Sabrina Stephenson was chosen as one of 15 agriscience educators in the nation to become a National Agriscience Teacher Ambassador.
Stephenson said she applied for the ambassadorship in February, but didn’t think she would be accepted. “I knew about the program because MacKenzie (Wright, her fellow agriculture teacher) had previously done it. I thought there was no way I’m going to get this,” she said from her teaching post at Carroll County High School.
“I feel like I was at a plateau in teaching, but felt I needed a boost,” Stephenson said. “I’m very excited to incorporate a lot of what I learned.”
The ambassador academy selection process is pretty rigorous, she said, including writing paragraph responses on why she wanted to be part of the program and how it would benefit her as an educator. The entire program is agriculture science-based, which is right up her alley as she says “animal science is my thing.”
Carroll County Schools Superintendent Casey Jaynes congratulated Stephenson on her selection for a nationally recognized program. “She is certainly an example of what it takes for our school system to be a #cctop10 school district in the commonwealth,” he added.
During the academy, she attended workshops for roughly 12 hours a day, including more than 20 different labs. “We put our student hats on for the week,” she said. The ambassador academy was one week in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
As an ambassador she will present her teaching plan on cross-breeding cows to the National FFA Convention at Indianapolis in November and also at the NAAE Convention in Phoenix, Arizona in December. She will teach it to her students first and utilize their feedback to prepare for the national presentations.
One key component she learned is called Kaizen. In a nutshell, it means take one step at a time. It’s a Japanese term defined as seemingly insignificant never-ending improvement.
“To me, that was an eye-opening way of seeing things,” she said, noting educators often try to do it all at once. Instead, she will approach new inquiry-based learning one class at a time and even one lesson at a time.
Stephenson said her goal is to use the new skills and approaches to empower her students to ask more questions and experience “more exploration and less explanation.”