Life Knowledge Lab

Our final teaching lab required us to use one of the Life Knowledge lesson plans available through National FFA. This lab was different from any that we had done throughout the semester, as we were adapting a pre-existing lesson plan, rather than creating our own from scratch. This was also the first lab that I had to interact with everyone via Zoom.

I had (wrongly) assumed that using an already developed lesson plan would mean that the work was 99% done for me already, and I would just have to follow along. Once I chose my lesson, which was on leadership styles, I realized I still had my work cut out for me. The first obstacle I faced was figuring out how to adapt the lesson to fit a 20 minute time frame. I was able to keep all of the components of the lesson, but I had to drastically shorten them. Another struggle that I faced was connecting some of the pieces of the plan. For example, there was a scenario about a dinner party that I could use as the interest approach, but the connection to the lesson wasn't spelled out in the plan, so I had to figure out how to make the connection on my own, and it still seemed like a bit of a stretch to me. I also found that even though the activities already had worksheets in the lesson plan PDF, I had to recreate them because there was no way to digitally share just that page with the students.

Teaching the lesson fully on Zoom was a bit of a challenge for me, at first. I found that whenever I shared my screen to the powerpoint, I could no longer see anyone, which really threw me off at first. I couldn't seem to find a good way to keep my slide shared while the group was working on activities, but still be engaged with and monitoring them at the same time.

While I did have to take on some obstacles, I definitely learned a lot in this lab. It showed me how valuable it is to have a lesson plan in a format that tailored to you, and also helped me to recognize some technical difficulties that I may run into in the future.