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- I am constantly setting goals for myself. Since this is the beginning of a new year, I want to talk about one of my New Year's resolutions I made. I love music and singing, so one of my goals this year is to write a song. I set this goal for myself because it is something I have always wanted to do, but have been scared and sometimes not known where to start. I have begun making a few drafts of song lyrics here and there and I feel like I am making pretty good progress.

- Another goal I have made for myself is to make all As in school. I transferred to the University of Memphis in the Fall of 2018 and have made all As every semester since I started school here. I want to continue this until I graduate because I know that if I am striving to make the best grades I can, then I am also trying to learn as much as I can.

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- I want to focus on two math examples for this characteristic of learning. The first one is an example from last semester. Last semester, I took my elementary math methods course and finally learned some meaning behind mathematics and could make connections to my own life with it. My teacher did her best to find ways that the content she was teaching connected to our every day lives and I really appreciated that.

- The next example I want to give is an older example. I have always been good at math, but never been able to understand how it could connect to my life. I just learned the facts and formulas and that was it. I think it is so much better when students can find ways to relate to what they are learning. I felt like my past teachers didn't necessarily always do a great job with that.

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- I am constantly involved with the cooperative characteristic of learning in pretty much all aspects of my life. All of my on-campus classes this semester involve group work. I have found that sharing your thoughts and ideas with your peers really gets your creative juices flowing. Sometimes teachers are against group work because they believe students will cheat and everyone won't participate, but I also believe and have seen that it can open so many doors and create new ideas. I think cooperative learning is one of the best ways to learn. It has always been a positive experience for me.

- Another place where I experience cooperative learning is through my Bible study. We are given the opportunity to share and discuss what we are reading and learning about. I can spend time reading and analyzing my Bible alone, which I do, but also communicating with others only opens doors to gathering more information, which is never a bad thing. We can always be learning new things and we do every day. I have seen great results from cooperative learning in my past in many different places.

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- I have witnessed a lot of constructive learning recently and they have all been positive. Here is one: Each week on Tuesday nights, I go to a Bible study with the young adults and college students from my church. We are currently studying the book of Mark. Each week, the night flows a bit differently. After we read the passage for this week, we were given a small sheet of paper with a few questions on it and were asked to take some time alone to answer them and really reflect on what the passage was saying. This caused me to spend time thinking deeply and critically about what the passage meant.

- Because of my background in musical theatre, I read a lot of scripts. As an actress, I can't just read the words on the page and say them as if they have no meaning. I have to dig deeper and look beyond the words on the page and figure out what is really being said. This causes me to reflect and also forces my thinking to be a lot more complex.

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- Throughout my life, I have been involved in a lot of musical theatre. I took both dance and singing lessons when I was younger, but I want to focus on the dancing aspect and how active learning was used. I haven't taken dance lessons in over 10 years, but I have learned how to be a better dancer recently by observing choreographers and trying different moves out and seeing if they work or not. For example, I would not consider myself to be a professionally trained dancer, but because I have had wonderful choreographers who made it easy to observe and copy what I saw them doing has taught me a lot about dancing.

- An example of where I have seen active learning done poorly was actually this week. My friends and I were about to play a game and one of my friends was showing us how to play and we were all observing her. She ended up explaining some of the rules incorrectly, so once we all started to play, we got confused and didn't know what to do.