Britton's Blueprint

When someone tells you they have a surprise for you, do you get nervous? I know I do. How do I know if the "surprise" will be a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe it is something that I don't want or need. On the other hand maybe the item is something I have been dreaming of.  Either way a surprise is something that you don't see coming. This week in lab we had our surprise lab. this consisted of us creating a lesson plan, and then teaching another persons lesson. I can't say that I was terrified, but maybe a little nervous. I knew that the person that got my lesson would be fine (it was super detailed).  I get to class, and we have 15 minutes to look over the other persons lesson. I got a very in depth electrical lesson. If we are being honest I had no idea, what ANY of the words were in context to electrical circuits. I don't know much of the science behind electricity.  If anyone watched my video on edthenia this week you can tell that I took words...

As teachers it is part of our job to ensure that ALL of our students are learning from us. It is my goal as an educator to have all my students learn from me. I know that it is a hard goal to have all my students always get a perfect on every assignment, but as long as they are learning from what I am teaching them I think I can say that I am being successful. As an educator it is hard to have the tme to be able to have individualized instruction for all of my students. We have 45 minutes and roughly 23 students, that would be a little over two minutes per student to have individualized instruction. I know that I will never have enough time as I would like to in each of the classes that I will be teaching. In the courses that I have taken at Penn State a lot of them have been project based, which helps with individualized instruction. I think that AEE 349 (the first ag mech course) has a lot of individual instruction. On the other hand there were a few online classes that were a wo...

I think we can all agree that testing is a form of assessment. Did you ever think about why we assess students or why it might be important to do so? This quote stood out to me in my weekly reading talking about why it is important to assess. "Knowledge of the level to which students have developed enables the instructor to effectively plan for teaching." I think that it is important to not use the word test, this causes students to have a little bit of anxiety. It is important for the test to be constructed to have motivational and instructional value to the student. It is frustrating for students to complete a test that is composed for testing trivial knowledge. I think that this causes frustration, thus the students becomes discouraged. Multiple choice questions, I don't think that these questions create the ability to think deeper. I like open ended questions, where the students can explain with their own words, rather than just choosing a choice that seems right ...

If you think back to the last time you were in the classroom did you ever solve problems? Now these problems are used to help further student learning about a specif topic. One of the more common examples is the proble m of having an engine and asking yourself or your students why that engine will not run.  This week in lab we did problems solving. I thought it would be super cool to do a lesson on cuts of beef with the problem being a specific recipe. I chose a recipe and gave it to the students, they were all assigned different cuts of beef to research to see if their cut would work the best for the specific recipe.  In my classroom with the students I would focus on more of the quality, and the differences in the taste. I think that it would be super cool to have the students actually cook the beef cuts and taste the difference between the different quality grades. I also like the idea of actually cooking the recipe, maybe even trying it with the different cuts of m...

I really do like project based learning. We all know that students learn by doing. I really do like projects, they help students to learn the material in a different way. I think students might even learn more from creating a project than they would if the teacher just talked at them. While I am student teaching or teaching in general I think I will do some project based learning with multiple things. I saw an idea that a teacher hands out black and white cut out of cow heads. The students are assigned a breed of cattle. The students are assigned with coming up with facts that describe the breed and its history. the students also color the cow the colors of their assigned breed. The students then share their facts with the rest of the class. I really like this project, and I really would like to use it while students teaching. The cow cut our that I found to be helpful for this project is to the right. When talking about project based learning I can not help but to think about gr...

When you think back to the last time you were a student, how did the teacher keep you thinking? How did they keep you engaged? I know that my teachers would always ask questions in hopes to keep me engaged. There were the teachers that would ask too many questions, and I would get frustrated. What do you remember thinking when the teacher would ask an open ended questions in the class? How did you use to feel if you got called on to answer the question.    I know that this is something that I am going to struggle with as an educator. I am worried that I will ask too many questions and frustrate my students. I don’t want to ask too many questions. I am afraid that my students will be able to predict my teaching, and know when I am going to ask a question. I don’t want to call out a student to answer a question, because what if they don’t know or get nervous? I imagine that I will use the “phone a friend” strategy. I just have a feeling i'll be asking questions and the same...

Today was my interest approach lab, where I was instructed to come up with an interest approach that was between 5 and 10 minutes long. We all know how much I love cows, so I thought I would do something with cattle.. but what could be a good interest approach. What is more interesting than the ruminant digestive system? I am sure that most of you have heard that cows have four stomachs, part of that rummer is true. The stomach is actually one unit, but has four different compartments. Mind Blown! I thought for a while how to make an interest approach about the digestive system, then it hit me, a puzzle! Who doesn't loves puzzles? The students were given the task of putting the pieces in the correct spot, they had five minutes to do so. I then gave the students a blank cut out of the digestive system with all the pieces, they laid their pieces in the correct places on the blank cutout. If the lesson were to have continues I would have had the students make their puzzles into ...