Macro-Learning While Micro-Teaching

This week #psuaged22 took on their Micro-Teaching project. This assignment paired each member of our cohort with a different agricultural education program to engage in a three day, virtual teaching experience. I was paired with Ms. Leanna Weimer, the Rockwood FFA Advisor and Agriscience Teacher for this experience. Before beginning my Micro-Teaching, the students in Ms. Weimer's Animal Science class were studying how to judge different species of livestock. This allowed for us to come to the simple conclusion that I would be teaching her class how to judge horses to fit in with the content she had been covering the past few days. So after buckling down to create my lesson plans, Monday finally came around and I began this experience.

Day One

Since Rockwood is a Google school, I connected with Ms. Weimer's class via Google Meet. I had never used Google Meet before, but I thought it was pretty easy to navigate after exploring it a bit. For this lesson, we focused on exploring the traits of a successful judge. In teams, the students deciphered the five traits of a successful judge according to the American Quarter Horse Association. After putting these statements in their own words, they drew pictures to explain what the statements were saying. One challenge that I noticed as soon as class started was that I lost instruction time to the morning announcements since this was the first class in the school day. This made the already short class period even shorter, but helped me to recognize a challenge that Ms. Weimer faces everyday in her first class.  

Day Two

On the second day of the Micro-Teaching, we dived into learning about the five criteria for judging halter horses; quality, balance, structural correctness, muscling, and way of going. After learning how to evaluate these criteria, the students were able to judge their first class of horses. I was excited to see that many of the students placed the top horse and the bottom horse of the class correctly, meeting our objective for the day. However, we ran out of time for the review game on Gimkit, which I knew the students would have really enjoyed. I felt a bit more confident after the second day of this experience as I could see the students learning and was excited that they drew on the concepts that I taught them to volunteer answers to my questions.

Day Three

To wrap up this experience, the students explored the concept of oral reasons. After learning about the different parts of oral reasons, the best way to format notes for horse judging, reading a set of oral reasons, and watching a set of oral reasons being presented in a video, the students were supposed to be able to create their own set of oral reasons in groups. However, we ran out of time for this last activity and had to wrap up our time together taking the last few minutes to complete the assessment and student learning survey on a Google Form. Many of the students expressed my own feelings about virtual learning and were pretty negative about their experience in the Micro-Teaching because of that. While this was not a factor of the experience that I could control, I was pretty bummed that some of the students did not enjoy our time together. However, there were a few students that enjoyed learning about horses which lifted my spirits.

Overall, I felt challenged by the physical separation between myself and the students. For much of this experience, I could not see or hear any of the students and relied heavily on Ms. Weimer to be my eyes, ears, and hands in the classroom. One of my favorite elements of teaching is being able to genuinely connect with students in the classroom and see their eyes light up when they learn something new. This element was missing because of the virtual component and it really opened my eyes to what educators went through, and may still be going through, during the pandemic. In the future as an Agriscience teacher, I hope that this experience helps me to cherish in-person instruction even more. I also hope to get better at pacing my lessons and utilize platforms like Gimkit and Nearpod to engage my learners. What questions do you have about my Micro-Teaching experience? Drop them in the comment section below!

'Taylor'ed with love,