Agriculture Workforce Training for Collaborative Leadership (AWT4CL)

 by Jama S. Coartney and Donna Westfall-Rudd --  Networking is one of those buzzwords that frequently gets tossed around; however, it is not always easy to figure out how to go about building professional relationships—and where to start.  In a research study conducted by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities ( APLU ), students ranked  building professional relationships as the number one skill they were not prepared for as they entered the workplace ( Crawford & Fink , 2020).  In the same study conducted by APLU about employability skills in agriculture & natural resources—which surveyed over 11,000 students, faculty, alumni, and employers—alumni also ranked building professional development as one of the top two skills that students are not prepared for as they enter the workforce.  Students identified cross-generational, mentor, and team relationships as some of the focal points they would like to develop. Building pr...

 by Jama S. Coartney --  Most people enjoy games. From an early age, whether it’s peek-a-boo or hide-n-seek, games are one of the fun ways in which we learn and engage with each other.  Within education, Bellotti and colleagues describe gamification as the “introduction of game elements in the design of learning processes.”  In an earlier post, Dr. Ben Casteel described the benefits of creating fun and engaging learning through the use of gamification. He has experimented with gamification, including the use of digital badges to mark learning achievements. You can read more about his work here .  Digital learning badges are an increasingly popular means of adding game-based learning to curricula to help motivate and engage students.  These badges are an educational strategy to award achievements and skill-development. Digital learning badges are versatile tools that can be applied across a multitude of settings and purposes.  For example, Virgin...

by Heather Butler --  I teach a 4-credit Dendrology course at Virginia Western Community College , which includes a 3-credit lecture and 1-credit lab. The lecture takes place in a traditional college classroom and covers tree physiology and forest ecology. The lab, however, is field-based and entails weekly field trips to forested areas where students learn to identify the common and Latin names of 100+ trees and shrubs native to the central Appalachia. I based the class on  Virginia Tech’s field Dendrology lab  developed by Dr. John Seiler. He still teaches at VT and was my instructor when I studied forestry. Each week, students learn to identify and properly name 8-10 new species, which are then added to a growing list of potential items on lab quizzes. Weekly quizzes are given at the beginning of each field lab, and the species add up quickly. If students aren’t engaged and practicing from the beginning, they can easily get overwhelmed, making it difficult to catch u...

 By Tom Scales --  The Advisory Group for Southside Virginia Community College’s Agribusiness and Business programs meet every year. It is made up of business and industry leaders throughout SVCC’s 11 county service area. Every year people tell us that the need for the “soft skills” is often greater than their need for job skills when hiring people. A dairy farmer can teach people about cattle fairly easily because cattle are their livelihood. But it’s a different ballgame for that farmer to teach people about time management, politeness, neatness, communication, work ethic, motivation, responsibility, etc. Often, they will tell us, “we hire for attitude and then train for skills.”  Thus, they ask us to prepare our graduates for better attitude, willingness, and communication. For some, they see soft skills as more important than the actual job-related ones. (The milking machine they’d use on the job is probably different from the one I’d teach them on, so the farmer wo...

By Jama S. Coartney and Eric K. Kaufman --  The Agriculture Workforce Training for Collaborative Leadership  cohort met January 13, 2023, to check in and discuss topics of mutual interest, including PDSA projects, opportunities to share key insights with a broader audience, and the potential of incorporating digital badges into the learning management system. During the summer of 2022, each member of the cohort drafted a PDSA proposal to focus on an aspect of their teaching they would like to improve and test.  The January 2023 meeting focused on updates on this work.   The cohort faculty used  IdeaBoardz  to share news on pilot projects, gain feedback and insight from others, and explore ideas for future improvements.This video summarizes a discussion around the challenges faculty face with balancing the amount of class time to both engage with students and cover content.  The project blog  contains some updates from va...

by Dr. Mallory White --  I teach an introductory animal science course with mostly first-year students at Virginia Western Community College (VWCC), and some students have never given a formal individual presentation. In previous years, students would fail to do a presentation because it was too intimidating. Retention rates for these students dropped, and some did not return the next semester. To increase student success rates for final presentation projects, I implemented two strategies: social interaction and student ownership. First, social interactions are an important strategy to promote success in community college students.  Many develop support networks that can span their entire college career ( Karp, 2016 ). Rather than assigning individual presentations, students worked in groups of 3 to 4. To help address pitfalls related to group presentations, such as unequal contribution and social loafing , up to 20% of their grade was based on peer evaluation, which motiva...

 By Dr. Ben Casteel --  “Do It Well.  Make It Fun.” were the words etched into our January in-service schedule at Virginia Highlands Community College where I teach Horticulture & Agriculture courses.  Local author Ron Culberson was sharing his philosophy (and book title) on how to achieve excellence in the workplace through entertaining motivational mechanisms.  I couldn’t help but to ponder how I might make some of the more banal moments in my classroom more enjoyable for students.  Later that evening, while having a throwback family dinner in front of the television set, the epiphany occurred.  We would often play along with Jeopardy over dinner—and in that very moment—I realized this could be a way I could make exam review time more fun and engaging for my students. That Spring, I trialed using a Powerpoint template of the Jeopardy game show as our midterm and final exam review.  It was a smashing success for the outgoing extroverted s...

By Dr. Heather Lindberg --  Internships are a great opportunity for students to bridge the gap between classrooms—which emphasize theory with minimal practice and application—and industry, which focuses on applying theory and solving problems in real time with real consequences. Internships can help to address this gap. Research indicates that internships can help to ease this transition for students—from the classroom to the workforce—by providing dedicated mentorship, training, and experience within the industry setting (Veenstra, 2014) . Roanoke Valley, VA and surrounding areas are encouraging innovation related to agriculture, life sciences, and the biotechnology industry. Programs, such as Regional Acceleration and Mentoring Program (RAMP) , a regional business accelerator, help to support STEM-related startup companies.  Some of these startups will turn into companies, increasing employment opportunities in the region.  With these developments, there will be more o...

by Adam O'Neal, MBA --  Durable skills are in high demand by employers, but teaching these skills to students in an academic environment can prove challenging. Teaching classes focused primarily on durable skills can lead to students compartmentalizing the content into the context of a leadership class, for example, and failing to transfer the skills to practical applications in their field. In classes focused on content, group projects present opportunities to teach skills like teamwork, leadership, critical thinking and problem-solving. Executing this effectively in a way that explicitly conveys the skills being learned—without distracting from the content—can be difficult. I discussed concepts of durable skills—teamwork, communication, leadership, problem-solving and critical thinking—but I had no effective way to assess the process of executing the project. One possible solution is to create a structured instrument that addresses the durable skills being featured. Students...

by Jama S. Coartney and Eric K. Kaufman --  The Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) Model for Continuous Improvement  has been around in one form or another since the 1930s. In the early days, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, an educator and engineer, called it either the  Shewhart's cycle or a cycle for learning and improvement . Have you ever heard of PDCA or Plan Do Check Act? In the 1950s, the business world derived PDCA from Deming's lectures and work. In fact, Moen and Norman (2009) note that PDSA was the basis for the Total Quality Management (TQM) framework, still used in business today. Deming, however, preferred that it be called the PDSA Model for Improvement; and so, people in the know tend to use the term PDSA.   Why use a PDSA approach in education? Today’s culture calls for data-driven disciplined inquiry; we see examples of this through the introduction of new terms, such as data analytics. As noted by the Deming institute, PDSA can provide a useful tool in...