GOALS Program: My Time at West Central Area High School
As I return from my week in the Minnesota snow, I can't help but reflect with a smile on my recent GOALS Spring Immersion Week. I've been participating in the Global Orientation to Agricultural Learning (GOALS) program throughout this school year (see this blog post to read more: https://mrbixlersblog.blogspot.com/2023/03/goals-program-gearing-up-for-minnesota.html), and our experience culminated in the Spring Immersion Week where it was our turn to take charge of a classroom and teach for a week about global agriculture!
Four of us from Penn State (myself, Noah, Paige, and Emily) traveled to Minnesota, completing our immersions at two neighboring high schools. While it was a bit of a different Spring Break location, I chose to spend my immersion week at West Central Area Secondary School in Barrett, MN with Mr. Eric Sawatzke. It was cold and snowy, but I could not have asked for a better spot to complete this experience! While at WCA, I taught an Ag 9 course with 20 freshman students. They were a good crew to go through this experience with, and I really enjoyed getting to know them throughout the week.
To start our immersion week, we flew out of Philadelphia into Minneapolis - St. Paul. This was my first time in Minnesota, and I was glad to check another state off my list :). It was also my first time renting a car, which was overall a good experience! Our little Hyundai Venue kept us on the snowy roads as we crossed the dirt county roads of rural Western Minnesota, and while I was quite relieved to roll back into the rental parking lot safe and sound, I will carry good memories with me from our time driving across the state in our spiffy rental car.
For our first day in Minnesota, we took the time to get settled in at our Airbnb, which was about 40 minutes away from Barrett in Alexandria. We stayed in a house on a ranch with eight horses and had an INCREDIBLE host named Cindy - if you ever get the chance to travel to Alexandria, MN I have an Airbnb recommendation for you! Cindy welcomed us with monster cookies and gave us an old-fashioned popcorn maker to use for delicious popcorn as a snack throughout the week. We enjoyed getting to meet the horses and exploring the 2 feet of snow on the ground, especially because we've had almost no snow in Pennsylvania this winter!
On Sunday, we had the chance to visit our school ahead of time and get situated for the week ahead. West Central Area recently opened a brand new greenhouse and does a ton of great work with hydroponic vegetable production, which was incredible to see and learn about from Mr. Sawatzke. Afterwards, we got to go to the Sawatzke's turkey farm and enjoy dinner at their house (delicious turkey, of course). Their family just recently welcomed a new daughter to the family, so in addition to teaching school, farming, and leading the Minnesota Board of Animal Health, Eric and his wife Erica found the time make us a welcome dinner. I definitely got to meet some incredible people on this immersion experience!
After a two-hour delay due to a small snowstorm early Monday morning, we kicked off our week of teaching. I was very grateful for this opportunity to step back into a high school ag classroom. Since wrapping up my year as an FFA state officer, my time in ag classrooms has been a bit more sparse, both due to COVID and the business of college life. It was very rewarding to get back to the setting that started my entire agricultural education journey, this time from behind the desk.
The leadup to our immersion week held careful preparation and planning as I reviewed lesson plans and planed out the content I hoped to to teach. We received a lot of curriculum during our Fall Immersion experience at the World Food Prize, but it was up to us as the teachers for the week to design at least one new lesson and revise the curriculum to meet the needs of our specific learners. Below is a small taste of my lesson plans for the week!
I created a Reflection Guide to guide my students throughout the week and capture their thoughts/notes, in addition to having all of the worksheets and activity pages organized as needed throughout the week. As a teacher, I tend to thrive in organized environments, so this was helpful for me (and I think for my students too!). Throughout the week, the students got to make maps of food resources in their communities, complete a Global Farmer Experience to see what decisions smallholder farmer face on a daily basis, follow the production process of a cotton t-shirt from start to finish, and much more! It was a busy week, but I think everyone in the classroom learned a great deal when it was all said and done (myself included!).
When we weren't teaching, Noah and I were often planning our upcoming lessons or visiting with students. We got to attend a practice for the Parliamentary Procedure team and conducted interviews for West Central Area's chapter proficiency awards that will be given out at their upcoming banquet. Outside of the school day, our crew from PSU got to do a variety of other fun things! We visited Riverview Dairy and saw a robotic milker, attended the Regional Farm Bureau meeting, enjoyed an Escape Room, and checked out a number of local restaurants.
Our time at Minnesota ended with a stop at the University of Minnesota on a snowy Saturday in the twin cities. We had left Alexandria the night before to avoid another impending snow storm, so we got to enjoy some time in Minneapolis and St. Paul. We stopped at Nelson Bros. for some massive (and delicious) pastries and then had a snowy flight home. I enjoyed seeing how they de-ice plane wings for the first time, but was glad to arrive back in Philadelphia in slightly less wintry conditions.
As I look back on the experience, I'm glad for this opportunity to see agricultural education in a different state and develop some very valuable skills as my time in the classroom comes closer and closer! It was certainly a different kind of spring break, but I don't think I'd pick it any other way. I'm grateful for all of the people who helped to make this possible, not the least of which are Mr. Sawatazke, Ms. Kobberman from the neighboring school, and the GOALS instructional team at PSU and the University of Idaho. Now...full steam ahead in the leadup to student teaching!
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