Fall Leadership Conference Reflection

I had an eye opening experience being a facilitator this year at FLC. This is an FFA conference for officer training and first year members. Olivia and I had the Vice President workshop. Here is some key events that I learned from.

• Not every student will be full engaged. It took us about half of the workshop to get all the students engaged. Maybe we weren't hitting their modality of learning, it was just too early in the morning for them to be mentally awake, or the student simply didn't want to be there. To address this, Olivia would stand next to the person with their phone out. I used the technique of clapping when I couldn't get their attention for the next objective, activity, or direction. One way that I will try to engage students more is to give them a classroom task or try to teach to their modality.

• We had to change minor details of our lesson plan. Olivia had the brilliant idea of playing Wheel of Fortune to guess the objectives as a transition. About half way through, most students had lost interest in the game. We decided to switch up our teaching method and use transitioning questions instead. I have realized that this type of thing may happen in the classroom as well. It takes thinking on your feet to change up a situation when you see your plan is starting to fall apart. 

• Time was our biggest enemy! We thought we had timing planned out well for our objectives. When they were put into practice, it only ended up taking less time than we thought. We slowed down the workshop and allowed students more time to think out a Program of Activities. Towards the end we had to cut out one of our leadership activities because we were having so much fun with the other two. Timing will be my enemy when it comes to teaching in a classroom. 

All in all, the experience of writing a long lesson plan and facilitating it to actual FFA members. I learned that planning is super important, but plans are meant to be changed and not set in stone.