My MEL Experiences

• Student/Teacher Relationship: Some of the best learning that I achieved has been with teachers that I feel that I connect with on a level outside of class. In high school it was my football coach who also taught U.S. Government and International Relations. I felt that we could talk about things outside of class and connected with him on more things than just what was happening in class and the curriculum that was being taught. His teaching style was also conducive to my learning style, he was very straightforward and had his expectations goals clearly defined at the beginning of each class.
• Interests: Another aspect of the Meaningful Engaged Learning was adapting to students’ interests. When discussing the founding of our nation and the writing of the constitution, my high school teacher from above adapted to our interests. In our class we had mostly people who were in sports and so he discussed the trades made by styling it like an ESPN story and the trade block that they have on SportsCenter. It was a really effective tool to show what each side was getting in the compromises that were made when writing the constitution.
• Avoid Rewards: The extrinsic rewards in education never help out the more applied students and only serve to hurt the unmotivated and semi-motivated students. In school I was always semi-motivated to achieve good grades and do well in school but when that work was never rewarded it had a negative impact on my attitude towards learning. It made me not want to try because I did not see the point if rewards were giving out to the same students over and over again.
• Connections: It is important to connect subject matter in the classroom to things that are happening in other classes or in current events. This gives the subject matter meaning to the students and gives them a way to apply what they have learned. In English class during high school we used to do current events while doing a unit on journalistic writing. This was helpful because it showed that we could write about subject matter that was happening in the world and helped connect the students to current events.
• Hands-On: My example of hands-on learning was an internship that I did in high school where I worked in a classroom of my peers and helped a teacher teach math. The hands-on experience helped me in two ways. It solidified my choice to study teaching and pursue it as a career. It also helped me decided that I could never teach math to high school students. Another aspect that helped was that it was a class of underachieving students and I learned a lot about confidentiality and also helping the unmotivated student.