It's In My Nature

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...