Lab 4 Reflection- Problem Solving

My lab this week was designed for my leadership class as they will help take charge of planning their Spring Trip to Maine and participate in a college visit. I felt my lab went really well, it was calm and laid back. I started off by spitting students into groups that they would later use to work on their assignments. This worked out well as an early classroom management.
I presented the scenario but left any additional information out. I then allowed for time for the students to think about what information they needed. I felt this made the students begin to start processing the activity and then when they would be released to work in small groups would already be on task.
I really like problem based instruction as I think it offers the opportunity for students to take personal ownership of their learning. As a teacher I believe the less I talk, the more a student needs to think for themselves thus resulting in a higher level of thinking.
One thing I need to continue working on is avoiding filler words as well as projecting my voice. Overall I thought this was a good lab that definitely gave me ideas for Spring!

Accomplishing tasks via Learning Objectives- AEE Writing

Good Afternoon!
Let me start out by posing you a question, Without your 'to do' list, how do you know what to accomplish? You are possibly thinking about the many things that you have to do, but can you easily put emphasis or priority on them? By creating your to do list you are able to provide clarity and organization to the tasks at hand.

This is a similar analogy to developing learning objectives in the classroom. At the beginning of each class announcing the days objectives to the students puts them in the mindset of what they will be learning. They will have an idea of what to focus their learning on and what to pay particular attention to. M. Susie Whittington gives advice on developing learning objectives in relationship to Bloom's Taxonomy by utilizing action verbs to help students hone in on what they should learn. Whittington states that verbs categorized under the following categories also are equivalent to the Bloom's Taxonomy of learning. Remember in relation to Blooms' Knowledge, Processing is equivalent to Comprehension, Application to Analysis, Creating equivalent to Synthesis and Evaluating to Evaluation. The action words let a student know exactly what they should take and be able to do from each lesson.

In the text, Methods of Teaching Agriculture, it is discussed that posting lesson objectives also allows a teacher to determine the best timeline for students to learn things or do activities. It is also recommended that after the objectives are stated to do an interest approach with the students. This will allow for the students to become engaged in the subject in a non traditional lesson to captivate and gain their attention. This can be done in a variety of ways or as a bell work to start the class.