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Let’s touch some goats…but nicely now!: Kelly Wilson


AGFs Johnson, Germany, and Jones (right to left) plan their lesson for tomorrow’s class on goat assessment.

We started our unit at the very beginning.  Our six students helped us define multiple parts of the goat’s skeletal anatomy so that we could easily communicate what to be looking at or feeling when assessing an animal.  After no more than 30 minutes in the classroom, we led our students out of the classroom and our wonderful herd of goats!   We demonstrated how to calmly approach a goat, how to perform a physical assessment, determine BCS and methods of record-keeping which would allow them to observe changes that occur over time.  They then were given goats and spent the next 2 hours doing their own assessments, some happily finding that their goats were solid 3’s while others realized that we had purposefully bought some 1’s and 2’s in order to demonstrate the differences.  Don’t worry, we told them, after three weeks with us they will all be looking like 3’s for our goodbye dinner. 

Turning learning into teaching
  After this full day of training, the AGFs began developing lesson plans that teach the competencies that they gained from our first lesson.  Working in pairs, they will put collaborate on a lesson plan and co-teach this coming Friday to a local youth group.  This will not only increase their experience teaching to students, but further their perspective on how different a lesson can come out in practice than how you initially write it.  
 
AGF Jones demonstrates how to take a goat’s temperature while keeping the animal calm with great handling skills!

And finally, some practice!
After a day of workshopping their lesson plans yesterday, today they had a practice run.  Each of our teaching groups took turns being the teachers and then the students with the other group of AGFs who are being trained in agroforestry and matters of the soil (clearly an expert talkin’ here…).  It was amazing to see how quickly they turned what they learned with us into expert knowledge!  It is so much this part, watching our trainees become the trainers, that makes us love working in agricultural education.  I could harp on this forever, but will instead leave with a string of photos showing how comfortable and professional they have become with the goats! 

AGF Michel ( red shirt) walks the goat through a visual
 assessment of this friendly neighborhood buck!


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