learning is a very interesting concept that focuses more on a specific learner's academic path. This creates more of an individualized feel and allows the students to move at their own pace. This is common in classrooms where there are gifted learners and can move at faster rates and the students that have challenges with learning and need to slow down. This is a great opportunity to use these steps to help students that might be excelling in a unit or struggling in a unit. The individualized approach is awesome for the specific learner concept. During student teaching, this can be used to help all the students be more successful and inspire more learning through all students. Through school, I have had teachers slow down lessons or units to help the entire class when the majority is not getting a topic. This is very helpful but challenging at the same time. When we would slow down a class, we would understand a topic better but that means you have to s...

I used the Problem Solving Approach to introduce a new topic of invasive and exotic pests that are impacting our Pennsylvania Forests. This would be done in lesson 10. The first 9 lessons will be based on dendrology and learning common Pennsylvania tree species. This lesson then leads into the forest management part of the unit. I brought in real examples for students to feel and see first hand what hemlock woolly adelgid and emerald ash borer really look like. Then we were able to connect this to the actual problem-solving approach. Students were asked, How can we manage our forests and ecosystems today when we are losing our ash and hemlock? What is the solution to this problem? The students then broke up into partners and began to research different possible solutions to this real-world problem. I really liked using the problem solving approach to introduce this topic and lesson. I thought the lesson went well but there are three major things. One is how I can better pre...

For my Week 8  Investment Blog, I am presenting 3 questions from our assigned readings.   1) For your future students and/or future school administrators  When a teacher asks students to solve a problem, do you the students find it effective to try and learn for yourselves through research?  2) For your cooperating teacher and/or university supervisor  Laura Metrick, how do you use the problem-solving approach in your units? Do you try to use it often or rarely do you use it?  3) For one of your current virtual mentors (be specific!) and/or your cohort  To Team Witmer virtual Mentors, what is an effective way to use the problem-solving approach to introduce a new topic? I think it would be a cool idea to separate students and let them conduct research for themselves and then bring that information back to the whole class. What could be some strategies to using that? 

Problem-based learning is a really cool concept that promotes critical thinking and for students to guide their own education. The student will get out of it what they want to put into it. Problem-based learning (PBL) starts with an initial problem and students in a group come together to solve it. Each student looks at the initial problem in a different way and that can prove to be inspiring for new ideas.  This can also be helpful to get all students involved. PBL cannot be successful without everyone’s participation in the group. This type of learning can be used for an entire lesson or for just an activity in your lesson. I can see this being a great group work activity in the middle of a lesson. Maybe PBL can even be used in an interest approach.  PBL is also important because it motivates students to learn more. With this learning style being inspired by the students. The student has total control in what they want to gain from the lesson. The only guidelines th...

For my Week 4  Investment Blog, I am presenting 3 questions from our assigned readings.  1) For your future students and/or future school administrators When a teacher asks students questions in front of the class, how confident are students to answer? Sometimes it is "awkward" to talk in class and can be hard for students to speak up.  2) For your cooperating teacher and/or university supervisor Laura Metrick, how do you effectively ask questions throughout the lesson? Do you plan a set of questions in your lesson plan?  3) For one of your current virtual mentors (be specific!) and/or your cohort To Team Witmer virtual Mentors, what is the best way to effectively come up with proper questions to help drive student interest? I would love to be able to find a way to get students interested in topics through questions and maybe even strike classroom discussions. But how do you effectively do that? 

This week's lesson was focused on interest approaches. Interest approaches are really important to lessons because they help drive student interest and engage students. I got to see a lot of cool interest approaches from my cohort members. One of my favorite ones was Abbie Smith's macroinvertebrates interest approach. That activity got me hooked and I wanted to keep learning. That is the key to a quality interest approach. For my lesson, I chose Ag 1, Intro to Wildlife course. The lesson was about the history of wildlife conservation. The goal of this lesson is to get students exposed to the history of wildlife conservation. It is so important to know the past because it helps to explain why we have habitats, species presence, and most of all the legislation to support it. Here a link to the presentation that is shown above: Timeline of Wildlife Conservation We went over all the important legislation and events that occurred that would later define the North American m...

This week's readings were very interesting and brought up a lot of good points about instructional design. When it all comes down to it, the typical lecture is not enough. In fact, the article mentioned that many teachers view a lecture as a conversation and just "wing it" through the lesson. The truth is if you are not prepared for your instruction the students will recognize that. No matter how you structure lecture, it's important to have other moving parts for instructional design because lecture is not enough. Photo: https://www.thoughtco.com/lecture-pros-and-cons-8037 There are many different forms of instruction that can be used besides lectures. There can be demonstrations, discussions, field trips or many other different instructional styles that can be used instead of lecture. But I have an important thought about this. Why not have lecture present and let the demonstrations or discussion be a part. I think you can easily do both. There are times that...

This week's lesson was a lot of fun. The first days of school were always great days during my school years. I was so impressed by the rest of the #PSUAgEd20 Cohort on how good everyone's lessons were this week. I saw so many cool ideas this week on how to do this lesson and how to get to know their students. I am actually really proud of my lesson. When I student teach, one of the very first classes that I will be teaching will be soils. So I did a soils lesson where we taught about the soil horizons and made a connection to our personal selves. Students had to fill out each section with their own personal answers. These would then be collected at the end of the class for the teacher to learn about the students. These questions were carefully designed and picked. Here are the connections:  O – Horizon is Organic Matter and Nutrients : Your name is who you are and the organic matter and nutrients are critical for plant growth.  A – Horizon is Topsoil:...

For my Week 4  Investment Blog, I am presenting 3 questions from our assigned readings.  1) For your future students and/or future school administrators To future students, what do you students think of bellwork (interest approaches)? Do you think they effectively get you interested or not? 2) For your cooperating teacher and/or university supervisor Laura Metrick, how do you effectively plan for a lesson in regards to time? Do you try to over plan and know that you will not fit everything in? 3) For one of your current virtual mentors (be specific!) and/or your cohort To Team Witmer virtual Mentors, what is the best way to effectively plan different teaching styles each lesson? I know it is "easy" to teach each week and class the same way, how do you find new styles of teaching and lesson planning? 

The readings for this week had some great information about instructional planning and writing lesson plans. Writing out lesson plans is so important to keep be able to effectively reach your unit goals and the class goals. Learning more about this, there were three things that really stook out to me with writing lesson plans. Having objectives, creating questions to ask throughout the lesson, and also having an evaluation piece. I find these three to be some of the most critical parts of an effective lesson plan. Having objectives is an important part of a lesson for not only you but your students. Telling the students what to expect for the lesson so that they can know how the lesson will flow and relate. Creating questions can be an important part to help keep the students in the lesson. Questions also help to evaluate understanding throughout the lesson. Also having a balance of questions that the instructor comes up with on the spot but also writing out well-worded questions. La...

For my Week 2 Investment Blog, I am presenting 3 questions from our assigned readings.  1) For your future students and/or future school administrators To future students, what can be done create the most effective learning environment? This can be anything from how class begins or changing the positions of the desks in the classroom. 2) For your cooperating teacher and/or university supervisor Laura Metrick, when you were a first-year teacher, what did you do to "stay happy", how did you balance the workload of a lot of teaching but staying happy and healthy? 3) For one of your current virtual mentors (be specific!) and/or your cohort To Team Witmer virtual Mentors, how hard is the first day of school? Do you do the same routine every year to establish every or do you change it up? 

This assignment was interesting to say the least. When we first received this assignment on Monday, I was at a loss for words because of my topic. I had to teach a class on how to construct the origami butterfly. This was a daunting task due to the fact of I had no idea on how to do this myself. After watching YouTube video after YouTube video, I learned how to do it and formed a lesson plan.     As I go and watch my lesson on Edthena, I see a few things. One, I don’t feel like I did that bad of a job. My objective was to have the students create an origami butterfly on their own and they did that. Second, I have a lot of work to do in improving my teaching methods. I was told that during the instructions, I made it seem like it was a fire drill. I would agree! I see that when I give instructional learning, I need to slow down and give more detailed instructions. I also see that I need to better manage my classroom and student behavior. Hopefully we will learn more about tha...

My summer internship at the Russell E. Larson Agricultural Research Center at Penn State finished with Ag Progress Days. I had an awesome opportunity to go around and visit different vendors to learn more about why these companies are here. It was so cool to talk to big-name companies and to have real conversations with them. Here are some pictures from Ag Progress Days.  Local Seed Company  Mid-Atlantic Seeds New Holand Mahindra John Deere Kubota  Pioneer Seeds All of the Summer Interns

The American chestnut tree was an iconic species to the Appalachian ecosystem; known for its rapid growth, high yield harvest and quality of timber. Chestnuts are an important keystone species to hardwood ecosystems because of the nut abundance and their nutritional value. Chestnuts also had a very economical importance because the wood is highly rot resistant. This made chestnuts very popular for building structures such as log cabins and railroad ties. At the start of the twentieth century, it was said that one in every four trees in Pennsylvania was an American chestnut. In the 1920’s, the chestnut blight had found its way to the United States from the Chinese chestnut and had begun to move through the landscape. By the 1940’s, the American chestnut had been removed from the Appalachian forests due to the devastation of the chestnut blight. Biologists suggest that this one of the greatest ecological disasters in history. Today, groups such as the American Chestnut Foundation, the U...

Jim Walizers chestnuts are proving to hold very similar characteristics of a true American chestnut with fast growth, high nut yield, and timber-like growth characteristics. His trees average 8-16 inches of growth in a year and by year three are mature enough to produce nuts. This is a perfect example as to why oaks were unable to replace the loss of chestnuts from the ecosystem. Chestnuts will have high fruit yields consistently every year, will produce nuts by year five and are extremely fast growing. Oaks on the other hand, are super slow growing and are commonly outcompeted because of that and they do not have consistent fruit yields. Oaks need to be at least 20 years old to produce acorns and only once every 3-5 years will have high harvest yields. The other years will be small and low acorn harvests.  In the early stages of Walizers research, he had planted one of his successful blight resistant chestnuts. The first-year growth was not straight and was simply not th...

On our way to the rain out shelters with the Millennium Scholars to learn about root structure, something interesting happened. When the students were arriving, they were blown away by the wheat field in front of the bus. After talking to these students, many of them were from the city and this was their first ever time even stepping into a field. All the students wanted to touch the wheat and feel it. This was a great opportunity to quickly teach them about wheat and what wheat is used for!  This is the key point as to why Teach Ag is so important. Teaching the leaders of tomorrow and helping them to answer questions like “Where does our food come from?” is imperative for the future. Out of this group of 35 students, there were only two that were in the College of Agriculture. This experience then leads to teaching that students in the college of engineering can learn applicable skills for the field of agriculture. There is an interconnectedness between all of the col...