Show Halters to Chalk Boards: Dylan's Ag Ed Journey

Well, National FFA Week 2021 is in the books and as a student teacher, I made it! The week was a blast with activities ranging from Food Insecurity and Dairy Days to Community Service Day. I believe that this week gave me great insight into what planning major FFA events will look like as a future advisor. For this blog, I wanted to talk about some of my experiences with planned out activities this week, what went well, and what could have gone better. Might as well start with the positives, the students had a great week that was a change of pace from the rest of school. We took a week to focus on topics that the officer team had chosen to discuss and participate in throughout the week. When it comes to planning here is what went well: Every day had a theme and a lesson to learn behind it The students were engaged  All of the needed materials were obtained in plenty of time THE STUDENTS HELPED SET UP AND CLEAN UP EVERYTHING THE STUDENTS DECIDED THE DAILY TOPICS THE STUDENTS PLANNED...

 When we talk about FFA being a student run organization, I really had to let go of the reins with planning out next week. I worked closely with my the Wilmington Area officer team over the last two weeks to plan out FFA week. I believe that we put together a really fun, productive and educational week together. After my conversation with Mrs. McKelvey, I realized next week would be the first time that the entire student organization would be together since before COVID-19, due to Wilmington not allowing club period since the pandemic began.  That information really pushed me to give the student some autonomy over what they wanted to do next week. However, this made me think about the planning that I had already accomplished. I realized that I did not want students to go back into a project or specific content area after a week of FFA related activities, so I slowed down some content in certain classes and moved around content in other classes. The one thing that I am not stop...

This week, my big idea focuses around the time that Agricultural Educators spend outside of normal class hours to ensure the success of our students.  This week, I took it upon myself in-between the classes that I am teaching to set the small gas engines at Wilmington Area Schools in order. One of my tasks for this semester of student teaching is to coach up some CDE (Career Development Event) Teams. As a former participant in the Small Gas Engines CDE, I would find it really cool to come full circle and get a CDE team in that contest. Wilmington has not had a small gas engines CDE team since my senior year of high school when I would compete against them. Thus being said, it would be a really cool opportunity to share one of my passions with the students at Wilmington Area.  Now that you have the back story, I spent some time this week organizing Wilmington's tool room, locating missing pieces for engines, and finally troubleshooting learning opportunities that former student...