In my experience, when the learning process I am engaged in has been successfully interactive; I have learned something. When I am a passive observer, I may retain some things, but generally I don’t learn nearly as much as when it’s interactive.

My experiences with interactive learning environments have been when there is a lot that needs to be done and everyone in the class has a role to do it. Everyone is contributing and learning from one another. One memory I have in an interactive learning environment was in a biology class we were given a work sheet and we had to find all the answers to the questions from a book we were given and we were in a group of 3 in the class. This happened often and then we would go over it and had to mark our worksheet and correct the answers and hand it in and everybody would get full marks. I remember being very engaged, also empowered and happy because of getting full marks. I also learned a lot, because I had to do the work without the fear or pressure of doing it right, because I knew the teacher would go over it and tell us the right answer.

I thoroughly enjoyed learning in that way. A negative experience where I did not learn or enjoy the leaning process was when a teacher was telling us what to do every step of the way, without really guiding other than directing. Then, if we did anything that wasn’t in the teachers standard w e would lose marks, even if had nothing to do with the concept being learned. For example, if we didn’t double space and use a particular font. This disengaged me so much because I really did not do well with things that seemed like arbitrary instructions based on personal preferences of a teacher. When the majority of a learning process is directing students to follow instructions, rather than understand and learn together, I have been very discouraged and not learned.