A Trek to Bald Eagle Area High School

I had the opportunity to visit Michael Cahill who is currently student teaching at Bald Eagle Area High School. Being away from your cohort members when you spent every day with them the following semester is a huge change, so it is nice to have those moments where you can meet back and see how your peers are doing. 

(Photo Credit: BEAHS)

There are a few differences in his program and mine that I thought would be interesting to see. One is that the agricultural classes are primarily led by one teacher. There is another teacher who mainly does shop, but the program is mostly run by one main agricultural teacher (at least that's the way I understand it to be). 

Another thing that I found different from our programs was that Bald Eagle has several sections of their intro to ag course. At Greenwood, we are a smaller school, so we really only have one section of each course available. There is an 8th grade Exploratory Ag class that has two sections at Greenwood, but I don't teach either of those classes. Because of this, it was interesting to see how these classes were handled and the benefit of having to plan 1 lesson plan for 4 classes, and yet the challenge of remembering and gauging where each student was at in each class and trying to keep pace with it all. Michael has done a good job with keeping each class right in line with one another and each class seems to be at the same pace. 

Finally, an interesting difference is the location and facilities. Their ag program is a part of their tech department. At Greenwood, ours are more part of the science. Because of this, their shop and facilities are all in the same area whereas at Greenwood, our shop is clear across the other side of the school. 

Before student teaching, I might not have thought much about the difference having the shop next to your classroom versus in a separate part of the school could make, but it certainly does make a difference in the way I plan lessons and what I do in my classroom. For example, I really have to plan out demonstrations. Obviously that is not a bad thing, but if I just wanted to show a five minute demonstration on something, it would involve taking the students all the way down to the shop just for that short demo or remembering to let them know ahead of time that they were meeting in the shop the next day. There is another shop class in there sometimes too, so that creates another challenge of having two classes trying to work at the same time. These little things can make all the difference in how I plan my lessons so seeing the facilities at Bald Eagle made me think about how I might have taught my engines class differently. 

They also had animals in their program which is something we don't have at Greenwood. Michael was having students work on their Compensatory Rat Growth labs which would have been such a neat experiment for students to do at Greenwood--especially since we have a veterinary science and an animal bioscience class. They had rabbits that they took care of as well.

I really enjoyed visiting Michael's program at Bald Eagle and seeing a different perspective on teaching from my own and my cooperating teachers. It goes to show that there are many different ways to skin a cat! I think the biggest realization from my experience related to teaching styles is that the way we teach is so reflective of our personalities. And when we recognize and embrace our personalities, we can better create lessons that are comfortable to us and for the students as well. There is simply no need to be someone we're not. 

Thank you Michael for letting me visit your program and seeing a sliver of your student teaching experience!