How do you describe your learning process?

We may not have realized it at first, but after doing all these labs, all of us used “thinking” as a way to describe our learning progress. We think all the time! We’re thinking right now. Thinking is easy, but focusing our thoughts to formulate the deliverables in all these labs requires much more. That’s where these other adjectives come in: Deciding, Organizing, Connecting, and Talking.

Talking is a way to express out thoughts. Some of us speak our minds and others keep their thoughts to themselves. The more extroverted students in the lab will speak, while more introverted students confirm or contradict their statements in their minds. Each kind of person nevertheless contributes since we all have to tweets to express our thoughts. In the end, talking is a form of verbal thought. Talking helps the entire group come to a consensus, especially in decision making.

After all the talking, we must make some decisions. In the decision making process, after all the talking has taken place, it is usually one student that decides verbally for the entire group, but verbal and expressional approval is almost always made. For example in this lab, two people decided how the structure was going to be made, but towards the end they were stuck. The rest of the group decided together that the protein should be much bigger than the two students originally thought. Decision making is still collaborative, but it wasn’t until one student in the lab made the protein with the zometools that we agreed with her.

For the first aspect of this lab it was especially important for us to organize who does what. Since there was a time limit for this lab period, it was incredibly important for us to divvy up our positions in order to maximize effectiveness. We use organizational skills every single day, from deciding how to balance our schedules to simply selecting our diet at the dining hall. While participating in lab, it is especially important that we maintain an organized group to ensure that we can complete each aspect of the lab to maximize our grades.

Connecting is a way in which we apply what we are learning in lecture to the hands-on activities of lab. Whether it was physically connecting the zometools together to create the selectively permeable membrane, or mentally drawing upon information from lecture to connect how to build the structure for images on the powerpoint in lecture. We establish connections in our daily lives outside of the classroom as well. From connecting our schedules to ensure that we get to the bus stop or T stop on time; to connecting on a mental, or emotional level with peers and friends. We as humans embrace connectivity in the classroom as well as in our daily lives.