Virtual Exploration # 3

Prompt Three

What are the best tips/resources you would provide to a new teacher regarding special needs accommodations?

Special education is an area that I am not too familiar with. This prompt definitely has helped give me some tips and advice from my mentoring team. One of the biggest things you can do is to stay in the loop.  Whenever you have the chance, become familiar with student's IEP to help accommodate them. At first, it can be overwhelming to read and understand, but they are essential to the student's education.


Another tip I was told is that you should try to attend an IEP meeting to provide you with more insight on the student and to work with the special education teachers to help with accommodations and adaptations.

After talking with my mentoring team, this has given me confidence in working with students with IEP to maximize their education.

Micro-teaching

For my microteaching, I spent my time at State High with Mrs. Campbell. The class I taught was her Exploration Agriculture Class that was made up of freshmen. Mrs. Campbell class was CASE class, so I was assigned the topics of lab safety, scientific method, and lab equipment. The Case curriculum helped give me a framework of what to cover, but I ended up adding a lot of my own information to the class. The class had nine students in it, so it was relatively small. I liked the small class because I was able to spend time working with each of the students.

My first day I covered lab safety and procedures it went awesome! I had my lesson well planned out, but after doing my interest approach, I decided to change my first activity. Initially, I was going to have the students write down on guided notes But after observing them with the interest approach, I decided to have them make a lab safety notebook out of construction paper. After going each of the rules, they would draw a symbol to remember the rules. They loved doing it, and it worked out well!

My second day of student teaching we covered the scientific method. The students had to come up with a hypothesis of why they thought a box was ringing. This activity was only supposed to take 10 minutes, but the students were coming up with great explanations and experiments, so I decided to extend this part. By the end, students were able to prove why the box was ringing along using the scientific method.

Overall the microteaching was great! An area that I need to improve is being more evident when it comes to giving instructions. I re-watched my video, and that was the biggest thing that jumped out! This experiences defiantly has me excited about student teaching!

Ag Mechanic Demo

For the agricultural mechanics demonstration, I chose to cable ripping.  I will be teaching electricity in my Intro to Ag Mech class this spring, so I thought it would be a perfect demo. The format I used was Teacher Say & Teacher Does, Teacher Say & Student Does, Student Say & Student Says.

The steps that I followed were:
1. Positioning the cable, so the flat side is down, and the rounded side is up.
2. Place the cable into the cable ripper and having the tooth of the ripper on the flat side of the cable.
3. Firmly pressed down on the ripper so it punctures the cable
4. Pull back and remove the sheath to exposes the wires.

This is a basic demonstration, but an area where students may struggle with is positioning the cable correctly. If the cable position incorrectly, it won't cut it. Other than that students should be successful when doing this activity.

Life Knowledge Day

On November 19th I had my life knowledge lesson at Pequea Valley High School! I taught the 2nd-period Food Science Class on discovering the world of agriculture. This lesson helped students learn the important role agriculture plays around the world. 

For the most part, the class was well behaved, besides some minor issue of talking with friends and staying on task. It was easy for students to talk to friends because they were in groups, but one way I used to solve that was using proximity with them. That seemed to work well. I would also ask them why they would draw something and have them expand their idea this helped with staying on track. 

The structure of the lesson was pretty simple. The original lesson plan was kind of boring, so I adapted the plan and made it more centered around Food Science because that's what they were learning. 

Overall, the lesson went well! Areas that I would approve is being more clear with instructions some moments students were confused, so it took up time to go over instructions again. I think this was a great experience for me to build up my confidence with students and leading a class!

Week 14 Investment

How does a professional learning network impact our teaching practice?

Last week the PSUAgEd19 cohort attended the National Association for Agriculture Educators Conference for in San Antonio Texas! Our week was full of workshops and sessions centered around student engagement, inclusiveness, tips and tricks for teaching, and professional development. All helping to advance agriculture education!

Since we are pre-service teachers, we had the opportunity to attend the Future Agriscience Teacher Synopsis (FAST). During this programs, we were able to ask questions, to a panel of experienced teachers, participate in inquiry-based workshops, and fill out tools box with tons of resources. One workshop I really enjoyed was put on by two advisors from the Galt chapter in California. Their workshop taught us how to make our program an inclusive program. Where all types of students are welcome no matter their, race, gender, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic status.

Another workshop I attended was including foldable in classroom instructions. This by far was one of my favorite workshops I attended! Before I was struggling with ideas on how to make genetics more interactive for my students.  I'll be teaching one week of genetics in my reproduction unit, so this workshop was beneficial!

Having a professional learning network and development events are wicked important when it comes to expanding our teaching practice.  At the conference, I was able to talk to a ton of current ag teachers and build a relationship with them. Relationships I can count on in the future when I have a question on how to do something in my program. Also, I was able to see and gain teaching tips that I can implement in my classroom! Overall, this was a great week!
I am looking forward to using the skills and resources gain in student teaching!

Inquiry Based Instruction

This week our lab was centered around inquiry-based instructions. Inquiry-based learning was something that I struggled for a bit. When it comes to teaching, I like to provide a lot of content and instruction where I have more control to make sure students are getting the information needed. Inquiry-based instruction is different where students are having more control over how they are getting the content. At first, I thought I was going to struggle in the lab, but by the end of it, I really enjoyed doing inquiry.

I found a few gems and opportunities for improvements for my inquiry lesson on food insecurity. Students enjoyed my interested when they had to find cards with countries on them and research a fun fact about the country. It was a great way for them to start to think about other countries that lead to learning about some challenges those countries faced.

An area improvement was changing how students research countries by giving a set list of websites to use. Students ended up finding a site that was going to be used in a later portion and gave away information to early so that part of the lesson wasn't as impactful.

Overall I really liked this lab and excited to use it during student teaching.

Literacy Strategies !

Including literacy strategies in the classrooms, students can work on their comprehension skills. Students spend a lot of time listening to teachers and getting spoon fed information and not as much time writing and reading about the content that they are learning. These skills can help students make sense of the information that they are reading. The strategies can help students with:

• Making connections
• Visualizing
• Questioning 
• Determine Importance 
• Synthesizing 

In inquiry-based learning, students will have to use each of those areas, so literacy strategies are a great way to help students develop them.

Some strategies include:

• Chapter tours
• Think-Write-Pair Share 
• Prediction Pairs 
• double-entry diaries 

One strategy that I planned on using in student teaching is Chapter Tour. This is done before starting a chapter when students take a "tour" through the chapter to familiarize themselves with topics, terms, images. This would be extremely helpful when you go over difficult chapters with students and gives you an idea of what areas students will struggle with. 

National FFA Convention Blog

This week I got to spend time with my cooperating teachers and students at the National FFA Convention and Expo in Indianapolis! This trip was chalk full of tours, workshops, sessions, and bonding times.

The first stop of our trip was the West Virginia University! This was an excellent opportunity for students to learn about a college that they typically wouldn't have visited before. It was a typical tour that showed students the dining hall, resident rooms, classrooms, and other recreational activities on campus. It worked well because it fit in our schedule and gave students an opportunity to think about their post-secondary plans.

Since none of the students were competing in CDEs, we had a lot of opportunities to go on tours. We drove down to Louisville Kentucky and visited Churchill Downs and Louisville Slugger Museum.  It was great for the students because it was their first time traveling to nationals and they were able to see multiple cities.



We went to a total of two sessions at the convention, the opening and the 7th general session! Two sessions with students are the perfect amount of sessions to see. Students were able to see awards that were given, two keynote speakers, and a national officer's retiring address. Any more, students may have got bored with the sessions. For future reference, I'd probably only have students go to two sessions maybe three if time allowed it.

One of the days we went on a couple of tours, one with CST Corteva and another with CST Lawson Cattle Facility. These were two completely different tours showing students opportunities in Ag. The students were really engaged and learned a lot. It helped that some of the tour guides were in FFA and shared how they ended up in their current position.



Overall it was a great trip! I am glad I was able to meet a couple of the students I'll be teaching with. Also, I spent a lot of time with Mr. Masser and Mrs. Vansant! I picked up a lot of tips with planning and learned about garden tools :) After this trip, it has me pumped for student teaching this fall!

Virtual Mentor Exploration 2 !!

Depending on where we are in the country we have students in our classrooms from varying backgrounds. Some places are more diverse than other, and the neat thing about diversity is that it's not limited to ethnicity. Today cultural diversity encompasses a plethora of uniqueness such as; gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender identity, and social status.  This month I asked my mentoring team to answer the following prompt: What strategies or resources do you use to help your class/program to be responsive to cultural diversity and English Language Learners?

Ms. Laura Metrick admitted that this question is a little difficult to answer because she teaches at a school that is 98% white and hasn't had a chance to work with English language learner. She wrote, "We have Olweus sessions once a month, and during this time we focus on several different topics including cultural diversity, English Language Learners, LGBTQ+ and many more. One of the main things that I stress to my students is that no matter what, if you have a different view, a different opinion, look different or talk different, you must respect each other." Even though she doesn't have students that are ethnically different she still is aware of the other cultural diversity that students may be part of and having students being respectful is HUGE in including all types of students.


Mr. Petrun, a teacher back in my home state of New Hampshire wrote, "When we do have some diversity, it is always good to sit down with the students first and speak with them to learn about their culture and its nuances. If you can understand a little bit more about them, then you can get a better idea of where they are coming from. This way connections can be made on that end to begin to open up the other students to other or new cultures". This is a massive benefit to the students and gives you as a teacher a baseline where to start. We can learn so much from just having a simple conversation with a student. 

Mr. Masser at Pequea Valley High School wrote,  "Open-door policy-It seems silly to put it in writing, but respect is the best strategy I can provide to help create diversity in our program. We always respect and embrace the differences our learnings bring to the classroom/program. Instead of trying to make the culture the same, we try to use these differences to enhance the program. Keeping your door open and verbally reminding students that you are there to support them makes a huge difference, and attracts students from all cultural background" A takeaway from Mr. Masser I found was not to try to make the student fit the culture but rather us theirs to enhance the program! By doing this, it shows that every student has something to contribute and that they are welcome.

My last mentor was Tiffany Turrentine from W.B. SAUL in Philidelphia. Mrs. uses several strategies/ resources to include cultural diversity and English Langauge Learners. One is an open discussion by taking "the time to allow the students to express themselves in an understanding and respectful way.  Providing an atmosphere where the students feel comfortable to express themselves in a respectful manner has allowed for others in the classroom to listen and be empathetic towards issues". Having students develop empathy can be difficult but having open discussions is a great way to do so.

From these responses, I learned a lot about including all types of students and some strategies to ensure that all are involved in the learning. Thank you to my mentoring team for all the help!

Surprised Substitute

This weeks lab was different from our previous labs. Not only did we have to prepare a lesson meeting an AFNR Standards randomly selected, but we also had to switch lessons plans with someone else. At first, I was pretty nervous! I was totally prepared to teach my own lesson not someone else's! Luckily we were given ten minutes to ask questions to prepare ourselves for teaching. I ended up taking Rachel's lesson on photosynthesis. Her lesson was pretty straightforward and easy to follow. I have taken a couple of biology classes, so I was familiar with the content. I think I was more so nervous following her lesson exactly and not on the material. During the lesson, I chose not to follow the lesson plan exactly, and that worked out a lot better for me. It was easier for me to make it my own instead of the following word by word on what she had written. The fifteen minutes allotted had gone by wicked fast!

Some gems for this lab was staying on task and making sure that students were too. Also, making the lesson plan my own and making sure students were getting the content. Some opportunity for improvement I noticed was in my own lesson plan. I wrote the lesson plan for me to understand and could have had a lot more details so that anyone could pick it up. I had the "substitute" cover new information with the students. I learned that this was a mistake and that substitute lesson plans should be a review on previous knowledge. Sometimes subs aren't familiar with the content, and this will help avoid any confusions that may occur. Overall I really enjoyed this weeks lab and learned a lot!

Week 9 Weekly Investment!

This week weekly investment was centered around differentiated learning.  Differentiated learning can be broken up into three parts:

1. Readiness is the starting point for learning.
2. Interest is connecting the new information to students by making it relevant to their own experiences.
3. Learning preferences- are the ways that students can learn and they can increase learning by connecting existing knowledge in they like.

It's important to use these parts of differentiated learning so we can increase the likelihood of learning in our students. If we lack one these parts, then we aren't maximizing our student's capability of learning.

We can utilize individualized teaching techniques in numerous ways. From the readings,  I learned that students have different levels of learning. What works for one student may not work for another. When using individualized teaching techniques, teachers can match the needs of students with techniques that best meet those needs.

A thought I had was "how is it possible to meet all of the students' needs if you are the only teacher." As I read, I found out that individualized teaching techniques also promote independence for the students. By practicing the techniques students realize that they can't always wait for the teacher. Students should be able to pull information from other resources available to help them when a teacher isn't around.

Problem Solving Approach!

This weeks lab was centered around problem-solving approach!  This has been one of my favorite labs so far! My lesson plan was on the Scientific method and included an activity to show how it can be used. Students would pass around a box that would ring every so often. Students would have to use the scientific method by coming up with a hypothesis, make predictions, and experiments to figure out why the box is ringing.

I had a few gems this week that include the activity I used and timing. People in the lab really enjoyed my activity! They had fun learning the scientific method by figuring out why the bell was ringing. Another gem was I able to complete everything I wanted in the time allowed.


My opp for this week is I need to explain and be clear with my directions. Sometimes I rush through them and miss a detail, so they become unclear. Then I have to take the time to re-explain when students don't understand.

Assessments

This week's readings were on assessing student performance. Before the readings, I was confused about what the differences were between formative and summative assessments.

Formative Assessment happens you are providing any sort of feedback to help improve their performances. Ways that we can do formative assessments is through face-to-face interactions, comments on assignments, and through rubrics. At Pequea Valley, they are a one-to-one school with laptops so a lot of my feedback will be provided online through google drive and schoology. Formative assessment can be used daily to assess student performances. 

Summative Assessment occurs through a test, quizzes, and other graded course activities that used to measure student performances.  These are cumulative of knowledge learned and help identify what students have learned throughout the course at the end of a unit. All my units plan will have a summative assessment one being my plumbing unit where students have to complete a copper square project. The project is worth 40% of their grade and is done throughout the semester and calculated in their final grade.

I learned a lot about assessments this week, and I am looking forward to unpacking my thoughts in class!

Problem Based Learning

This weeks weekly investment is centered around problem-solving. One of the readings that I found to be very interesting was The 8 Essentials for Project-based Learning. The essentials for project-based learning are:

1. Significant Content
2. A Need to Know
3. A Driving Question
4. Student Voice and Choice
5. 21st Century Skills
6. Inquiry and Innovation
7.  Feedback and Revision
8. Publicly Presented Product.




Some of these essentials I was familiar with and really didn't overthink them, but the one that surprised me the most was 21st-century skills. By having these project-based learning students are learning and strengthing 21st skills without putting much thought into it. These skills include collaboration, communication, critical thinking and the use of technology. I think its pretty cool that these projects can really focus on these skills in an engaging way for the students.


As I read,  I remember doing projects in my ag class that included these essentials. One project was centered around agricultural issues. We had to choose a topic, research it, form groups, write an essay, and do a presentation on it. The guidelines were pretty simple,
and as a class, we learned a lot! It was definitely one of my favorite projects!

Moving forward I am excited to learn more about project-based learning and how I can include it during my student teaching experience at Pequea Valley High School!

Unit 1 is DONE

My first unit plan has been submitted! Initially, when I was writing the plan, I was nervous and confused. I was struggling and had no idea where to start. The unit I chose to workout was Plumbing. I will be teaching plumbing for about 3 weeks in The Intro to Ag Mech course at Pequea Valley. I picked this unit because we recently did a copper square project in AEE 350 so the idea of that project was fresh in my mind.

Typically I wouldn't plan a unit around a project but since I was struggling to pick one plumbing seemed like a good start. At first daily objectives were impossible for me to come
up with. But as I began writing them and pulling from resources it became a lot easier. Another area I struggle with was coming up with accommodations and adaptions for gifted and exceptional students. But an idea I got from my workforce ed class was I can assign gifted students as helpers and have them assist other students so they are part of the learning.

It was nice to get reviews from my peers before submitting the final draft. They were able to pick up on some mistakes that I overlooked and provided areas of improvement. It was great to hear about areas where I did well, so that really boosted my confidence in writing a unit plan. I'm glad that the first one is out of the way and looking forward to writing my other units with more confidence!

Week 6 Investment

How do we transition between techniques utilizing effective questioning?

This week our readings are based on effective questioning, and how we can use them to enhance our student's learning. One of the reading states "questions can do more than measure what students know."  We can use questions to encourage students to explore and refine their understanding of key concepts by asking challenging, engaging, and effective questions. Asking questions can help teachers know if students understanding the material and can also help students retain information by rewarding unarticulated thoughts.

In my classroom plan, I listed "Ask Questions" as one of my procedures. I want my students to know that it's okay to ask questions throughout the class. For me, as a future educator, I can gauge where my students are at with the material and make changes if students are not understanding. For students, to get them thinking about the content and opens up a discussion to the class. Students can listen to how others are thinking about the material and provides them with another perspective. 

This week I am excited to see how I can use effective questions in the classroom!

Interest Approach Lab

This week in lab it was all about interest approach. We were able to come up with a "hook" to get out students attention. For my interest approach, I chose to us the bone dance video from Hannah Montanna to introduce the anatomy of livestock. I chose to use this video because it was a fun way for students to see that the bones we have in our body are the same ones found in animals. Also, everyone is familiar with Hannah Montanna!

Looking at lab, I wrote down two gems and one opportunity for improvement. My first gem was the Bone dance video, I chose this because it was relevant and something that students would know. My second gem was how I divided the students up. Each student was given an animal and had to act it out to find their groups. With these two activities, I was able to use all three domains of learning. My opportunity for improvement is working on how I give directions. Sometimes I missed details in directions have to go back and reexplain the directions.

After this week, I am excited to develop more interest approach to get my students hooked on the content!

Virtual Exploration Part One

For our first virtual exploration assignment our mentors had to answer the following prompt; What is your teaching philosophy and/or core values as an agriculture educator?

In each of my mentor interviews, they brought up the fact of respecting the students. Whether that was respecting them as individual learners and knowing their abilities or being honest with them and not beating around the bush when talking to them. 

One of my mentors mentioned that she believes in progress, not project-based learning. This ties in with Daniel Pink's book Drive that we read over the summer. We talked about how it's important for students to know that they are making progress and not just completing an assignment or project to just get the grade, but showing mastery of content. 

We also talked about inclusiveness in the classroom. In Ag ed there are so many different opportunities for students to be involved and have an active role in the classroom. One of my mentors mentioned building a community in the classroom, where students feel comfortable with working together and taking risks. 

Another thing that everyone mentioned was the three circle model and making sure everything they do ties in one of the three circles.

The last thing we talked about is how your philosophy will change as you teach, your core values may stay the same but the way you look at student success can differ. I am excited to see how my philosophy will change as  I grow as a teacher with my students. 

Weekly Investment 5

This weeks weekly investment is focused on techniques we can include in our classroom instruction. From the readings, I learned that objectives are essential in challenging students to think. Objectives provide a roadmap for students in a class. They give students a sense of direction on where the class is in lecture. When writing objectives, it is important to use verbs and to be observed with some sort of measurements. Action-measurable verbs lead to clarity which begins to stretch the cognitive processing of students (Whittington).

One chart I found helpful in the readings had a ton of vocabulary words useful for developing objectives. The chart had four headings to simplify Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain. Remembering-Knowledge level;Processing- Comprehensive, Application, and Analaysis level; Creating- Synthesis level; Evaluating-Evaluation.

Remembering would be the lower level of cognitive thinking and Evaluating would be at the higher end. When writing objectives, I learned it's important to match the level of cognitive objectives to the level of the teaching. In other words, if your objectives are set to a lower level of cognitive like remembering, then you must teach at the lower level of cognitive. This helps limit student frustrations and avoid students giving up on content.

Before these reading, I struggled with writing objectives and not knowing if I was using the correct verbs. This week I am excited too what else I can learn about writing objectives!

RTL Lab Reflection 2

This past Wednesday we were tasked to come up with a lesson plan for our first day of school. In lab, we shared 10 minutes of our lesson plan. Before going to into lab, I was excited and prepared to teach. Little did I know that my peers were going to assume the roles of students and act out their behaviors. The behaviors included: a bully, disengage student, a student on their phone, and a teacher's pet. Even though there were only four of them. They were the toughest group of students I have ever had. I've been reasonably confident in my abilities in managing students because I've been a camp counselor for the past three years. I would have to handle 15 campers to myself and surely thought four students would be a breeze. In my opinion, I think the behaviors were way over the top and not realistic in a school setting, but it did help me get a sense of behaviors I could be exposed to. Some of the tactics I would use with my campers didn't quite work with my lab students. I left my lab frustrated, but my next step is looking at more classroom management tools to prepare me for those unexpected behaviors.

Pequea Valley's Agricultural Program!

Take look at the video I made of Pequea Valley's Agricultural Program!

TOOLKIT

The last part of DRiVE talks about a Toolkit to help put the ideas from the book into actions. They are all concentrating on ways to build intrinsic motivation. 

Build Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose into Assignments

• Offer students autonomy over how and when to work.
• Promote mastery by giving engaging task rather than just a regurgitation of something already covered.
• Share the purpose of assignments and of the course 

Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) 

• Students still need to meet goals and do the assignments, but as long as they achieve their goals, they can work whenever and wherever they want.
• One way this can be done is set a day when students can work on whatever they want. But the catch is they have to do something. 

Conduct Anonymous Surveys of Autonomy and Purpose 

Ask questions like "how much autonomy do you have over your assignments?" and "what's the purpose of the class." As a teacher, you may be surprised by the inaccuracy from your students. 

Give Yourself Performance Reviews

Whether it's Beyonce or Tom Brady seeking feedback is essential for growth. To help with this give yourself performance reviews. You can set performance and learning goals at the beginning of the month, and then evaluate your performance at the end. This helps you identify areas that need work or explain why certain items are not being completed. 

When student teaching my hope is to use some of these tools to help motivate my students!

Planning for Instruction

From the readings, I learned that's important to have the end in mind when coming up with the curriculum a way to do that is using the UbD framework.  UbD frameworks is a three-stage planning process that helps guide and structured curriculum.

Stage 1- Identify Results

Key questions:

• What should students know, understand, and be able to do?
• What is the ultimate transfer we seel as a result of this unit?
• What essential questions will be explored in-depth and provide focus to all learning?

In this stage, you look at the goals and standards that you have to follow. Due to lack of time, you have to prioritize what you teach. 

Stage 2- Determine Assessment Evidence

Key questions:

• How would you know if students have achieved the desired results?
• How will we evaluate student performance in fair and consistent ways? 

In the UbD framework, there are six facets of understanding for assessment: 

• Explain 
• Interpret
• Apply
• Perspective
• Empathy
• Self-knowledge 

All of these facets don't have to be used in every assessment because some are hard to use in a specific context. In stage two you are assessing everything you want to accomplish in stage one. 

Stage 3- Plan Learning Experiences and Instruction

Key questions:

• How will we support learners as they come to understand important ideas and processes?
• What activities, sequence and resources are the best suited to accomplish our goals?

In this stage, teachers plan out the activities of the lesson. An issue that teachers face here is when teaching is primarily focused on presenting information and not for understanding. When you teach for understanding, students are given opportunities to make connections and generalizations for themselves.

I am excited to learn more about planning for instruction this coming week!

SAE Visit

In late May I had the opportunity to learn about a Supervised Agricultural Experience (SAE) of a student at the Pequea Valley High School.  One option for students to conduct an SAE is taking an Advance Research class. This is an elective course, and it is intended for students who enjoy exploring a variety of open-ended scientific or social topics. The students then have to opportunity share their research in Agriscience Fair.

Here the student is collecting
Stoneflies. 

The student I was able to talk to was a rising senior.  Her project was a Research-based SAE that takes place in a few locations; at the Trout Hatchery Paradise Sports Association, some collection sites, and at school. In the project, Stoneflies were used. They serve an essential role in their ecosystem throughout their stages of life. When they are younger, they help break down plant material, and as stoneflies get older, they feed on smaller organisms. Stoneflies they also serve as a good indicator of water pollution and stream health. The project was to test the survival rate of stoneflies to intervals of warming to mimic the effect of climate change.

Above is an image of a system that was
built to allow the student to manipulate
water temperature. 

When meeting with Mr. Masser, the student and he would discuss the data that was found. And they would go over any malfunctions that were encounter through trial runs. The would also discuss any manipulations that the student made and the impacts on the results.

When it comes to observing SAE, I learned its extremely important to visit the location.  There, you can interact with employers, family, whoever the student has contact with; to better assist the student. Being there in person gives you the ability to see their SAE allowing you to understand more clearly what the students are doing. You are able to offer onsite feedback so the student can make corrections faster.
In the future, I look forward to visiting my students SAE !

Drive Part Two!

In the first part of the book Drive, we learned about what motivation is. The second part of the book covers three pillars of motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Autonomy is the desire to direct our own lives. Pink argues that humans are naturally wired to be self-driven. He talks about how infants and children are very curious and are driven internally without the presence of a reward. But as we grow up, these drives begin to go away because we choose to accept the pressures that are in our schools, families, and other factors of our life. In this section, I learned that  "autonomous motivation involves behaving with a full sense of volition and choice, whereas controlled motivation involves behaving with the experience of pressure... demand towards specific outcomes that comes from forces perceived to be external to the self"(Pink). It's a long quote, but I believe it holds a lot of value.  Autonomy is more of a choice in having control of your learning, and it's different from independence. It's not a go-it-alone thing. You can have influences over your life that may shape your learning but as long as you acting with a choice by directing your life, you are autonomous. The opposite of autonomy is control. Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement. When students are engaged in the work, it leads to mastery.

Mastery is when people want to better their skills or knowledge and have a sense of fulfillment when they do. In drive, I learned mastery is a mindset. Some people believe that others are born with a natural ability, like intelligence or being athletic and you don't get better with work. This is a fixed mindset. To become successful, you need to have a growth mindset where you don't think abilities are set and can change if you put the work in. Believe in yourself. Autonomy and mastery are the how and what, the last pillar is purpose which is the why.

Purpose provides context for the other pillars. Without purpose, there isn't a direction to go in. A quote I liked from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is "Purpose provides activation energy for living." It's true that autonomous people can work towards mastery at a very high level. But how long will that last? Pink argues that when people are in service of some greater objective, they can achieve more.

As educators, it's important to recognize these three pillars of motivation. Some takeaway questions that I came up with are:

1. Do students have a choice of what they learn?
2. Are students seeking to improve?
3. Why is what they are doing is important?

I hope that by asking these questions, I will be able to see if my students are motivated or what drives them.

RTL Reflection

RTL Reflection 

The first week of my senior year is completed! It's crazy to think the summer is over and we are back at school. This week has been chalked full of new information to better ourselves as future educators. Our first assignment this week was to come up with a 15-minute lesson on a random topic that we selected. The topic I ended up with was Heat Energy and Temperature... At first, I had no idea how to teach the topic or enough content knowledge about it. I sat a bit trying to sketch out ideas and nothing was coming to mind.  So to help me get over the mental block, I did what I always do when I am stuck.  I googled it!

 As I was reading, I realized that I already knew a lot of the information, but I was too focused on the assignment itself to think clearly. One thing I struggled with was trying to find ways to make the topic fun which was a mistake. I spent way too long trying to find a fun activity and not the content. In one of my class readings, I found a quote that helped, "Fun is fine in the classroom, but the fun is the result of accomplishment, not the purpose of learning". After reading that I started to focus more on the content of the lesson and it became a lot easier to write.  Another thing I need to work on is checking for understanding. I noticed I didn't do it as often I should of and a couple of other people made a note of that too.

Things that I did well and other people have mentioned it was the visuals on the powerpoint. I didn't want the powerpoint to be text heavy, so I had a lot of visuals. This helped with understanding the content because I was able to show examples. With the lesson being 15 minutes I was a little nervous that I would rush through the information, but I had pretty good pace and was able to cover everything that was needed.

This activity put in perspective the areas that I need to improve on but also gave me confidence knowing I have skills already set. I am excited to see what else AEE 412 has to offer.

Effective Teaching

For this weeks weekly investment, we were asked to read a few documents and to answer the question of "What is effective teaching." The document I found the most interesting was The first days of school: How to be an effective teacher.  The first line of the document was "the first day of school can determine the success and failure of the rest of the school year."  At first, I thought that was crazy! But as I read I learned about three ideas of an effective teacher:
1. Classroom Management
2. Lesson Mastery
3. Positive Expectations

Establishing control in the classroom and being consistent is huge with classroom management. What I learned was control doesn't mean threat or intermediations but to know what you are doing. Make it clear that you know the classroom procedures and stay consistent with them. Especially when it comes to classroom management. A quote that I liked was "you don't discipline a store; you manage it" the same is true in the classroom. Discipline has very little to do with classroom management but being consistent with your procedures and practices.

With lesson mastery that's the student's ability to demonstrate a concept that is learned. I never really focused on the other side of education I only connected education to learning new practices. What I learned is education is not about teaching people things they don't currently know but education is teaching behaviors they don't currently practice.  As a future educator, I think it's important to recognize that. We are in a position where we can change the behavior of our students to maximize their learning.


Positive expectations tell the students that the teacher believes in them and their ability to learn. It's connected to the idea that what the teacher expects from the student is what the student will produce. Remembering back when I was in high school it's a world wind of emotions. Students have to balance a lot and to know that my teacher believed in me definitely helped me out.

These are just some ideas I found interesting through the reading. Moving forward I am excited to learn more about effective teaching and to see it in practice as a student teacher!