Prompt: Share a story about your best learning experience (could be a formal course or something more personal). Why did you enjoy it?

I’d say that my best learning experience had to have been in a high-school Biology and Chemistry preparatory course that aimed to give us students background knowledge that would be helpful in our post-secondary education in the same subjects. Reflecting back on my time in that course I can say that it definitely served its purpose as in my first-year biology and chemistry labs I was able to recognize a lot of the information and skills that were presented to us as I already had some prior experience with either the terminology used or the materials/equipment that were used in the lab that day. The preparatory course also offered us the freedom to choose what subjects we wanted to learn more about in a more self-directed manner away from following a pre-determined curriculum. I found this method of instruction to be more engaging as we would have regular classroom discussions where we would present on our chosen topic and field questions from our classmates and teacher to update them on our research. Personally, I had chosen to dive into the subject of mycology (study of mushrooms) and the end result of my time in the course culminated in a final project of sorts where I grew and harvested my own Shiitake mushrooms along with some other classmates as we formed a learning pod of sorts in the class. There were no final test or quizzes to check on our progress instead we followed a more formative assessment style with our teacher regularly checking in on our progress with our more self-directed projects and following up individually to gauge our understanding of concepts covered in class. I enjoyed the more informal grading process in this course as it had less to do with grading our performance and more to do with preparing us for post-secondary study as evident in the name of the course.