Getting to the Game Plan

Through every course I have taken the constant I have had reiterated to me is that we need to produce self sufficient learners. Students for life that can think critically and attack problems by being able to adapt and use the tools they have to accomplish a solution. It doesn’t matter which content that may be in, what is important is that critical thinkers are produced.

My plan going ahead is to have my students look at the NET-S and have a conversation about them. A couple of years ago I started putting our district standards and what we had done for the year on a whiteboard that I didn’t use because I had to many of them and thought it might as well have something on it. What I started realizing is that it drew students interest. I would get questions like “what is that?” or “What does that mean?” which led to a discussion of what I was expected to give to them and they were expected to learn as mandated by our district. In my opinion, ever since then, my students have had a clearer sense of what we are doing in class and what they need to do to get better at certain things. Having an entire list of what we have covered for the year also gives them a sense of ownership and pride. I no longer get students who say “I don’t have a clue what we learned this year” because it is visible to them every day and if they in fact didn’t learn it, they know it isn’t because they didn’t know where the class was going, or what we were trying to do as a class.

I use this long aside simply to demonstrate what I want to start doing with the NET-S throughout the year. Once students have a direction in technology, they will answer the how and why to get there. I am excited for the upcoming year to test it out.