It's In My Nature

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?