Life Knowledge Lesson Reflection

 

It has been an exciting start to the Thanksgiving Break! Earlier this week, I made the trip up north to Athens Area High School to teach my Life Knowledge Lesson before beginning my full-time student teaching responsibilities in January.  For this assignment, we were asked to select one lesson from the National FFA Organization's Life Knowledge Curriculum to teach at our Cooperating Center. I selected a lesson on the importance of being aware and involved in our communities. The lesson focused on four levels of community (local, state, national, and global) and how we can be meaningful citizens and contributors to these communities.

As students came in, I gave them an index card. To start the class, we took one minute and students wrote down everything they could think of related to the phrase "My Community". After several students shared out, we had some brief introductions before moving into a drawing activity. I asked the students to visualize an iceberg, and then had two students come up front to draw the iceberg on the board. Athens has smart board technology where students can come up and draw just using their finger, so it was fun for me to be able to gain experience in using technology in instruction that is different from what I had ever had as a student myself! We talked about how the icebergs we drew were all slightly different, and how there was a lot more ice under the water than there is above the water. In the same way, there is often a lot about the unique communities we are a part of that we can't know until we go a little deeper beyond the surface level.

After taking some notes on the four levels of community and considering how they related to our lives, I split the students into four groups. Each group focused on one level of community to create a poster representing that community and proposing some ideas for how they could be involved. Overall, the posters turned out pretty good! We ended with a short review quiz to check for the students understanding, and they did very well. :)

I taught this lesson to two sections of Mr. Steinfelt's Introduction to Agriculture courses. Most all of the students in these classes are 9th graders. I will only teach one of these sections during my student teaching internship, but I was glad to be able to gain practice teaching the Life Knowledge Lesson twice so I could hone in on things to improve the second time around. The time periods fly right by, and I often find myself wondering where each of the 45 minutes went! Having had a block schedule as a high school student with only four classes a day, it is a somewhat significant adjustment to prepare to teach 7-8 periods a day on a much shorter schedule for each class.

As I reflect on this lesson, I believe there was a high level of student engagement and feel good about the delivery of the lesson! If I were to teach this again, I would try to revise the notes portion of the lesson to be shorter and more concise. I did my best to ask meaningful processing questions to apply the note-taking content to the greatest extent possible, but I feel the lesson could be improved by reducing the time spent taking notes. This lesson would also have a lot of potential to be extended and taught over several days. In talking with Mr. Steinfelt, we discussed that it would be nice to devote more time to this topic and have students think critically about how their communities could connect to their Supervised Agricultural Experience (SAE) projects or generate ideas for community service initiatives. 

It was nice to gain this experience and spend a bit more time at Athens before it will be my full-time home. The few weeks remaining between now and then will fly right by with Thanksgiving, a trip to Phoenix, AZ for the National Association of Agricultural Educators (NAAE) conference, a Final Presentation, and Christmas. I am doing my best to keep plugging away at the work while also enjoying this special time of year and my last few weeks in State College for now. There will be a lot of time spent on the road over the next few months, so I am glad to get to explore some very beautiful parts of rural parts of Pennsylvania and find some quality stops for a peanut butter milkshake along the way (shoutout May's Drive In and their cool panda trashcans :) ). 

Happy Thanksgiving - I truly am grateful for you all!