Blog Prompt #1

For our first blog post we were given a number of prompts to choose from and one that inspired me was “Share a story about your best learning experience. Why did you enjoy it?” I immediately thought back to my first year when I took two courses focused on teaching math to elementary school students and how much I loved those courses. Now before I continue it is important to know that I have never enjoyed learning math. I remember dreading math class in school, my struggles to understand the concepts being taught and inability to keep up with my peers left me with a hatred for the subject. So after years of hating math, the fact that I loved this class was a shock to me. I wondered what was different, certainly math as a subject had not magically changed yet I was enjoying it for the first time in my life. That is when I realized it all came down to the professor. The prof who taught this course was a bright, engaging man who made every class an entertaining experience I could look forward to. My enjoyment of the class came down to more than just who he was as a person though, he also incorporated all four categories of Keller’s ARCS Model. The four categories of the ARCS Model are Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction. First off the bat the professors infectious energy and excitement about what he was teaching meant he always had the classes attention. He also put great effort into explaining why what we were learning was important and how it would relate to our teaching careers, meaning he made sure we understood the relevance of what we were learning. When it came to confidence, he used the gradual release of responsibility to help us strengthen our skills and to gain autonomy as learners. He would introduce a new concept by showing us how to complete a problem, then having us complete a problem with him, and finally have us complete the problem on our own. Finally, he set us realistic and attenable goals that allowed us to feel satisfied in our abilities. I always felt a sense of satisfaction when I completed assignments for his class because I had learned something new and successfully show cased my skills. Through his teaching method and passion for the subject this professor was able to teach me to love a subject I thought I could never love.