Week Eight: Taking ACTION!

 At this point in my student teaching internship, I have been teaching a full course load for two weeks. This week I swapped Animal Science for the Supervised Agriculture Experience (SAE) class. This week was fairly quiet in terms of FFA events, although a group of students has made it a habit of staying after school to work on banquet preparations, community service events, and the chapter scrapbook. I've enjoyed working with this group of dedicated students and getting to know them outside of class. 

One event that did occur this week was the first GLAGreads book club meeting. This meeting included educators from all across the country and from all disciplines and from all grade levels. I was energized by the energy and passion of the group, there were so many great ideas shared I could not write them down fast enough! The author of Teach Boldly often calls on readers to take ACTION and in the spirit of GLAGreads, I would like to share with you some examples of my students and I are taking ACTION in week eight. 

Taking ACTION for McVit - As I dug into chapter one of Teach Boldly, the author was discussing how students can create change through projects for social change. This comes as some FFA members expressed interest in doing a fundraiser for a teacher who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. I am excited to see this project through with my students in the coming weeks as they create an awareness campaign for breast cancer and a community of support at Cumberland Valley High School and in the local community. 

Taking ACTION to get student feedback - As I exchanged my Animal Science class for the SAE class, I decided to do a course evaluation where students would rate their experience in my class. I asked the students to rate my performance using a standard teaching evaluation question bank and a 5-point Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. I asked students to rate my preparedness for class, confidence with the content, fairness in grading, giving feedback on assignments, etc.  I also asked the students in an open-ended format what they thought Miss Guise's strengths and areas for improvement were. 

Here are some of their responses:

Strengths: "kindness, encouraging people, patience", "she clearly cares about her students", "she is good at getting us to participate in class", and "creativity when it comes to making assignments"

Areas for improvement: "showing more examples in class", "make note-taking more engaging", "explanations of topics and assignments"

I appreciated hearing my students' perspective and this is an exercise I will definitely continue to do as I slowly give courses back to Ms. Case. 

Taking ACTION and getting creative - I have been using the Curriculum for Agricultural Science Education (CASE) extensively during my student teaching internship. While it is a well-put-together resource and I have enjoyed having some pre-prepared content available to me, I have missed being creative in my assignments and in-class activities. However, my Plant Science class has just finished the plant anatomy and plant taxonomy units and we are now moving into the floriculture unit (which is not included in the CASE Curriculum). I am looking forward to this opportunity to flex my creative muscle and bring more variety to my instruction. 

What about you #PSUAgEd2021? How are you taking ACTION or teaching BOLDLY? Is there anything specific you are looking to implement between now and the end of April because of discussions at GLAGreads?