Thursday, December 16, 2010

Using the GAME Plan Process with Students

The GAME plan is a versatile tool that can be used in many different applications. It's a great lesson planning tool for teachers as well as a learning tool or even a goal attainment tool that anyone can use. It could be used by someone trying to lose weight or getting out of debt or any project or goal that someone finds overwhelming. The GAME plan helps to keep you focused and organized. Students could even create their own GAME plan for studying for an exam. Since the best teaching is done by example, one thing I could do is decide on a technology that would benefit my classes the most and then, with the help of my students, devise a GAME plan for myself on how I will learn to use the technology and use it in the class. The students could help me monitor my progress and evaluate the end results. At the same time, perhaps each student could make up a GAME plan for something they want to accomplish themselves. It wouldn't have to be math related. They'll probably more receptive to the idea if it's not math related.

2 comments:

  1. I like your idea of having the students monitor and assess you and your GAME plan. This would show them what they need to do themselves with their own plans and at the same time it is making you more accountable. I would certainly be more conscientious of what I was doing if I knew my students were going to critique me. Your students will love doing that! Having high schools take the independence with their own GAME plans is especially important. They are much closer to independence than elementary or middle school students so your students could take it one step further and as part of their evaluation have them tell what they could have done better and how their choices, good or bad, would have affected them at a job or in college.

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  2. Involving the students in monitoring and assessing your progress is a good idea to help them learn about the GAME plan process. A way I thought of for having my students use the GAME plan is in making GAME plans for learning their content standards. My district is currently pushing us to get the students involved more in their own learning by communicating their "learning targets" (content standards) with them so that they know what they are supposed to be learning. I was still finding that simply telling the students what their learning targets were was not enough. Even though the learning targets were being written, as the board office put it, "plain English", I was finding that my students were still looking at our high school science learning targets perplexed. They also did not know how to be self directed learners and expected me to just fill their heads with the information they needed without actually looking at the learning targets themselves. Between strategies I've learned about in this course and in the last course, if I do go back to having my own classroom again I plan on instead of just giving the students their learning targets to have them develop questions they would need to answer to meet their learning targets then create a GAME plan for learning the needed information. Even though you said you might just have your students create GAME plans for any goal they would like to obtain since they would be more interested in doing that, you could also have them focus their GAME plans on their content standards to help them become more self directed learners. This could help better prepare them for post-secondary educational experiences as well as help them meet the content standards for your class.

    Laura

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