College Learning Experience
In my education, my most powerful learning moments have been experiential. In college, I was able to study abroad in Bolivia. One component of our program was to spend the last thirty days of the program studying any topic we wanted to anywhere in the country. I studied how international quinoa exportation was affecting rural communities that had traditionally grown this crop for local consumption. In order to prepare for this, I spent five months in a research course where I learned how to do fieldwork from our teacher who was a documentary filmmaker. He taught us how to ask research questions and interview people. We learned this through a lot of modeling and practicing these skills with our peers and guest speakers. As part of this program, prior to my own research, we would travel around the country meeting and speaking with a variety of people in different fields (politics, international development, the arts, etc.) to practice our Spanish and fieldwork skills. I was then able to apply my research skills to my own research project and write my thesis at the end of my program. It was an incredible experience and one of the most valuable experiences in my education.
Elementary Learning Experience
I loved elementary school. What I remember loving the most was the options that I had to study about different topics that I was able to become an expert on. One memory that I have was in 4th grade when we were learning about the ocean. Each student in our class got to pick a creature that lives in the ocean to do research on. I remember, I was fascinated by the abyss. I found it be other-worldly and eerie. As I was flipping through books that our teacher brought from the library to our classroom, I saw a picture of the anglerfish. I was struck by how odd it looked and knew that this was the creature that I wanted to research. I remember spending the next few days during our writing and science blocks reading all about the anglerfish: how their size could vary from less than a foot to three feet, the differences between male and female fish, how they can swallow prey twice their size, and how females have a luminous rod above their heads. I was engrossed in how utterly strange these animals were. I remember writing a report all about them, but what I remember most was that my teacher had us turn our creature into a visual representation using tissue paper, foil, felt, foam, and other materials. She then put all of our creatures on a giant piece of blue paper on the wall of the classroom. I remember proudly looking at my weird anglerfish while daydreaming during the day and imagining what their lives were like deep in the abyss. Reflecting on this experience, I think our teacher was less interested in us learning about a specific ocean animal and more interested in us learning how to research. It was one of my memories of doing in-depth research on a topic of my choice and I remember loving the autonomy and ability to dive into something that I found fascinating.
Professional Career
When the pandemic hit, I was one of the high school teachers I knew who fell in love with online learning. I have always loved content creation and being able to incorporate technology and multimedia tools more seamlessly into my lessons was an exciting challenge. I also loved the ability that I had to differentiate my lessons without the spatial limitations of a classroom. I could record videos and make them interactive with different tools. I could put students into break out rooms to instruct groups of students with diverse learning needs. A specific learning experience that I remember from my pivot to online learning was when I learned about how to make my class more personalized and self-directed when a colleague suggested the Building Modern Classrooms course to me. It was a self-paced course that explained how to set up a classroom with blended instruction, mastery based grading, and self-pacing. Through this course, I learned that my virtual class did not need to have a full class lesson every day. Instead, I switched to creating content that was self-paced so students could work on learning without me directly instructing every day. This freed up my time to run small groups and provide meaningful feedback to students as they worked on their projects. I also learned how to use different video creation tools and effectively set up my Google classroom. It supported me in my shift to virtual instruction and I have been working as a virtual instructor for three years now.