"My MEL Experiences"

Student Teacher Relationship- My chemistry teacher in high school was very helpful and she set a very comfortable vibe in the classroom. She did not put up a barrier where students felt as if they couldn't ask her questions, but rather she was able to understand that many of us were new to chemistry and was very efficient and helpful in explaining directions for labs, was there to explain concepts along the way if we didn't understand why things were happening as they were.

Helping Students Succeed- Going into my junior year of high school I was going to take Honors English, but I was reluctant and nervous that I was not going to pass the exam over the summer reading books. This test had a reputation of being very difficult because its purpose was to "weed out students" because we had too many in our class. I explained my concerns to my teacher the first week of school, and he explained to me that the test was over all the required reading and his discussion with me not intimidating at all and even though at that point the didn't know that much about me, he was very encouraging and was not worried that I would have difficulty with the test. This really helped ease my mind, because a teacher who has never had me in his classroom before already believed I was capable of so much and that definitely helped me and pushed me to work even harder in his class than I normally would have.

Hands on- My freshman year of high school I was assigned to take on the leadership role of our class project in World History class. My task quickly began to take on many forms and I had to incorporate the whole class and motivate them to work on one project as a group, even when they may have some "down time" when they may have completed their assigned task. This was my first real experience of learning how to incorporate various learning styles and various students’ interest. The point of the project was to make something illustrating a point in history. We picked war scenes and fighting scenes, but the purpose of the project was not necessarily to have a completed product by the end (because no class had ever achieved that in the history of this teacher's career) but rather to work together and figure out the most effective way to get as much done as possible. I split the students up into interests, for instance: those students who liked the "hands on, activity" learning style were the ones that were the warriors and fighters in our movies, while I had others who liked the planning portion better and they helped me coordinate and direct the movie along with make the script for the project, we had people video record it, edit it, etc. This was my first "hands on" experience working with working with students my own age and making a movie and coordinating all of the behind the scenes work, and surprisingly we were the first class ever to finish our movie just seconds before it was due!

Autonomy-In middle school we had book groups, where the teacher split us up into groups depending on how fast of a reader we were. My partner and I were not the quickest readers in the class, but this assignment gave us flexibility in terms of our reading. The teacher said we weren't allowed to assign any less than 20 pages for every two days but that was our only limitation; we were able to assign up to however many pages we wanted to or complete the whole book, and then we were supposed to write in our journal and exchange journals and read the responses of the other group members. This was a very effective approach, because first off we were able to pick the books that we wanted to read so it kept me more interested in my reading, and it motivated me to want to read faster to see what was up ahead. Also, watching the other students reading multiple books within a few weeks and having detailed conversations gave me more encouragement to continue reading at a faster pace, not to be included with them, but because it was giving me more opportunities to discuss the literature. The flexibility was what made this assignment one of my favorite assignments by this particular teacher.

Connections- In biology, I remember we had to do a project explaining the process and the functions of different parts of the cells, (the mitochondria, the cell, etc.) I remember first being very intimidated by this project, but we had to connect each element to some sort of real life job and explain what each thing would be in that job. I remember using my mom's Insurance company (State Farm) as my "real life job" because then each of the parts functions became clearer to me and I was able to understand what each parts purpose was. This approach was much more effective than just trying to read and memorize the definitions from the textbook and I remember that I retained that information a lot longer then normal.