My Student Teaching DIY Project

During my student teaching internship, I was tasked with forming a project surrounding professional development and professional learning.  After talking with my cooperating teacher, we came to the idea and conclusion that I would interact and spend time participating in the GLAG online community and platform.  In the proposal that was sent to my university supervisor, I would watch some videos and participate in the GLAG platform and then proceed to incorporate what I had been learning and participating in into a lesson in one of the classes that I was student teaching.  

Thus, what I ended up doing was participating in GLAG for a few weeks near the end of the semester.  Near the middle of March, I watched and then participated in the Kickoff week main event that was originally held in February.  I had the pleasure of listening to Dr. Alexa Lamm give a wonderfully inspiring and interactive talk about who we are and what we do as workers. I also watched several Tuesday Touchpoints and completed a short course on the 4 pillars of food security formed by Dr. Melanie Foster.  I found the course to be super informative, educational, and beneficial for the work that I plan to do in the future.  Upon completion of the course, I applied to get a badge for completing the course.  I had been planning on implementing these relevant and profound concepts into a lesson during the feed science and safety unit in the Intro to AFNR course that I was teaching, but we, as a class, did not get to that unit before my student teaching was completed.

Additionally, after watching one of the Tuesday Touchpoints on poetry with Dr. Melanie Foster and Dr. Hiram Larew about including the arts into education and when discussing hunger, I decided to find some ways to implement poetry into my classroom during student teaching.  The perfect opportunity to do this came on National Haiku day! Thus, as a review activity for one the plant science focused unit in my Intro to AFNR class, I gave each student a word that had to do with the unit we were in, and instructed them to write a haiku poem describing their word.  The student would then read their poem to the class and the class had to guess what word their poem described.  Whoever got the word correct first received a prize from my prize bin.  It worked well as a review activity, got the student thinking about syllables and literature, and allowed them to use their previous knowledge of the concepts to be creative and create!  I have written 2 examples of my students poems below.

Word ~ Pollination

Insect on flower

Transporting the pollen grains

To other flowers

Word ~ Petal

Brings pollinators

Usually brightly colored

Are modified leaves

After participating in and becoming inspired from the GLAG community, I plan to continue to stay engaged and participate in the community in the future as I plan to teach farmers internationally.  For anyone looking to learn more about international agriculture, for any educator of any kind, anywhere wanting to learn how to teach more international agriculture and to see what other Ag teachers are doing around the world, I HIGHLY recommend getting connected with the GLAG community online!  You can work and participate at your own pace on your own time and they are doing a great job of making it very accessible. I have learned a lot already and am sure that I will learn even more in the future.