Student Teaching Coming to a Close

 While writing my final blog post to bring closure to my student teaching experience, I cannot begin to bring words to the growth I have experienced this semester, the connections I made with students and educators, and the opportunities I saw through. I’ve distilled my biggest moments of learning down to 15 items–one for each week I spend in the classroom. Woven throughout are pictures that show the joy I have experienced over the last  (very short) 15 weeks in the classroom. 

1. Networking is an invaluable skill

From my cooperating teacher, Mrs. Carly Rippole, I have learned that you can make a connection with anyone and you never know how they can help your program until you start a conversation. Penn State taught me how to network through different events where I was able to interact with new people. At the beginning, this was intimidating, but as I did it more, I got better at starting conversations and learned how valuable networking is when you go in with a purpose. 

2. Students need a place to just work. Give them a task and they will do. 

A number of the students I worked with during my student teaching struggled in their core subjects. I found these students to be particularly good workers in the ag building. Whether it was prepping flowers, planting seedlings, or cleaning out the floral cooler, all they needed was a task and they would complete it wonderfully. I found that the ag building is an oasis within the school; it’s a place where they can work with their hands and get their mind off of stressors they cannot avoid in the rest of the school. 

3. Premade curriculum is great, but it must be tweaked to fit your style

Teaching 6 different preps this past semester, I quickly learned how to plan efficiently in order to plan for each day of every class I taught in the week. I became quite skillful in finding resources made online that I could use within a lesson, saving me time in making a worksheet or other materials from scratch. I also learned, however, these premade materials and lessons must be tweaked to fit your style of teaching and your student’s style of learning. 

4. Ag Ed teaches students to be good citizens, thoughtful consumers, and self driven people. 

One of the courses I taught was Introduction to Horticulture. This course is a half-year course, meaning the class started right as I arrived to start teaching. The class had 5 freshmen in it, along with a senior (who had taken many plant classes before but wanted another ag elective). Because of this, I was able to start from zero with them, as this was their first course in the ag building at Derry. I started the course with a plant anatomy unit. Once we learned the parts of a plant and their functions, we tied it to plants we eat. We talked about what a fruit is and how it is beneficial for a plant. Along with it, we talked extensively about different items you find in the grocery store. In Floral Design, we talked about elements of good advertising and how companies can convince you to buy something through the way they market it. In Greenhouse Management, we learned about how to take care of and display plants so that people will buy them. All of the content taught in class is applicable to life in the ‘real world’ outside of school. 

5. When the students are asking to go outside, it's usually because they really need it.

Similar to number 2, students have stressors coming from their core subjects and Ag can be an escape from that. Not in the way of it being less rigorous, but because it is directly applicable to the world around them. When students would come into my Natural Resources on an especially nice day begging to have class outside, it usually coincided with a Chemistry exam or English paper that was due in the coming days. Depending on the agenda for the day, I attempted to adjust class to bring them outside. Luckily, the lessons I taught were based on the ecology of PA, making this task much less difficult. We would go outside and usually within the first five minutes, a student would identify tracks from a mammal they had learned or a tree that they knew the bark of. 

6. People thrive off of routine.

In the beginning of each class that I taught, I introduced the concept of bellwork: students have a question on the board to answer at the start of class so they immediately have a task to do and can get into a learning mindset. It took about 2 weeks before the routine was solid when students would immediately start working on their bellwork upon entry, unprompted. One week, about halfway through the semester, I didn’t do bellwork and it threw off all of my students. Similarly, this semester, I have been able to make a solid routine out of my day. I have found that keeping my routine consistent makes it much easier to wake up at 5:45 every morning and shut off my work brain at 7 pm. 

7. Plants make people happy

The greenhouse is my favorite place in the ag building at Derry because there is so much color and it gets brighter every day. One day, a student who had never been in the greenhouse before went in and was awestruck. She immediately exclaimed that she wanted to take Greenhouse Management next year because she “didn’t know the greenhouse even existed.” A student nearby (that I had rarely seen smile in the 7 weeks I’d known her, unprompted, said, “the greenhouse is such a happy place.”

8. School has changed since COVID

Many students view school as optional. I think I probably taught 10 out of 35 periods each week with full student attendance. I had not considered before student teaching how to have students make up work when absent. During student teaching, I filled in students almost every class period who had missed the previous day(s). It was not uncommon for students to be out for an entire week of class. I also found that students had difficulty in creating individualized work where there is no right answer or right way to do it. I introduced the idea of making a mind map and none of my students had heard of it before. When school was virtual, indiviualized learning was near impossible. Now that we are back in person, it is essential that students develop skills to think for themselves. I walked them through how to make a mind map, and the more we did it, the more comfortable they became. A few students even made mind maps, unprompted, while taking notes. I am glad I could explain the concept, I just didn’t consider that I would need to. 

9. Place based education gets students excited and does the work of bringing learning outside of the classroom/home for you 

The units I taught in my Natural Resources and Ecology class were Wildlife and Forestry. Both had major identification portions because of the impact that wildlife and forestry have on Pennsylvania’s landscape. While teaching each unit, students would come into class each day excited to share the newest tree they were able to identify. Whether it was one in their yard that they realized is the Norway Spruce we learned to identify last week, or white pine needles they found on the ground and knew to count the number of needles in the bundle to identify the tree. When students can relate to what they are learning, they are naturally excited to bring their learning outside of the classroom and apply it at home and in the world around them. 

10. Cross curriculars serve so many purposes 

I helped to run a cross curricular lesson with the AP English classes. In English they were reading Ophelia. In Floral Design, they had previously learned the symbolism in flowers. Since Ophelia wears a flower crown made of flowers that are symbolic to her, the English students came to the ag building for their class period and the Floral Designers helped them to recreate Ophelia’s flower crown. This was beneficial for so many reasons: students were exposed to new information that they wouldn’t have gotten from just the class they were enrolled in, it encourages teachers to collaborate and work together, and it promotes the ag program to new students that may not have even known it existed. 

11. “Don’t take student frustration to heart. We’re just stressed, we don't mean it.”

This was feedback a student left me on my end-of-semester evaluation forms. I thought it was especially helpful to hear from a student since, I know they are just stressed and don’t mean it, but it can be difficult not to have a negative student interaction stick with you for the rest of the day. This feedback helped to put it into perspective. 

12. I want to be a teacher

I did not realize how much fun being a teacher is and how full you leave each day. I have worked in informal education positions for many years, but have never had students more than 3 weeks, making it difficult to build strong connections, building strong trust, and being able to learn through. As a teacher you get to build connections for a full year. As an ag teacher, you get to build connections for up to 4 years with some students. I found it fun to relate students’ interests into lessons to keep them engaging. Building strong connections makes lessons even more engaging. 

13. Connections with students are not optional–bring them into their learning

Going off of number 12, teachers must connect with their students in order for lessons to be effective. Incorporating student interest, getting to know different learning styles, and knowing which students work best with each other is essential to make a classroom run smoothly. 

14. Teachers wear one hundred hats, Ag teachers wear one thousand

I expected teaching to be busy, doing one hundred things at once, but each day of my student teaching experience brought so many new aspects of a career in teaching to light. Because Ag is an elective course, not only do you need to teach classes, but you need to make sure you retain students for said classes. You also likely teach a wide variety of courses while managing a range of different facilities. You are in charge of keeping students alive on top of all the plants and animals you oversee as well. On top of this, you are an advisor for an intracurricular, FFA, and independent projects, SAEs, that all of your students are working on. Though you do a million things in a day, it keeps it exciting and fun to come to work. 

15. I can’t wait to have a classroom and students of my own

Throughout this entire semester, I caught myself constantly thinking about how I would do things in my classroom with my students. I am excited to get to know the community that I am in, finding resources to enrich my student’s learning and my lessons. I am excited to get to know the other teachers at the school, brainstorming with those willing to do cross curricular lessons.  I am excited to be able to connect with students for more than 15 weeks. Though the last semester was too short, I am grateful for every experience I had and every person I met along the way that helped me grow as an educator.