Interest Approach Lab Reflection

Hi everyone!

It is hard to believe we are already wrapping up Week 5 of the semester. The time is going so fast here in State College, in large part thanks to the fact that our Agricultural Education cohort is staying quite busy as we complete our work and engage in meaningful learning experiences as we prepare for the spring.

This week's lab focused on the topic of interest approaches. Interest approaches are an important components of the lessons that we plan and are designed to capture and maintain student interest from the very beginning of a lesson. Generally speaking, interest approaches last around five minutes and should accomplish the goal of reviewing some prior content knowledge while also previewing what is to come in the class session ahead. On one hand, I find interest approaches to be one of the most fun aspects of the lesson to plan. However, it can also be quite difficult to put together a quality interest approach when it sometimes feels as though I am out of creative ideas and new ways to introduce what we plan to learn in that class period.

For our lab exercise, I went with another lesson in my Animal Nutrition unit. For my interest approach, I decided to leverage the excitement surrounding the class New York Times Wordle game. I have loved doing the Wordle for some time now, and it seems to be a pretty popular activity with high school students as well! An activity like the Wordle helps to create a healthy level of competition while also requiring students to think critically about the challenge in front of them.

In the process of designing this approach, I found this exciting website where you can create your own Wordle! (https://mywordle.strivemath.com/). This website even allows you to make the word as few/many letters as you would like. For this interest approach, I decided to use the word "cecum", which is a portion of the large intestine. At this point in the year, my Animal Nutrition class will be learning about the organs in a monogastric digestive system, which is the digestive system in animals that do not have ruminant stomachs. The cecum is important for nutrient absorption and is especially critical in hind-gut fermenters like horses or rabbits that have an extra large cecum that contains microbes and synthesizes essential Vitamins B and K. This activity will give my students a chance to review what they had previously learned about what a cecum is and where it is located in the animal before our lesson on the function of the organs.

In lab, my interest approach activity went pretty well! My three peers that acted as my students were good participants and they seemed to have fun. To their credit, they did solve the Wordle correctly and only needed 4 out of the 6 possible tries I gave them (good job, Lab Section 2!). The activity did take longer than I had been anticipating, so part way through I started a time to keep our guesses moving along. Once I teach this with a full size class, I will need to think carefully about how I can make sure everyone is involved. I plan to ask students for their favorite Wordle starting word, then state that the remainder of the guesses must connect to Animal Nutrition in some way. In addition, each student will only be allowed to give one response to limit eager students from dominating the conversation.

My hope is that this interest approach is one that I can implement in several of my classes throughout the year using different words that is both exciting for students and sustainable based on the effort/preparation it requires of me as the educator. Just like any strategy, this will get old if I do it too often, but I am excited to try it out in at least one lesson as I plan for the spring. Thank you NYT for the idea, and also for the Connections/Mini Crossword games which have become my favorite downtime activity when I need a short break from school work. Thanks to each of you for reading this blog post, and let me know if you ever wanna race through the Mini Crossword :).