A Comparison of Inservice Needs of Middle and High School Agriculture Teachers

Agriculture is a constantly changing field. As such, many believe that agricultural education must also change if it is to remain a vital part of American education. As agricultural education shifts from its traditional focus on production agriculture to its new focus on consumption agriculture, teachers of agriculture may need to re-tool more frequently than has been done in the past. However, are all agriculture teachers offered the inservice training they need most? Therefore, to ascertain this, the objective of this study was to identify and compare inservice needs of middle school and high school agriculture teachers related to 1) FFA and SAE Supervision, 2) Instruction and Curriculum, 3) Technical Agriculture, 4) Program Planning and Management, and 5) Teacher Professional Development. This study yielded several interesting conclusions. The first is that the inservice needs of middle school teachers are similar in the categories of FFA and SAE supervision, Program Planning and Management, and Teacher Professional Development. However, their needs are considerably different in the categories of Technical Agriculture and Instruction & Curriculum. When examining specific inservice training items, the greatest inservice training need by both middle school and high school agriculture teachers is writing grant proposals for external funding. In contrast, the lowest needed inservice training items for both middle school and high school teachers were in the agricultural mechanics area