Career Success at Tri-Valley

This past Monday I had the awesome opportunity to teach my first lesson at my student teaching placement, Tri-Valley Jr./Sr. High school in Schuylkill County, PA.  A week prior I had email my Cooperating Teacher and set the day and time in which I could teach the lesson.  The lesson we were tasked to teach was a choice lesson from the National FFA Lifeknowledge lessons.  Mrs. Dingman and I chose the Defining Career Success for middle school learners.  I taught the lesson on Monday to a group of 8th grade students in their agriculture rotation.  

The lesson incorporated 4 characteristics of career success and 5 steps to achieving the career success.  All 16 students were able to create a collage using magazines as to what career success means to them and fill out a staircase of steps to achieving career success using clues.  There was quite a lot of material to include in the lesson, so some of the things I was not able to include, but overall, the lesson went very well and the student came away learning more about what career success looks like.  

Teaching this lesson taught me more about planning and estimating the time it will take for each activity. I was able to use some of the classroom management techniques and strategies while I was teaching to keep the class moving and the students on task.  Additionally, having a lesson plan to look off of that was organized and clear was something I have learned and have been learning in AEE 412.

The National FFA Lifeknowledge characteristics of Career Success.  

From this experience, I learned that it is good to try and include lots of activities into a lesson, but not too many or some of the most important activities could be cut short or even gotten rid of in the attempt to save time and use each moment effectively.  Additionally, I learned that having too many activities crammed into a pretty short lesson can make the students stressed and create a very busy lesson with too many components.

As a future Ag teacher, I will have to plan and use the time in each lesson effectively.  I can take what I learned from this lesson and from the labs in AEE 412 and not create lessons that are too busy and try to incorporate too many activities.

The National FFA Lifeknowledge Steps to Career Success diagram.