When I look back through my notes from our PD week at NCCAT scribbles and doodles are visible throughout. I tend to scribble when:

1) I’m in the zone

2) I’m engaged in what I’m learning

3) I have time to process what I’m learning

but most of all…

4) I’m dreaming about what I’m learning

If my notes are any indication, this was a great week for me professionally. It’s easy to get stuck in the monotony of everyday teaching. Naturally, my favorite part of the week was the ease of having inspiring conversations. You see after even a few short minutes with any of my fellows, I was open to being influenced and inspired by his/her ideas. This made it easy to listen, collaborate on, and consider the application of many different ideas. What a difference this made for my mindset throughout the week.

What was unique about this professional development experience for me was the opportunity to REALLY process the information I was learning throughout the day…not in the “talk to your neighbor for thirty seconds about what you learned today” fashion that I’ve become accustomed to. Writing. Meal conversations. Typing reflections. Answering the same question with more than one other person. I can’t necessarily fault other PD opportunities because let’s face it, we can’t always take an entire week and often have a lot of really specific topics to learn and get through in PD sessions. It also helped that we had many breaks and transitions so that I never reached a point of being too overwhelmed. Like I mentioned earlier about the doodling, there were scribbles in my notebooks! I place an exclamation point because it has been soooooo long since I have seen that in my work. I’m usually overwhelmed in PD and trying to figure out what pieces I want to take away as the lecture keeps going and I get behind, definitely no time for doodles. The narrative format of many of the PD sessions and option to access materials post-session helped me relax. I was able to avoid feeling the pressure to take away every bit and piece of the sessions I attended in real time.

Two areas in particular sparked my curiosity throughout the week:

1) Community engagement (including parent involvement)

I really started thinking about the state of parent involvement in my classroom and school as well as other community agencies. After thinking about this, I started thinking of ways to make involvement more purposeful. I really would like to find a way to empower parents in the school community and think of ways for community agencies to naturally take part in what we are already teaching. I’m in the process of developing a survey that can be distributed schoolwide at the beginning of the year for parents to mark their talents, skills, and hobbies related to curriculum taught schoolwide. The survey would be used to create a database for teachers to consult when planning. Instead of career day, how about having parents come in when the career directly connects with student learning?

2) Citizen Science

Previously I had heard of citizen science and was familiar with the basic premise but this week I was at the point that I could envision my students participating and am really excited about finding meaningful ways for my students to participate in the future.

Well I guess this is the end of the beginning. Now that our first PD session has concluded I can continue dreaming up and working on the ideas that were sparked during this week.

I have a problem. I can’t decide what sessions I want to attend for our concurrent session PD options tomorrow: Project Based Learning as a Differentiation Strategy or Integrating STEM Skills and Content in the Humanities? Too much awesome PD…I always like love a good problem! We’ve all attended some version of PD in which we were left skimming booklets for the options that appeared to be the best of the worst, am I right?

Overcoming this type of PD is exactly what I had in mind when I completed my application to become a Kenan Fellow. Now that I have spent a solid week in my internship and have also spent time with other Kenan Fellows I’m realizing the potential of this opportunity for my teaching career.

For me, this experience is not merely about my teaching career, but also me as a person. I followed a very traditional route graduating high school, immediately attending UNC, leading me to begin my teaching career. Here’s the thing…what percentage of my fifth graders will spend the rest of their lives in the education arena? Certainly not 100%, so for me the value of this fellowship lies in the experience itself of waking up, driving into RTP, attending meetings with gasp…adults, taking a lunch break, considering the multiple perspectives of a product cycle and efficiency, and so continues the endless list. Result: I now have an idea and concept of what it is like to work in the world outside of education. While I’m certainly no expert, I have new ideas in addition to those that have been shared with me by friends and family.

It is easy as a teacher to get caught up in planning great lessons and curriculum for my classroom and with my grade level at my school that I can lose sight of the bigger picture. The picture being that one day my current fifth graders ten, eleven, or twelve years old are going to leave school at some point and make choices about what they do outside of an education arena.

In addition to developing my own concept of what it means to work in the world outside of education, I’m really looking forward to being able to develop my voice as an educator and advocate for the needs of students. Example: in PD yesterday I broke down and finally obtained my very own Twitter (follow me @lhensler413). Quickly I started following educational organizations and other individuals passionate about education. As a result, I’m immediately more knowledgeable about an area that I am very passionate about, thus empowering me to be the advocate I want to be. You may be wondering what I mean by “the advocate I want to be,” what does that look like? What will I specifically advocate for? What drives my passion for those topics I want to advocate? Here’s what I can tell you: there is no definite answer because it’s flexible and always changing, just like the real world experiences I’ve had through my fellowship thus far. For tonight though, I’ve decided in light of already attending a PBL session, I’ll attend “Integrating STEM Skills and Content in the Humanities” tomorrow.

Growing up in suburban Detroit, my family took vacations to the Outer Banks in North Carolina. Ten years ago I moved to a rural town in North Carolina as a high school student and was surprised to find that agriculture was still a way of life. My experiences with agriculture extremely limited, I was slightly disappointed that I had better views of tobacco fields as opposed to the ocean I had pictured when my parents originally mentioned North Carolina. Fast forward ten years and I am trading in my teacher summer vacation for a summer trip into the world of agricultural education.

I think back to the fall when a robotics student asked me why the FFA high school organization was coming to visit our after-school club. Oh, how I wish I could go back in time to answer that question again! I’m currently four days into my six week internship with Bayer CropScience as a Kenan Fellow. Already, the applications and connections for my fifth grade students and curriculum are numerous.

Of course, naturally I think about the units I teach on ecosystems and genetics. I reflect on the tour I took of the bee care center and the passion that Bayer has for studying and promoting bee health. I also think about seed trait research being conducted in the greenhouse I visited this morning and connect this to teaching students about traits that are both learned and inherited. I see words on posters such as viscosity and density, science vocabulary that relates to the physical science component of fifth grade curriculum.

What about the other 21^st century skills I can take back to my students? Whether interviewing or receiving a tour from someone, I have asked what his/her goals are for the position. Surprisingly, every person has a people-related answer to my question. For example, a scientist mentioned keeping his team motivated when trials are unsuccessful. A fifth grader would expect the scientist’s goal to be success in research such as finding a successful trait modification. This demonstrates that no matter how tech-savvy our world is communication and relationship skills will always be highly valued, a take away from the week also echoed by the CEO I met Monday morning. In our world of instant gratification I wonder how my students would respond to working in a job in which they have to wait weeks, months, or even years to see results (whether positive or negative) from their work today. My kids could barely handle waiting a few days to receive their EOG scores last week. The product cycle can take 10-15 years from start to finish in agricultural science.

If I could go back and answer that robotics student again, I would challenge him to brainstorm ways that technology could help farmers. Afterwards, I would validate the student’s work and spend time explaining that farming is an applied life science that uses technology, including robotics, at every stage. Students have this perception of farming as being cows and plows; separate from the technology that they use every day. From what I’ve learned in four days, nothing could be further from the truth. Will I have a different answer in four weeks? I’m not sure, but I do know that I look forward to continuing to think about how my experiences at Bayer CropScience can positively impact classroom learning.