FLC Reflection

To be perfectly honest, facilitating for Fall Leadership Conference (FLC) was a challenge for me for several reasons and definitely stretched me. 
First, having no FFA experience, except what I have read about and heard from others, adds its challenges because I only have a superficial understanding of the FFA component of Agriculture education; however, I am excited to learn more about this part of the 3 circle model, and I am sure that attending National Convention and student teaching will give me a much better understanding of FFA. 
Second, facilitating the "catch all" group presented some real challenges because we had to design the workshop in such a way as to include everyone and yet try to make it beneficial for all of the officers in attendance on an individual basis. Another challenge that we faced with was that we got an "extra" 8 students added to our group... We had chaplains, historians, student advisers, a parliamentarian, and a few other "random" officers who didn't seem to be sure of their position or role. 

My focus was primarily working with the chaplains, and we discussed and reviewed several invocations/prayers as a group. The  students then each compiled an invocation that they could use in their own chapter. Furthermore, I added a scenario of losing a community member that was an important contributor/supporter of their FFA chapter, and initiated a conversation on ways that they as the chapter chaplain could initiate recognition from their chapter to the family to extend their sympathy and express thanks for their support. Each of the chaplains were given a template for writing a sympathy card, and then they created their own scenario and wrote a sympathy card for practice. It would have been neat to have a few of them share what they wrote, but it never crossed my mind at the time... guess that is what reflection is for... to make notes of needed improvement for the future.
Lastly, I felt that overall the workshop went well, the campfire theme was a great way to capture there interest and to encourage participations, and I felt that being able to dim the lights really added to the overall effect (Teach Like a Pirate application!). While there were a few "issues", none of them got out of hand... there were several from one chapter who came close to being "asked" to be separated because they were distracting each other (towards the last portion of the workshop), another student wanted to continually contribute, and several students seemed really shy and it was difficult to get them to share and contribute to the conversations; however, it was very beneficial to me to observe these situations, and now I have some time to process and think about how I would handle them if they were in my class...  I also feel that having the catch all group gave me a little more preparation to work with a more diverse group of students in the future.