Cultivating Curiosity with Ms. Cusate

  Stop 1: Planning the Visit   The first step in conducting a potential student teaching site visit is reaching out to the cooperating teacher. I’ll admit, I was a bit nervous to send the first email, since first impressions are everything after all. I did my research to see what each school had to offer and carefully wrote each email, eager to get a response. After I got a few responses that I could come into their schools and visit, I had to write them into my calendar, email my professors that I would be missing the day, and prepare my questions for each site visit.     Stop 2: The Visit   What a time I had at each of the sites I visited! Each potential student teaching site I visited had something unique to offer, and since I have not really seen any other school-based agricultural education programs besides my own, I really enjoyed seeing the diversity of each program.   At each site I visited, I tried to imagine myself teaching there and bei...

My teaching immersion with the Penn State GOALs program has officially come and gone! Traveling to Maryville, Tennessee over my spring break to teach was one of the most rewarding things I have ever done, and the experience gave me the opportunity to teach in a school based agriculture program for the first time ever! In this blog, I want to share the 3 biggest lessons I learned about teaching as a profession and some of the fun activities I did while in Tennessee. Students from A day class presenting their country research project on China. Teachers Need to be Flexible and Adaptable Due to the nature of teaching on an A and B day schedule, I had the opportunity to teach the A day students three days of instruction, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I got to teach the B day students one day of instruction on Thursday due to a FFA trip on Tuesday. Naturally, because of this schedule, the A day students got the opportunity to go a little further with the content and complete country researc...

As the semester moves along, I am searching for my ideal cooperating center to complete my student teac hing experience! But what is the ideal program for me? Here is “Ms. Cusate’s Top 5 Want’s in a Cooperating Center” (in no particular order ) as I am searching for the perfect fit for me!     A Comprehensive High School   I attended Columbia-Montour Area Vocational-Technical School in Bloomsburg, PA, where I studied Agriculture and Plant Systems Technology. Since I attended a Career and Technical Center, I would like to see how agricultural education is taught in a comprehensive high school, where students take agriculture classes as an elective instead of as a vocation. Teaching a 90-minute block or 45-minute class period will be a tremendous learning experience from what I saw as a student, which was 3 hours in my agriculture classes a day.      Offers Classes I Do Not Have a Lot of Experience In   As a student fm an Agriculture and Plant Syst...