MId-Winter Convention and PA Farm Show

Students who are joining the FFA and receiving their jackets 

Tie tying teamwork!

First off, I want to talk about how amazed I was at the
representation of the agricultural industry in Pennsylvania during the Farm Show. I mean, everything you could think of from mushrooms to bicycle frames made from wood to alpaca wool mittens! It was a great experience and it makes me excited to be a part of a great industry in a great state.

Now, putting on my agriculture teacher hat, man it is a lot of work facilitating that experience for students. Making sure that you fundraise to be able to take students to the show, make sure that all of the students' projects are at the show at the right time, that they are ready, renting vans/buses, making sure no one gets lost...the list goes on! As an ag teacher you have to be on your game all the time especially during times like that.

Mostly as I reflect back on the experience, I am excited to start a career in which I get to learn and grow daily doing something that I am truly passionate about with the support of many great people.

Tractor restoration project by Bald Eagle students

Getting My Feet Wet - A "Microteaching" Experience at Mifflinburg Academy

I had the opportunity to practice some of the teaching techniques that I have learning about this past semester as I "micro" taught at Mifflin County Academy of Science and Technology in Lewistown, PA. I taught some lessons that I wrote for my soils unit, specifically about what soil is and why it is important, how soil is formed, how to collect and prepare a soil sample, and a lab in which the students tested for macronutrients in the soil. I had a really good time and I think that the students did as well. The Agriscience teacher, Annette Sprenkel, gave me some excellent feedback and I am excited to be able to improve my teaching techniques. 

Students collecting a representative soil sample

Some key takeaways

What I need to improve:

• I need to prepare materials for the students like guided notes and handouts to enrich the retention of learning
• I need to ensure that I maintain professionalism throughout the lesson. I am still struggling with this, because I want to have fun and I want the students to have fun, but I need to be conscious and careful that I don't let the students forget that I am their teacher and that they are here to learn
• Transitioning from interest approach to lesson material and activities. Make sure that there is a clear connection and that adequate instruction is given

Some things that I did well:

• I made the students work and think. As a new person coming into the classroom and only being there for 4 days it is hard to develop a rapport with students and encourage them to feel comfortable to ask questions and participate, but I think I did pretty well with that regard.
• The students were engaged. I spent a lot of time thinking about interesting ways to teach soil properties and processes to design an engaging and interactive experience. There are a lot of things that I need to improve, it wasnt perfect, but the students liked it and during a formative assessment they rated their confidence level regarding the material on average at an 8 (scale of 1-10, 10 = very confident)
• I was able to learn every student's name and call on them by their name which I feel is very important

As a side note, I really like the CTE school setting with the block schedule. Forty-two minutes just isn't enough time!

(Pictures posted with permission)

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Lil' Wilburt (or Craig)

The animal barn. Pigs, goats, and rabbits

Inquiry Based Instruction - A Reflection

What is education? What is the goal of education? John Dewey was a harsh critic of educational paradigms that relied on the transmission of facts as educational goals. He believed that education was a mechanism of social change and as Paulo Freire incisively declared in "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," a "means by which men and women can participate in the transformation of the world" (the quote is often attributed to Paulo Freire but is actually attributable to Richard Shaull in his introduction of Freire's work "Pedagogy of the Oppressed).

So if education is not merely the transmission of facts, what is it and as teachers what is our role? That is a difficult question to answer, and as with most difficult questions there is no one right answer. That being said, there are many approaches to teaching which I believe come close to some of the ideals that great minds such as Dewey and Freire had imagined.

Inquiry based instruction is a process in which the instructor facilitates a learning experience that is directed by the student. It is based on the scientific method, namely: making observations, formulating hypotheses, developing testable predictions, experimenting, gathering data, and making conclusions which is followed by a scholarly peer review.

I know when we hear scientific method our minds are filled with images or thoughts of scientists in white lab coats pouring colorful liquids into test tubes or Doc from "Back to the Future," however, that is a very narrow perspective of "science" and a paradigm that we need to change if we want to encourage students to be excited about science. Stated simply, science is a systematic way of finding answers to questions that we have and you probably use the scientific methods unconsciously everyday.

Although I have very limited experience with inquiry based instruction, I recognize that more than helping student discover new things, it is about helping them through the process of discovering new things. In other words, it is about the process as opposed to the output. What is really powerful about inquiry based instruction is that learners learn how to learn! To be a lifelong learner you have to learn how to learn and learn effectively. And that is what inquiry based instruction is all about.

Think about it!

Throughout my study of education I have been striving to understand exactly how we, as educators, can help our students love learning. I have been frustrated because I feel that our current system of education in the U.S. is not conducive to the development of a love of learning, and that many times it has the opposite effect. I have often felt discouraged and disenfranchised, but at the same time I knew that there had to be something that could help me to empower students to love learning and effectively seek answers to questions that they would have. I think that I may have found a very important tool that can help me achieve this, at least in part.


Inquiry based instruction is an approach that utilizes the scientific method to capitalize on natural curiosity in our students. It is about the process of discovering new knowledge without a teacher to tell you what to memorize or do.  It is an empowering process for both the student and the teacher as they are edified by increasing their capacities to obtain knowledge from their own experiences with the world.

As I can't write everything I have learned about inquiry based instruction in this blog, I will write about something that I was having a difficult time wrapping my head around and that is breaking the culture of working for a grade. As I have written about previously, we know that we work in a "system" whether we like it or not. We have to assess learning and students need a grade to show how well they "understand" the material so that they can put it on their transcripts and get into a good university. But with that system, students aren't motivated by learning new and interesting things about the world, they aren't interested in discovery, they simply want to know what will be on the test so that they can get an A. I had been thinking about just telling the students that as long as they work hard they will get an A, but I felt that that left a lot of subjectivity in the assessment process.

In the article, "Inquiry-based instruction: How is it utilized" that was published in the Journal of Agricultural Education, the researcher used focus groups to better understand teacher experiences with inquiry based learning. A comment from one of the members of a focus group mentioned that although there are usually many right answers, the students are assessed not on whether or not they get the right answer, but how well they justify the conclusions that they draw from the data that they collect. I think that that takes some of the anxiety out of the the process and helps students to focus on learning instead of the grade. This really hit home with me and I am excited to be able to experiment with this approach.

I believe that agricultural education is in a unique position to provide inquiry based instruction in the context of agriculture. I think that it is imperative that we share out what we are doing to ensure that others recognize that we are not just training farmers, but that we are engaging our students in deeper levels of cognition in many different subjects that include, but are not limited to mathematics, science, reading, and writing.

I know I still have a lot to learn about how to empower students to love learning, but I am confident that inquiry based instruction is an approach that will help me accomplish that goal.

Thoron, A.C., Myers, B.E., & Abrams, K. (2011). Inquiry-based instruction: How is it utilized
accepted, and assessed in schools with national agriscience teacher ambassadors? Journal of
Agriculture Education, 52(1), 96-106. DOI: 10.5032/jae.2011.01096

The Problem Solving Approach - Lab Reflection

I had a good time teaching this lab. Looking back and getting some feedback from my peers I can see how it can be improved a lot, and I am excited about that, but honestly I had fun teaching. I really do love teaching, I don't know exactly why, but I do. That is encouraging to me on days when I feel that there is so much expected of us as teacher candidates and will be expected of us as teachers.

I really do want to be a great teacher and help make young people's lives better in any way that I can, but I also want to have fun and enjoy my career. I am not insinuating that being a great teacher and having fun are incompatible, but sometimes I feel that if we are so caught up in teaching to the different intelligences, domains, and modalities of learning and the other thousands of articles and books published on effective teaching, that we may miss out on the most important and magical part of teaching, and that is, in my humble opinion, interacting with students.

Differentiated Instruction

I listened to Ken Robinson's talk about the education system in the United States being based on an industrial model in which students are "educated" in groups, or batches, that have nothing to do with readiness or interest or anything at all really except that they are the same age. It is one of those talks that makes so much sense, but at the same time discouraging because at the end of the day we are still a part of this "system" and, for the time being, there isn't a lot that we can do about it.

Although we do have to work within the education system, there are many ways in which we as teachers can move beyond the industrial model of education with its concurrent conformist agenda, and not only engage our students, but empower them. That is where differentiated instruction comes into play.

Stated simply, differentiated instruction is "instruction that is responsive to students' readiness, interest, and learning preferences."

When I think of readiness I think about the zone of proximal development (see image). The hard thing is is that in a class of 20 students you will have 20 different students with different levels of readiness. If you simplify the content too much, some kids will get bored, however if it is too difficult some students will get confused and give up. So the trick is to get everyone engaged and learning based on where they are.

A student will be more engaged and enthusiastic about learning if what they are learning is interesting to them. Check out the primary and secondary principles of interest for more about that.

Learning preferences refers to how each individual wants to learn. I think of Gardner's multiple intelligences and realize that not all learners learn best through lecture or even through hands on activities.


At this point you are probably thinking, "Oh yeah, you're talking about individualized instruction, right?" Wrong! Differentiated instruction is not synonymous with individualized instruction. Differentiated instruction is about using variability of teaching techniques and approaches to address a diverse array of learner needs and preferences.


Bottom line, with our current system it is not feasible to address every students needs and preferences simultaneously, but we can engage a diverse group of students by varying our instructional approaches to meet the needs of those diverse learners.

If you want to learn more here is a great brochure from EduGAINS as well as an image from that brochure that sums up differentiated learning pretty well.

References 
Ken Robinson: Changing Education Paradigms by The RSA https://youtu.be/zDZFcDGpL4U

Reach Every Student Through Differentiated Instruction - EduGAINS
http://www.edugains.ca/resourcesDI/Brochures/DIBrochureOct08.pdf

How to assess learning effectively, efficiently, and objectively.

A teacher I worked with taught me a little about grading and it has stuck with me. Grading needs to as objective as possible. If a student or parent comes up to you and asks why they received a poor grade you had better be able to defend why you gave the grade that you did. So how do we do that? How can we ensure that we are grading objectively and more than that, that we are grading effectively and efficiently?

This is what I learned this week. First, you need to determine what the students already know. To accomplish this, a pre-test can be a very useful tool. A pre-test is a short assessment that helps you understand what the students already know and perhaps understand more about the diversity of understanding that is present in your classroom. However, make sure that the students know that it is not actually a test, or that it will even be graded at all so that they don't feel pressure to know content that they have never formally learned. But I ask myself if this is really that effective, I mean if students know it is not graded, how do we incentivize them to take it seriously? Hopefully,you have already demonstrated the value of the classes that you teach and you can help them to understand that by participating in the pre-test, that it will make the class more interesting.

Another tool that is especially useful for remaining as objective as possible are utilizing rubrics. I think that this is a tool that can help students understand what is expected of them (clarity of expectations), but in my own experience it can also limit the creativity of students. So there needs to be some sort of balance between establishing clear expectations and leaving it open-ended enough for students to be able to use their creative liberties.

We are supposed to be about learning, our goal is for our students to learn and be empowered by what they are learning. An effective strategy to ensure that this is happening is to give students the opportunity to revise their work that you have already graded and allow them to turn it back in for more feedback/a final grade.

That being said, I always think that a completely different perspective on things is refreshing and interesting. I came across some posts by Mark Barnes, who you may have heard of before, but he advocates for ditching grades altogether. I won't write about his opinions (some I agree with and others not so much), but check out this post and his Twitter feed if that sparks your interest.

Parting question: is there a difference between grading and assessing?