Reflection - GAME plan

The GAME plan that I developed at the beginning of this course has been helpful in making me realize some important factors I need to change in my teaching. When I developed my GAME plan, I set my goals on improving and increasing the amount of creativity that students will be encouraged to use in their learning. As I have stated before, I truly believe that students must learn to take existing knowledge and leverage it in a creative or ingenious way in order to be successful in the future. By providing opportunities in school for students to come up with creative solutions to problems, I can help them become comfortable in this process.

Problem based learning (PBL) is a great tool for getting students to think creatively. It has all of the necessary elements for students to be engaged in their learning. When students work on real world problems in a collaborative way and then create solutions to the problems and work to implement them, they are really practicing many critical skills that they will need in the future. I will use the PBL process in my classes next year to help my students learn all of these critical skills. This will be a major part of my action plan for the future.

As part of the PBL process, I will also work to have my students do more collaboration when working on problems. This collaboration will take the form of local collaboration within their student groups, as well as distance collaboration with peers from around the country and world. Although I have never done any online collaboration with my students before, I am more confident now that I have found some resources during this class.

Teaching students to be creative involves reducing some of the structure in the classroom. If we truly want students to come up with creative solutions to problems, then we need to let go of the traditional way of teaching where the teacher knows where the project is heading and simply guides the students to “the answer”. As a teacher, this will perhaps be the most difficult aspect of teaching creativity. The key will be providing the right amount of structure so that students understand their task, but allowing them the freedom to follow their own path towards the solutions to problems. This balance between structure and freedom may take some time to get right, but once it is found I believe it will be the key to supporting students in learning critical thinking and creativity skills.

My immediate plans to implement my GAME plan are to become more familiar with some of the social networking program we looked at during this class so I will be able to help my students with online collaboration with their peers. This will be an interesting challenge for me and I look forward to using some of the sites in the fall.

I am glad I have had the opportunity to develop and begin to implement this GAME plan during this course. With the plan in actions in place, I need to continually monitor my progress and evaluate the effectiveness of the plan with respect to improving critical thinking and creativity with my students.