Doing the Inquiry Project Assignment was interesting and fun. I have never really had to document a learning process before for myself so this was definitely a first for me in many ways.
Planning a strategy for learning something is not anything that I would normally consider doing if I wanted to learn something new. This did however give me more of a perspective about how a student in my class may feel overwhelmed sometimes when presented with new material. Gaining an understanding of this will help me pass on what I learned doing the assignment to my students by teaching in a scafolded approach. This I think will help students not only get a feel for the logical sequence of events that we use but may help in letting the student self analyse where their own personal weaknesses reside. This being said, it can allow both student and instructor to focus on weak areas of learning development and employ alternate strategies to help them reach their goals.
Realising the similarities between the topic I chose for my assignment (learning golf) and the subject that I teach was also a nice surprise. Breaking down the learning steps for myself with this project is a strategy that I use with all my students.
I also re-affirmed a belief I have always had that self teaching may not always bring about the best results when learning something. I think it is important as instructors to take on the role of guide and facilitator but always keep a close eye on the learning, or lack of learning that is taking place so we can be swift to spot if students get frustrated and demoralized as happened to myself during my assignment.
A great side note to embracing any new pursuit that will need to have a learning component to it is additional unexpected things that can be learned along the way. A personal example of this are all the things I had to learn about the software mediums that we needed to employ to complete our assignments eg. digital cameras, slide shows and the like.
In conclusion, I learned alot from the learning process.
weldini 
Good point, Ed. As instructors, it is so easy to forget that we are performing what is ultimately an extremely complex task with what the students see as relative ease. It is quite interesting to learn a new skill from an expert and realize there are so many questions leading up to performing a task that are so easy to forget about as a professional who has been in practice for years. Hopefully this experience helps you to empathize with your students and break things down for them a little more in the future. Don’t let them set themselves on fire (literally), only intellectually. ha!
LikeLike