Hey everyone!
On Thursday I finished my spring practicum, my last teaching program for the graduate program I am in. It was a bittersweet moment and as we were pulling into campus, I might have teared up just a tad. This program is such a unique experience. It is unique in so many ways that I will only list a few.
This program is unique in these ways:
- Living with 13 other people for an entire year.
- Living in a small cabin and having to walk to another building for a living space.
- Getting teaching experience in classroom and field teaching.
- Learning how to live in a tight community.
- Considering faculty as family.
- Outreach-going to other places in Wyoming to teach in the classroom and field.
- Ecological research projects
And so many more…
I cannot believe we are already headed into our summer capstone in just a few short weeks. It has been a hard but awesome year so far.
The past few weeks of the spring practicum have been challenging but also rewarding.
The spring practicum has been challenging because of my lack of focus and because I have not been able to reach some of my goals for this year.
I think my lack of focus for this teaching practicum was due to knowing that I do not want to be a teacher after this. I would like to be an educator in some way but not in an everyday setting. I believe I would become burned out quickly and I believe that as a teacher you have to be passionate about what you do. However, I still wanted to try my best when I was teaching but when I was teaching this practicum. During this practicum, I put more of an emphasis of students being able to explore the outdoors and ask questions, rather than delivering the content I wanted to cover. It always seemed like students knew the content I was covering so I thought it would be better if the students led the learning. There was more of experiential learning over content learning.
Even though I do not want to be a teacher, I have been striving to become a better educator and setting goals for myself to do this, such as asking better questions. I wanted to ask better questions in order for students to answer their own questions and I was striving for students to understand what I believe they should understand. For instance, for one of the weeks of field teaching I had to teach culture. On Bradley Taggart day I took the students to Mormon Row. I had questions written out and the students were answering them and I was trying to get them to a specific answer, but they did not get there without me giving them the answer, I kept distracting them to different answers with my questions. It was very confusing, the students were confused and I was confused by the end of it. This has been a goal of mine since I have started teaching in the fall. I believe I have improved, but I also know that I still struggle with it. It is discouraging but I know that teaching is not easy and as we enter the capstone I will still make it one of my goals.
The spring practicum has been rewarding because I was finally comfortable teaching and if I was ever in a panic I had the tools to recover from my panic. In addition, to teaching, seeing the season change once again has been awesome, as well as having the knowledge of the environment changing around me.
During this practicum, I felt comfortable with teaching, I was not stressed and I knew what I had to do when it came to teaching. This was GREAT! I did not feel rushed to get through content and I did not have to scrounge for content because I ran out of content first thing in the morning. I believe there was a perfect balance of content and student exploration in my lessons. I think this was due to the fact that I had the tools in my tool belt in order to facilitate a lesson based on my students and the flexibility to add or change things at the last minute. Essentially, I knew how to make stuff up when I needed to. An example of this would be when I was teaching about weather and clouds, I was not sure what kind of clouds were in the sky but a student asked me if they were right, they had a cloud finder and I told the student that they were the scientist not me, the student took that as an answer and was content with his own answer.
In addition to being a better teacher than in the previous practicums, another rewarding part of the spring practicum has been seeing the season change from winter to spring and having the knowledge of what is going on around me. Especially after learning about everything in the class AEFECD.
It was great having the tools to be able to talk to students about what they were observing in the field. Thanks to the class AEFECD, I was able to give a 20 minute teachable moment on a dead deer carcass and have students try to guess what animal track they just saw.
Overall, this practicum was a great ending to the teaching practicums because I felt like I knew how to teach and I was not just being thrown into teaching without knowing anything. Over the course of the year, I was able to gain more tools and proper guidance on how to design a learning plan and how to facilitate a better lesson.
Even though, I am pretty sure I do not want to be a full time teacher, I know I would like to be an educator sometimes, whether that is a few times a year or every other week. I know I want to educate people about the environment, something that I am passionate about and know a lot about.
It was a struggle for me when I only received the base knowledge of a topic and then I did not have the answers to more in depth questions. I think I would be better at teaching something I am truly passionate about.
Going forward, I look forward to using the skills I have learned about teaching in my professional career. Those skills might be public speaking, working with others, interpersonal skills, knowing my audience and so much more.
The most unique thing about this program is being with 13 other people that will get up at 5:30 in the morning and go look for a sage grouse lek, go camping on the first day that it hit 60 degrees outside and dork out over a ruffed grouse doing his mating dance.
Cheers,
Concerned Ski Bum
Concerned Ski Bum 