A birthday, winter weather, and wrapping up a unit

Let me just say I have the best CT and students, on Wednesdays we have club period for students to go and work on club related things so we have an FFA meetings. This week, they surprised me by decorating the room and donuts with candles, which was super sweet and fun!

This week was also a short week with winter weather causing school to be closed on Thursday and Friday, which is when we were supposed to be reviewing and testing on my first unit in Animal Science, so per usual we stay flexible and we will just start next week with that. 

Along with flexibility, my lesson plans changed a little with what the students wanted. so this does not happen all the time, but when the students are really interested in something I think it is important to cater to that to help their learning. So on Tuesday I gave the students a choice if they wanted to wrap up breeding methods and AI with a mini debate/discussion with a partner or if they wanted to have a class debate the next day. They were all very excited about this class debate, so class debate it was! 

I set some basic expectations but I gave a lot of freedom to them, they did not have a guided worksheet to follow or a strict rubric, they just knew everyone needed to talk  at least once and be involved and they should have at least 3 main points for the opening statements. Which in some ways I think I could have done better in preparing this and in other ways I think it went well with them having freedom. This also meant I changed a few things for the next day and the review, but the students not only enjoyed the debate but they also were challenging their opinions and the information they learned so the schedule change was well worth it. 

Going forward I think incorporating a debate in future units will be beneficial to help engage these students and if planned correctly can challenge them differently each time.  I hope to continue to be flexible and remember that student autonomy is extremely important. 

Comments

  1. John EwingFebruary 7, 2022 at 9:16 AM

    Flexibility is important, and I am glad to see that you connected your learning objectives thorough the activity. Debates are a great way to get students to view content from various perspectives, and it is good to sometimes have a student "argue" for the side that is not really the side with which they associate. Keep up the great work, and... Happy Birthday!
    -Dr. Ewing

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