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

This week, I had the opportunity to spend a day with my students as they competed at their local Leadership Development Events competition.  Over the past couple weeks, I got to work with a few of my students as they were preparing for their individual LDE competitions. I worked with students competing in Extemporaneous, Creed and Employment Skills. During this time though, I had to reflect back on conversations from AEE 311 with Dr. Curry about what a coach is when preparing FFA students for competitions. I had to take a step back and realize that I still needed to be coachable about how I was preforming as a preservice educator in the role of advisor/coach. Talking with my Cooperating Teacher we had conversations about how to best prepare our students, but still realizing that the work and preparation was mostly on their part.  I focused a lot with the employment skills students as it was my favorite LDE to compete in while I was in FFA. We talked about creating resumes and ...

 I think the title of this one ends up being pretty self-explanatory with what I am going to discuss. Every Ag Teacher knows that community support is one of the biggest things that you need to have a successful agricultural program. Without your community, you will not have the student interest and the pushes for funding that you need to have a program.  I am going to take this one step forward. This week, I spent some time reaching out to the community via social media and by talking to my students and seeing who had what contacts in the community. You see, it was time that I needed more than just support from the community. I needed supplies. Next week, we will be getting into some hands on work in my landscaping class, practicing some hardscaping and learning new skills. For these activities though, I needed pavers and bricks. Reaching out on Facebook, I was able to acquire about 200 bricks that I will be using for the students to construct straight walls out of. Not many ...