While going through these readings, I was thinking about what I want to do as a future teacher to help my students learn best. I thought a lot about the different learning theories and about motivation. I also thought about my personal experiences with learning, and I realized that I have had many great experiences. One of the first ones I thought of, which was one of my best learning experiences, happened fairly recently. During the fall term this past year, one of my courses was field experience, and I spent every Wednesday in a classroom. I was in a kindergarten classroom, and I loved it. I mainly observed the teacher and helped around the class, but this really allowed me to learn and to see how my mentor teacher handled different situations. I spent one day a week in this classroom for about three months, and it was one of the best learning experiences I have had. The teacher explained to me that you need to get to know your students in order to figure out what way of teaching works best for them, as a class and as individual students.

Thinking back to my time in this classroom, I am realizing that different learning theories were present. A big one I noticed is behaviourism. I learned in a different course after my field experience that behaviourism is not the best way to teach, because it often involves offering rewards to the students, which is extrinsic motivation. Teachers should try to intrinsically motivate their students so that they want to learn for themselves and not because they will get a prize for doing something well. However, I also believe that the way these reinforcements were incorporated into my class worked well for the kindergarteners. A common one that was used almost every week was that when they finished doing the assigned pages in their workbook, they would get a sticker and then get to go read a book or do a puzzle. This kept them motivated and wanting to finish the work to get the reward.

This field experience course also had an inquiry project we had to do, where we chose a topic that we wanted to learn more about. I chose to learn about supporting children with autism in the classroom, because there was a student in the kindergarten class with autism. This was a very interesting topic for me to learn about because I was able to observe first-hand how the school and teachers supported these students. This also helped me stay motivated to keep learning because I was interested and curious about the topic.

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