Hay Baylor

      Last week, I had the opportunity to do my micro-teaching experience for AEE 412 at Bellwood Antis High School in Bellwood, PA. The program is led by Mr. Matt Webreck, who agreed to allow me to come into his classroom for three days to teach some lessons. The class that I got to teach was his 1st-period Ag Science 1 course. This class was a group of 30 freshman students that could not all fit into the ag classroom. Therefore, they have to use the cafeteria as their learning space, which can pose its own challenges.      The unit that I got to teach out of was an FFA unit, and I got to focus specifically on CDEs and LDEs. These are events that FFA members get the opportunity to compete in, and can ultimately go all the way to the national level while competing in these contests. I started the first day of my teaching with some basic lectures on what CDE/LDEs are and gave some examples for students to reference. Then they got to do a sorting activity in ...

      I did not really know what I was going to be getting into when I departed my place for the Inquiry Institute on Friday evening. I knew that we would be participating in lessons, but was not really sure what that meant as far as learning about inquiry-based learning. I mean, what the hell is inquiry-based learning to be honest?     Going in, I thought that inquiry-based learning was the giving of information to students, and then allowing them to use that information to develop solutions or answers to questions that we as teachers, or they as students posed. I actually wasn't too far off, but I can tell you that it is not so much giving them information as it is allowing them to craft questions and hypothesize about possible results or solutions to said questions that they pose. This is the most advanced form of inquiry and can truly make for a pretty cool lesson. For example, we go to perform an Oreo Lab in which we tested to see if double stuf Oreos were ...