Positive Learning Experience

Learning is like a highway, incorporating vast packets of information being delivered, often at high speeds, and building connections between different subject matters. With so much information racing down from the sensory register to the intermediate memory, it’s is easy for students to feel lost and confused about what they learn as most of the lesson is never properly recorded by their brains. As a peer instructor, I have found that in order to have effective learning there must be effective teaching, built around metacognition and student thought processes.
Effective teaching begins with the learning climate; the emotional feeling a classroom exudes on a student’s learning experience (Sousa 1995). As a teacher, my job is to create a positive …show more content…
Comparing my two study groups, attendance was very poor in the beginning, resulting in one group starting with only one student and the other starting with ten students. The first group, with only one student, later expanded to ten students but due to timing there was not much time to reevaluate expectations, while in the second larger group, since a majority of students had attended from the start their expectations were pretty clear and set. Today, comparing these groups there is a visible energy difference between the groups, with the first group often being more timid and quiet and the second group being competitive, energized, and friendly. The contrast of these two groups comes from their level of trust and confidence in their peers as one group through a positive learning climate bonded and the other while in a similar positive learning climate did not full experience the climate. As a teacher I believe that it is my responsibility to be aware of this and frequently revisit the expectations to help students further develop connections with their peers which is important in the 21st century as workplaces are extremely diverse require workers “to get along with different types of people” (Towns …show more content…
As an instructor, my goal is to prepare my students with the most pertinent details of the class and give it meaning. “Meaning has a greater impact on the probability that information will be stored,” yet, often teachers focus more on making sense of the material and lose focus on the meaning of it (Sousa 1995). In ignoring meaning, students begin to compartmentalize material and never look beyond the top layer of the material to see the why behind it, never climbing up Bloom’s Taxonomy. This leads to them picking up a basic understanding of material and never really appreciating it and applying it elsewhere. This reduces the feeling of relevance in the students and so they turn to cramming and short-term memorization rather than impactful