Shalie Logan, alum of the Department of Agricultural Communication, Education, and Leadership was one of a select group of agriculture teachers nationwide who received the 2015 Teachers Turn the Key professional development scholarship. Logan is the agricultural educator at Ohio Hi-Point Career Center at Kenton High School in Kenton, Ohio.
The Teachers Turn the Key scholarship brings together agricultural educators with four or fewer years of experience and immerses them in three days of professional development that addresses issues specific to the early years of teaching agriculture. Participants also have the opportunity to become involved in NAAE leadership and network with other NAAE convention attendees. TTTK awardees come away from the experience with a long-lasting peer cohort and tools that will help them have successful careers as agricultural educators.
Logan believes in helping each student become self-motivated and responsible, and uses individual and group research projects to help teach students to manage their time and priorities. Students do peer and self-evaluations to keep themselves on track and help guide their projects. In addition to group projects, students present their own individual research topics once a week to foster communication and to develop leadership skills.
“Self-motivation can and will lead to career success and ultimately that will feed back into making the community a better place to call home. Agriculture is a vehicle for students to find their strengths and weaknesses which can only be discovered through the process of learning and doing,” said Logan.
In addition to attending professional development, each of the TTTK scholarship recipients was also recognized at a general session during the NAAE convention. RAM Trucks sponsors the TTTK program as a special project of the National FFA Foundation.
Logan is an alum of the agricultural and extension educator major at Ohio State (now known as agriscience education). This major prepares its students to acquire a license to teach agricultural science in secondary high schools in Ohio and across the country, with extensive training in agricultural science, educational phychology, instructional methods and youth development.