If Only I Knew Then What I Know Now

I came into this profession much ke many of you: I enjoyed my wn experience in Agriculture Education as a student and wanted to ensure that future generations of students would have that same opportunity. I knew in high school that I wanted to become an agriculture science teacher and never wavered from that desire throughout college. I entered the teaching program at Texas A&M University and four years later was applying for my first teaching job. I was ready to train national champion public speakers, take every student to National FFA Convention, and direct leadership workshops for FFA members far and wide. I have been teaching for six years now and am proud that my students appreciate agriculture and the FFA just as I did, and still do. However, somewhere along the way my priorities changed and in my opinion, they changed for the better. I am quite certain that FFA and the leadership development that I gained from my participation in FFA have been a fundamental part of my success as a teacher. I know this is where I learned how to plan events, organize activities and prioritize actions, which were all required of me even in my first year of teaching. But what I did not truly leam until I was surrounded by it was where my emphasis needed to lie. I can spend countless hours planning a trip to National Convention, preparing a member for competition, and organizing a leadership workshop, but if I am not spending twice that much time on curriculum development, then I feel it is all in vain. It might have been when I applied to be a participant in the National FFA Delta Conference that this revelation became apparent. I had just finished my first year of teach- ing and was selected to attend this conference where I spent a week working on more effective lessons through better teaching strategies. I gathered with teachers from around the nation to work on lesson plans! We were not working to determine new rules for the livestock judg- ing event, or comparing National Chapter applications. We were working on the most important part of our jobs - the curriculum! I started the school year inspired by what I had learned from my men- tors at the conference and for the first six weeks I committed myself to writing lesson plans every day for each class that would meet the expectations I had been taught. Not surprisingly, the care I was putting into lesson plans each night im- proved the technical lessons I was teaching by 300%. My interest ap- proaches were focusing students and the contextual sets were fram- ing previous knowledge to bridge to the new objective. I was using student-centered language that was specific and action-oriented and of course, I was using student-engag- ing strategies to facilitate learning. The implementation of these tools made a tremendous difference in my classroom. I noticed it most in my non-traditional agriculture stu- dents who had previously been dif- ficult to engage. Through constant interaction, engaging strategies, and active directions, I found a way to facilitate learning for all students in my classroom. I was excited about my teaching and my students' learn- ing. Not only was 1 creating my own new lessons, but I was armed with a collection of highly critiqued les- sons, a battery of effective teaching strategies, and a brand new outlook on teaching. No wonder my class- room instruction improved so much! If I had known about how to really design a lesson to be effective, my first-year students might have had a better experience. …