Share a story about your best learning experience. Why did you enjoy it?

For me, my best learning experience was ironically, in a case where I was learning how to teach. For three years I was a teacher’s assistant in a second-grade classroom, where I was learning every day how to interact, teach, and engage with young children. This was a steep learning curve for me, because even though I loved kids; I had never been around them for an extended period of time, and especially in a context where I was supposed to be more of an authority figure. This combination could have easily been disastrous if I had had a subpar mentor. Luckily though, this was not the case for me. What made this experience such a positive one was that I had the pleasure of working with a teacher who was able to learn and adjust her approach after she got to know me and my own learning style more. 

Like it is mentioned in Motivation and Learning, knowing your target learners will increase the likelihood of increased motivation. There were many times during those years that I felt frustrated or discouraged at how things were going, but because my mentor understood who I was and how I worked best; she was able to help me work through these difficult times and mental walls. I already had an interest in teaching, as I mentioned earlier in this post I had always loved kids, but if that interest wasn’t fed into positively then it very well could’ve died out. When considering the question, “Why were you so invested in seeing it through?” It’s because I had that very firm and consistent support system that was able to help me navigate through uncertainty and lapses in motivation. I enjoyed this experience so much because it was about more than learning, but also about building bonds not only with my mentor but with the kids I was working with. Because I was so well supported, I was then in a better state to support the children too and so on and so forth. Those positives mindsets could then see into other intrapersonal relationships, and every person in that environment was then better off for it. This example of my own best learning experience is one that I hold very highly because it was able to show me the tangible positive effects of fitting a teaching approach to specific learners.