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!

Part One of Drive

When you think of motivation, what do you think of? Do you think of some sort of award for doing something? Or is the act of doing something enough for you to complete a task? In other terms, do you rely on extrinsic motivation such as awards or monetary values that come from the outside or intrinsic motivation when the motivation comes within?  This summer my mentoring team and I tackled the book Drive by Daniel Pink.

The first part of the book is about identifying the Carrots and sticks of motivation the effects they have on a person’s short and long motivation. The carrot and stick approach is a combination of rewards and punishment to induce good behavior. As I was reading, I was thinking about how this affects the student’s motivation. A questioned I asked my mentoring team was "how do you find the balance in motivating students but not to dampen it?" Doug Masser replied "This is always a fine line. The carrot can be a great way to start learners, but it can’t always be the way to keep them producing. You have to switch to what motivates them, which I’ve found to be a choice and allowing them to show what they know in a meaningful way to them".  This is huge! Remembering back when I was in high school, I would always do better on assignments when I was allowed to choose the delivery method. Whether it was writing a paper, PowerPoint, poster, etc. The information would be the same on any of those methods, but I knew I would do better if I made a poster because I liked making posters. The choice is everything. Later on, in the book Pink talks about autonomy and the benefits of it.

The more I read about carrots and sticks and the more hesitant I was about using extrinsic rewards in the classroom for fear that students would be more focus the award itself and not the learning. In our discussion, Mr. Masser brings up the point that "often our students like the content or assignment but sometimes are students need a little boost to get them started." This is where extrinsic motivators can be beneficial and mini snickers can serve as that boost. But Mr. Masser reminds me that " No week-long project can be sustained on the promise of a snack-sized snicker… But that snickers can get their brains to switch from “this is a project I need to do” to “this project is going to be awesome!”  There is success when using extrinsic motivation when appropriately applied. 

I look forward to reading and hearing back from my mentoring team, tips I can use in the classroom, to help maintain and motivate my students! Stay tuned for part 2!