Jumping into Week 5

After a week of travel and fun, it was time to return to Oley Valley and teach agriculture. This week, I picked up two additional classes: animal and plant biotechnology and advanced animal science. I must admit, I was nervous to start teaching these classes due to my lack of knowledge on some of the material and the older students, but it went better than I expected!

It was time to add biotech to my schedule on Wednesday. When I first learned I was going to be teaching about biotechnology, I was very intimidated. This is a class that I do not have much (or any) experience in, but I was excited to learn more. We started with a review of transcription and translation. On Friday, we started a lab called "Where's the protein?" On Thursday night, Mr. Deysher and I stayed after school for a few hours preparing for the lab. Thankfully, Mr. Deysher is CASE certified in biotech. I could not imagine having to start this class from scratch! For my lesson on Friday, there were definitely more things that I needed to fix than went well, but I am going to continue researching more on the topic to be better able to answer student questions.

For my advanced animal science class, we started with an introduction to me as a teacher, and "jumped" right into our frog dissection lesson.

I came into the lesson with an inquiry approach. As a frog dissection is something that I have not practiced since 10th grade biology, I used my students with their more recent knowledge. Each group was assigned a different body system of the frog to research and present on. When we start to dissect the frog next week, each group will be seen as the "expert" of their body system.

A few questions:

When you are teaching a class with students who know more about the topic than you, what are some strategies you can use to not feel overwhelmed or anxious about teaching the topics?

Students testing their limits of being a "friend" with the teacher rather than a student can be frustrating. What are your suggestions?

ACES conference starts tomorrow! Oley Valley will be there for the first weekend with 17 students and 3 chaperones. Tune into my blog next week to find out how ACES and my next week of teaching turns out!