I have had a lot of really good learning experiences, as a student and a teacher. For me, what makes a learning experience positive is accessibility, joint engagement, and collaboration.
Since I am still completing my undergraduate degree, I have more experience as a student during learning experiences. I really, enjoy when teachers provide a structured, but flexible way of being evaluated. Therefore, instead of just being evaluated using exams, also having the opportunity to show my knowledge via papers, or presentations. Unfortunately, this flexibility of assessment is less commonly found in university courses. However, in the second year of my psychology degree, I took a class (PSYC 231) that offered a large variety of ways to be evaluated. We had the opportunity to take 4 exams (of which 3 counted towards our final grade), write a paper, and do a group project.
I have also had the opportunity to create my own learning design activity in an Earth and Ocean Science course (EOS120) last semester, where I worked with a partner to create a mock lesson plan, teaching students about the layers of the Earth
In my current job, I work as a behaviour interventionist in a one-on-one setting. This means the learning experiences I create, may look slightly different to others, found in a larger group setting. I typically work on teaching life skills to students. A learning design the student and I collaborated on together, was for an activity where we worked on following a recipe. Attached to this blog post is a very simple example of what the required tasks were with this recipe-following activity.
Overall, the student and I were able to collaborate, and work together to create an engaging and accessible activity that fit their needs and abilities!
