Is This Thing On?

We're already at the end of week three and oh boy have we hit the ground running in Ag Ed! It seems like I've barely had time to catch my breath, too. I jumped right from Extended Orientation on campus the week before school started and working 12 hours a day, to diving head first into student teaching preparations and learning more about teaching methods and program planning. It all seems like a whirlwind so the fact that we're about to move into week four seems unreal.

With week three we tackled the "first day of school" lab and started planning out our classroom expectations, consequences, and procedures. When we were first given this task, I thought it would be relatively easy. As far as classroom expectations go, I feel like it was something I have been thinking about in one way or another through other AEE courses such as 311 last fall. Having to write them out and put them on paper, however, proved to be a little more challenging than I thought it would. For expectations specifically I had a hard time paring it down. In my head I had a lot of different things I wanted to include into my expectations and when I initially wrote them down, the list was a lot bigger than it should be.

For consequences I found them to be pretty standard across the board, and through watching other presentations form my peers, everyone seemed to roughly have the same sort of consequences. Similarly,  procedures had a lot of the same content with a few variations, and some great ideas I took from other's procedures.

As far as technology goes, recording the video and uploading it proved to have its own challenges, which is a little surprising, especially being seven months into a global pandemic and a lot of hours working from home and doing classes remotely. There was certainly a learning curve with figuring out the swivel and the markers that record audio, the different apps that we needed to record on, and the biggest challenge of all, navigating the Edthena upload.

As far as the actual lab went, on reflection I have a couple important take-aways:

1.) I needed more visuals. 

    I wish I had made a PowerPoint that showed pictures of me and who I am, that reiterated the expectations, procedures, and consequences, and that provided a visual aid to what I was verbally stating and to help the class (and myself) follow along.

2.) I need to work on my procrastination.

    It's a tale as old as time, but my procrastination got the best of me for this lab. I wish I had taken a little more time the night before to go through what I was going to say so that I didn't have to look at my lesson plan as much.

3.) Student engagement is the name of the game.

    No one wants to have a teacher talking at them for hours, especially on the first day of school. From doing fun get-to-know-you's, to asking a lot of questions, making sure the students have a say and get to share out is important in keeping them engaged.

4.) Language is so important. 

    I have always been a huge proponent of how important language is in creating inclusive environments and this lab pointed it out to me even more. Using language like "calling home" instead of "calling parents" shows inclusion for those that have non-traditional home life. Also using language that gives students autonomy is important. If I had more time I would have allowed students to create expectations for me as their teacher, showing that were all in this together.

5.) Students want to get to know each other.

    As someone who played the role of both educator and student, I could tell from the student perspective that getting to know others in the room was very important. Also from my work in Student Affairs I know how vital it is for students to form connections with each other, especially early on. This means on the first day of school allowing plenty of time for students to interact with each other and learn about the people they are sharing a classroom with.

6.) Use my peers as a resource!

    From all that we've been doing, it has been so cool to see the nuances between the way I teach and present and the way my peers do. From this lab I got so many new ideas about what I could add and adjust to what I currently have for my classroom expectations, procedures, and consequences. I also learned some new interactive activities for students to do to get to know each other and learned different interactive techniques to make what I am doing more engaging.

All in all, I had some good take-aways from this lab that will help me when I finally am in the classroom.