The Development of School-Based Agricultural Educators' Identity Regarding Designing and Planning Lessons

<p dir="ltr">Agricultural education as a discipline has faced issues of teacher attrition (Blackburn et al., 2017; Smith et al., 2024), which is perpetuated by several complex personal, social, and environmental factors that influence agricultural educators' choice to remain in the profession (Boone & Boone, 2007, 2009; Disberger et al., 2022; Myers et al., 2005; Sorensen et al., 2016; Stair et al., 2012; Traini et al., 2020). Agricultural education researchers have advocated for teacher preparation programs to be adapted to better support aspiring and current agricultural educators (Boone & Boone, 2007, 2009; Disberger et al., 2022; Knobloch & Smith, 2024; Myers et al., 2005; Roberts et al., 2009; Stair, 2012; Thornton et al., 2020). The purpose of this study is to describe the experiences of agricultural educators in the United States as they develop expertise in designing, adapting, and assessing curriculum. Eight U.S. traditionally certified agricultural educators participated in the study to share their perceptions of the quality and impact of their experiences as K-12 students, preservice teachers, and early-career teachers. A deductive, interpretive, phenomenological analysis (IPA) approach was used to analyze the responses of eight participants, who followed the reflexive sociocultural model of adaptive teacher learning (Smith et al., 2022). This model aimed to understand how individuals' experiences impacted the development of their teacher identity and ability to plan and design lesson plans. Three themes were identified through cross-case analysis of the eight agricultural educators: (1) they draw on multiple sources of information to plan lessons and develop their tacit and pedagogical knowledge, (2) they utilize reflection as a tool for learning, and (3) they shape their instructional style as they begin teaching and learning. These three themes informed the development of a model of agricultural educator learning, which emphasizes three reflective stages in teacher development: (1) lesson planning, (2) teaching and feedback cycles, and (3) post-reflection. This research and model demonstrate how teachers develop and learn as beginning teachers, and emphasize the need to encourage moments of critical reflection within teacher preparation programs and to support beginning agricultural educators as they transition from students to novice practitioners. Future research in this field should design its studies to purposefully incorporate reflection and teacher metacognition as central to the research, aiming to better describe the complex, multistage cycle of agricultural educator reflection. This study has several limitations, including a small, purposefully selected sample of eight agricultural educators, reliance on subjective participant responses, and the use of a pre-existing framework that shaped the findings. As such, the results are not transferable to other populations and do not represent all agricultural education teacher preparation.</p>