Guest Blogger Series: Career Success 101 - How to Plan a Career Tour

Editors Note: This blog is part of a series of guest contributors from the National school-based agricultural education family. Ms. Jaysa Fillmore is a 7th year Agricultural science teacher and FFA advisor who currently works at Cassia Alternative High School in Burley, Idaho.  CHS is one of the few agriscience programs in alternative schools in Idaho and Ms. Fillmore started it the program in 2014. She is the current Idaho Vocational Agriculture Teachers Association secretary and the Idaho FFA Service Learning Coordinator. She is currently a CASE Master Teacher and has been a lead teacher since 2011.  She lives in Paul, ID with husband Richard and two daughters age 3 & 5.

"FFA makes a positive difference in the lives of students by developing their potential for premier leadership, personal growth, and career success through agricultural education." The FFA Mission. 

We all know it and we strive to put it into practice in our agricultural education programs. What exactly does it mean to "develop their potential for career success"? We prepare great lessons, we invite guest speakers to our classes, and we encourage students to train for Career Development Events, but how do we expose students to the real careers we are preparing them for? A career tour is a great way to introduce students to new careers in an interesting and engaging way.

Students visit a Pacific Ethanol plant to learn about fermentation and ethanol production. The plant manager describes the automated monitoring system that keeps the plant running at optimum efficiency. The ethanol plant offers good benefits and some of the highest paying entry level careers in the area.

1. Plan ahead! 
Pick a few date options for your career tour at least one month in advance. Career tours can be one tour during one class period or a full day with multiple stops. You could even plan a multi day event! Determine the size and scope of your career tour including how many stops you'd like to make and how many students you want to include. A group of 25 or less is ideal. If you have more students, consider separating tour groups onto separate buses with rotating tour stops. This obviously takes more planning and coordination, but as someone who has planned a full day, four bus event for 100 students, it is totally worth it!

2. Form a list of potential tour stops.
Talk to your local chamber of commerce, economic development committee, elected leaders, fellow teachers, advisory committee, or civic groups to get ideas. Create a big list and include any contacts already have. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• food processing plants
• commodity handling facilities
• commercial greenhouses
• production livestock or crop operations
• agrifinance companies
• co-ops
• agricultural equipment manufacturing or repair
• government entities- USDA, Forest Service, BLM
• agriservice businesses- ag electricians, ag transportation, commodity inputs, veterinarians
• agricultural laboratories or Extension research facilities 

2. Contact the tour locations.

If you have a contact person at the tour location, start there. If not, make a cold call. Introduce yourself as an ag teacher and FFA advisor. Ask who you should talk to about setting up a tour for your high school students. You may have to leave a message. Keep detailed notes on all of your calls- who you talked to, who you left a message for, when you left a message, etc. Once you get in touch with someone who can schedule your tour, discuss the date options you have selected. Don't schedule a tour, yet. Ask what days and times work best for the tour host and get several options from them. Ask how long the tour will take from arrival to departure. Ask how many students the host can accommodate. Will you have to break your students into groups? Take detailed notes!

3. Put together the itinerary.

After you've talked to enough tour locations to fill your tour schedule, start putting together an itinerary. Make sure to account for time to load, unload, and travel between stops. Leave a little wiggle room at each stop. It's better to be early than late! Make time in the schedule for lunch.

4. Confirm the tour stops.

Now that you have an itinerary, call the tour hosts back to confirm the tour times. Make adjustments to your itinerary if needed. Ask about tour protocol like clothing or shoe requirements, check in procedures, etc. Schedule transportation for your career tour. Prepare for a guest teacher. Create permission slips and recruit chaperones. Consider having enough chaperones to accompany any small groups that need to be created at tour stops.

5. Plan for lunch.

If you're planning an all day career tour, consider asking the chamber of commerce, a local bank, civic organization, or local government to host your students for lunch. Many of these groups have access to large conference rooms and would welcome the opportunity to buy your students pizza and soda and talk about their business or organization. If you need to eat lunch en route, sack lunches may be the way to go.

Idaho Fish and Game Biologist shows students how to collect and separate sagebrush seed for habitat restoration. Wildfires in Idaho destroy thousands of acres of rangeland each year and Fish and Game employees are tasked with collecting seed in the fall and planting seedlings each spring. Their careers keep them outdoors most of the time.

6. Prep your students.

The week before the career tour, tell your students about the tour stops. Guide students in researching the host sites. Discuss the types of careers they may see in action. Talk about tour etiquette and help students formulate good questions for their guides. Collect permission slips and remind chaperones about the tour.

7. Tour time!

We can all agree that days like these are one of the reasons why we became ag educators! Enjoy the career tours with your students. Learn right along with them. Bring business cards to exchange with tour guides and hosts. Take lots of pictures but be sure to follow tour protocol on cameras!

A project manager for Kloepfer Concrete and Asphalt talks to freshmen on a career tour. He encouraged students to seek out after school internships with his company if they were interested in a career operating heavy equipment.

8. Reflect on the experience.

Create a career tour reflection assignment and encourage students to write about their favorite tour, careers they learned about, and people they met. Teach students how to write good thank you notes and send them to the hosts. Create a press release for the newspaper highlighting your students' experiences or write a letter to the editor acknowledging the tour hosts. Post your pictures to social media and tag hosts if possible.

The USDA estimates that there will be 57,900 high-skilled job openings annually in the food, agriculture, renewable natural resources, and environment fields in the United States and only 35,400 new U.S. graduates to fill those positions. Our students may not even realize the types of careers available in agriculture and seeing them first hand while on a career tour is a great way to open their eyes to the career possibilities in agriculture. If we plan to feed 9 billion people by 2050, we need all the help we can get!

Submitted by: 
Ms. Jaysa Fillmore
Idaho Agriscience Teacher
filjaysa@cassiaschools.org
@mrsagteacher

Follow up on Growth Mindset: September 2015 from Carol Dweck

Follow up on Growth Mindset conversation from Carol Dweck, 2015. 

Article here:  http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/09/23/carol-dweck-revisits-the-growth-mindset.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news2-RM

Guest Blogger Series: Incorporating Blended Learning in an Ag Education Classroom

Editors Note: This blog is part of a series of guest contributors from the National school-based agricultural education family. Ms. Jillian Gordon is a current graduate student at the University of Georgia in Agricultural Leadership, Education & Communications in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. She is 2015 graduate of the Penn State Agricultural Education having completed her student teaching at Ridgemont High School in Ridgeway, Ohio. She is a past Pennsylvania State FFA Officer and graduate of the Twin Valley High School Agriscience Program.

At 23 years of age, I didn’t think I would start a piece with a sentence like “back in my day…” but here we are. When I was in high school, five short years ago, cell phones were off limits. I had peers who regularly ended up in the principal’s office having to explain exactly why the text they were sending was so darn important. Bringing your laptop to school was basically unheard of as well, the wifi connection was strictly off limits to students and teachers weren’t even trusted with the knowledge to be able to log on on their own accord, their laptops needed to be set up by someone in the tech department.

Today, however, more and more schools are adopting open cell phone policies and not only allowing students to bring in laptops but providing them. And while technology use is expanding, it could be argued that purposeful and meaningful use of technology in the classroom is not. 

Education is one of the only professions where slow technology adoption is acceptable. I’ve seen even some of the most innovative and talented teachers unwilling to make the dive into implementing technology into their classroom. It’s much like a new fashion trend (bear with me for a moment fellas) that looks great in magazines, but you’re not willing to try it yourself. “I mean, it looks like it works great in THEIR classroom, but I just don’t think I can pull it off in my classroom.” Sound familiar?

Agricultural education classrooms are especially susceptible to this mindset. With hands-on, lab based classes it is a common conception that blended learning just doesn't fit the experiential learning model of agricultural education. I am here to tell you, from experience, that this sentiment is straight up wrong. 

This post aims to talk about blended learning in the agricultural education classroom. Blended learning, doesn’t have a specific, succinct definition, but the folks over at TeachThought gave it a try anyway.

“Defining hybrid or blended education is a trickier task than one might think–opinions vary wildly on the matter. In a report on the merits and potential of blended education, the Sloan Consortium defined hybrid courses as those that “integrate online with traditional face-to-face class activities in a planned, pedagogically valuable manner.” Educators probably disagree on what qualifies as “pedagogically valuable,” but the essence is clear: Hybrid education uses online technology to not just supplement, but transform and improve the learning process.

That does not mean a professor can simply start a chat room or upload lecture videos and say he is leading a hybrid classroom. According to Education Elements, which develops hybrid learning technologies, successful blended learning occurs when technology and teaching inform each other: material becomes dynamic when it reaches students of varying learning styles. In other words, hybrid classrooms on the Internet can reach and engage students in a truly customizable way. In this scenario, online education is a game changer, not just a supplement for status quo. But what does this theoretical model actually look like in practice?”

There are MANY ways to blend your classroom, including flipping the classroom, which is another awesome method, but not one I am going to address here. If you're interested, definitely check out Edutopia for some great resources.

One common misconception is that online learning strips a classroom of its environment of inquiry, but after watching a group of equine science students approaching me after learning about body systems, completely on their own accord, and say to me "Ms. Gordon, we passed those tests and finished our project, but we don't really think we really learned what we needed to, do you think we could do a dissection?"

Pig Dissection prompted by the students

After I picked my jaw off the floor (my only reaction to a group of high school students truly wanted to do MORE than assigned to reach mastery), we contacted the local butcher, got ahold of the internal organs of a pig and later that week, the students were using information they gathered on their own about how to dissect and identifying the organs and body parts their learned a few days earlier. That's when I realized the potential for blended learning to foster inquiry is huge, and I couldn't help but share the love. 

Because everyone loves lists nowadays, I went ahead and created TWO for this post (you can thank me later). These are specific ways for the 2016 Penn State Student Teacher Candidates to tinker with technology at their cooperating centers in the Spring, however, I think they can be applicable for anyone looking to blend!

First, let’s talk about the advantages of going blended.

     1. You’ll increase your capacity as a teacher

By using curriculum from iCEV, I was able to teach five different class pathways in ONE class period. By offering your content online, as opposed to only in class and only through you, you can expand the choices that you are able to offer your students.

1     2. You’ll increase your ability to easily differentiate.

To expand on the first point, offering your content online also offers greater capacity for differentiation both when it comes to types of content as well as the level of difficulty. Students move through content and assignments at their own pace, and you can work one on one with students to meet their individual learning needs. 

2     3. You’ll get to know your students better

When you no longer are the “gatekeeper of knowledge” during class time, this frees up the opportunity for you to meet with students one on one or in small groups. They can ask you questions about content or an assignment they may never have asked through a lecture or activity engaging the entire class. This also gives you better feedback about what content is sticking, what is not as well as identifying best practices for your individual students!

Next, lets cover three tips for making the transition to blended easy as pie!

      1. Take the time to set context

      The biggest mistake I made when trying out blended learning is making alot of assumptions. I assumed the students would understand everything I was saying, assumed they knew how to use the technology, etc. It is SO important to take the time to ensure you are using the utmost clarity with your students about expectations and procedures. It may feel as though you are using valuable instructional time, but if you do not go slowly on the front end, you will spend even more time throughout the class re-explaining things that you thought was covered weeks ago. 

    2. Be prepared for push back

      By far, the most confusing learning moment for me was understanding that just because this generation of students grew up with technology, doesn't mean they are dying for it in the classroom. I had many students, who after 11 years of being talked at in school followed by worksheets at home, took weeks to get used to or enjoy learning online. Often, students see technology as where they "have fun" (texting, playing games, etc) while school is NOT fun. I do not have a good piece of advice to combat this, because it is something I struggle with greatly myself. Anyone reading with ideas or feedback, please drop a note in the comments below!

     3.  Utilize your resources

      The biggest limiting factor, in my opinion, of teachers adopting a blended learning classroom is believing that have to create all of the online videos, modules, etc themselves. This is simply not true! My cooperating teacher and I personally utilized iCEV, which has great agricultural education content. By no means was it as simple as "plug and play." Some days I did create or edit iCEV content on my own (check out this blog post about how I did that). Others, I found content from completely different courses. Finding content that fits your classroom does take time, but don't think you need to do all of it on your own!

One last piece of advice for the 2016 Student Teachers before I am off of my soapbox, take risks! The reason I am so passionate about this post is because I was given the opportunity during my student teaching to take one big scare jump off of the educational diving board into the waters of blended learning.

Did things go smoothly why I tried it? Nope.

Are there a lot of things I would have changed if I were to do it again? You betcha.

But guess when I get to try it over again? In my own classroom! Taking risks as a student teacher not only set me up to continue taking risks as an educator, but allowed by cooperating teacher to finally try something out in her classroom that she had been planning for years. Sounds like a win-win to me!

If you have more questions about my experience developing the class and working with iCEV, you can check out a few of my blog posts from student teaching, or feel free to reach out via Twitter @jillianpsu!

Submitted by:
Jillian Gordon
Graduate Student
University of Georgia
@jillianpsu
https://travelingteachertales.wordpress.com/
jilliangordon@uga.edu 

Blog Oh Blog - How to use it to advance AEE 412 and pedagogical knowledge?

As an instructor, I want to maximize and organize resources for the learners in the class for future use. One way I do that is to utilize a Blog.

A blog can be "leveraged" in many ways. To be frank; I do not believe I am doing the "blog" well as an effective instructional resource for AEE 412.

AEE 412 is the Senior Capstone Course in preparation for agricultural student teaching. The course description from PSU reads:
Instructional strategies and media; directing individual and group learning activities; assessing student performance and quality of instruction in agricultural education and environmental sciences

A core value I have as a teacher educator is building a strong professional/personal learning network (PLN) around our teacher candidates as as support scaffolding. Specifically, this mean growing the professional network of our candidates with current secondary agriscience teacher who will be their colleagues in the future.

With these thoughts, I am soliciting "Guest Bloggers" from across the state and nation on specific topics...we will see how it goes!

Do you want to be guest blogger? Here is the google form, Take a moment to fill it out:

First Friday of AEE 412 - Thought for the Week!

Thought for the Day

“Forget Robert Donat or Peter O’Toole in Goodbye Mr. Chips, Sidney Poitier in To Sir with Love, Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver, Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, Jon Voight in Conrack, Richard Dreyfuss in Mr. Holland’s Opus, Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, or Kevin Kline in The Emperor’s Club.

These are excellent fictional portrayals of powerful individuals whose personal authenticity and pedagogic brilliance illuminate the mediocrity surrounding them. But they are bad role models (at least for me).

Teaching is not about charismatically charged individuals using the sheer force of their characters and personalities to wreak lifelong transformations in students’ lives. It’s about finding ways to promote the day-to-day, incremental gains that students make as they try to understand ideas, grasp concepts, assimilate knowledge and develop new skills.

All the small things you do to make this happen for students represent the real story of teaching. Helping learning is what makes you truly heroic.” (p. 278)

Reference: Brookfield, S. D. (2006). The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom. 2^nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Hmm...AEE 412 RTLS "Reflective Teaching Lessons"

Lessons from Hondo..

We need more John Waynes in this town!

The 2015 Edition!! Preparing 2015 Student Teachers to Rock!

Hmm...the Power of Amateurs.

  Remember, professional built the titantic; Amateurs built the Ark!