Life Experience
Life Experience
Teaching at Career College is wonderful because most students bring their life experience to school which helps others with lack of experience. Some of my students have strong work experience that applies in my class. I take advantage of that by creating groups and name a student leader when working in projects. The student leader will help the rest of them and I just walk around to make sure they understand the material. It's amazing how useful that life experience can be if the instructor can take advantage of it.
Hi Daniel,
I commend you on using your students' life experiences as learning opportunities. So many instructors don't capitalize on this area to help integrate the students into the learning evironment and develop rapport with them.
Gary
By using student's life experiences, we can see how different students approach a subject matter. By taking advantage of these experiences, we, as a classroom, can find a way to look at a problem in a differnt manner and in this way, maybe a student that has been having trouble with a certain subject, will be able to look at it differently and resolve it.
This is an area of interest to me. I love the fact that we have such a wide range of age. Older student can give work and life experiences that the younger students have not had the chance to experience. Younger students can assist older students with new technology and new exciting ways to look at life from a different perspective. I work with many talented and experienced instructors who also can talk from a point of view that neither type of student has had experience.
Our curriculum starts with new students being put in to classes where they have to work together. During the term they experience both being a leader and a follower. I have seen such changes from this. with the many types of students we have, its nice to take different approaches. You never know when the light bulb will come on or who can say a statment that someone can learn from.
My personal experiences really help make the teaching more interesting.
Hi Talin,
What methods do you use to relate your personal experiences to your classes so your teaching is more interesting?
Gary
Life experience bring a new faset to the class. The more life experience brought to the class by the Instructor or the student the better.
Hi Richard,
What guides do you use to select the appropriate life experiences that you bring to the class? How do you make sure that they match what you are discussing at that point in the course?
Gary
Also happen same in my classroom. Make their days exciting and want to be experiment working right-away. They try to took as much information as they can so their career can be success after finish class. We also offer field trip for their working related.
Hi Daniel,
i agree with the use of student life experiences as a way to build depth in the course. Others with less experience can live through these moments. This allows them to transfer the information to their own application when similar situations arrise in the work place.
Life experiences is why I enjoy teaching older students; they tend to challenge me personally. I've learned a lot from them as well.
Hi Troy,
You sound like me in liking to work with older students. They do bring a wide variety of experiences and opinions into the classroom. I like you learn much from them each time I have them share.
Thanks for sharing this positive benefit from having career mature students in the classroom.
Gary
With personal experience students are more involved.
I have found my classroom to be a great mix of experienced 'non-traditional' and inexperienced younger students. The learning styles and motivations of each group compliment the other when I bring not only my life experience but that of other students, not only giving more credibilty to the subject manner but breaking away from 'the text says...'.
Hi James,
Excellent way of expressing how you bring all the various experiences of your students together to create a learning community that is supportive of everyone and their learning needs.
Gary
