The Desire to Inquire Will Inspire

Many of us in agricultural education understand that earning a higher degree, though costly, will pay dividends after a long and rewarding career teaching agriculture. However, with the demands of teaching agriculture and advising an FFA chapter, a new teacher might perceive that there are enough limitations of time and resources to forgo this wise investment opportunity. I had these same beliefs early in my teaching career but decided to go back to school while working. Making that decision has been the best career move that I have made thus far. Now, I think it is one of my duties to try to convince other young agriculture teachers to seriously consider going back to the classroom. When I began teaching I had high ideals; my expectations of my students were just as lofty and I felt that since I had earned my degree, my ticket to success, I was complete. Boy, did I get a strong dose of reality from my first teaching job. I thought that all of my knowledge and enthusiasm for agricultural education would mesh well with my students' willingness to learn, but it did not. Today, I am thankful for that. It would have been too easy if my first students had been as eager to learn as I wanted them to be. I would not have become the teacher I am now if I had not spent the first three years of my teaching career looking for ways to make what I was teaching more relevant to the students I was encountering in my classroom every day. This challenging situation forced me to think critically and become a learner myself. While battling the daily challenges a new teacher faces and trying to develop a more attractive format for my lessons, I began working towards my master's degree. Initially, my motivation for seeking a higher degree was somewhat monetary but throughout the process I found my rewards to be completely intrinsic. As I began my course work, I started to reflect on how I felt being a learner again and I tried to apply my feelings to the planning for my students. The knowledge I was gaining in these graduate courses made me a more informed source of information for my students, of course, but cultivating their desire to inquire remained difficult. As I continued to reflect on my roles as a student and as a teacher I began to understand that I was motivated to inquire, seek understanding and learn more because of this problem I had... the inability to make students see the relevance of what I was teaching. I began to hypothesize that if my students were introduced to an agricultural topic with a scenario of a plausible, real-- life problem, their natural curiosity and their sense of wonder would motivate them to learn. I also thought that if my students were more motivated to learn then their satisfaction with the process of learning would increase. During the latter stages of my master's program I was required to develop and propose an idea for my master's thesis. The thought of writing a paper longer than any most agriculture teachers wrote while earning their undergraduate degrees as well as the longest many of us will ever write is a strong deterrent to earning a graduate degree. This may be the very reason many teachers choose not to. But should we not expect at least as much of ourselves as we do of our students? Writing a thesis is a huge commitment of time and mental energy; however, that commitment will definitely sharpen any teacher's sense of what their students need. My proposal was not difficult to design. Through my reflections as a teacher and a student I had discovered something to investigate and test... would problem scenarios enhance the content of my lessons and motivate students to learn while increasing the students' satisfaction with the learning? Expert support from my graduate advisor and the access to technology was key to my success. No one is expected to go through this process alone so with the Internet as a research tool and e-mail as a reliable feedback tool I felt very connected with the sources of help available to me. …