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Dora (13), Italia
TIPS
for Teachers-
Making
& Managing Long-Range Plans
Advanced
Planning
Making & Managing Long-Range Plans involves considering past, present, and future plans:
- What had you planned to do, but haven't completed?
- What do you need to get done at this present time?
- What tasks are upcoming that you need to prepare for?
Dealing with a long-range project involves some hurdles you may have to overcome. One hurdle is the tendency to wrongly judge the amount of time that it will take to complete a certain amount of work. Another hurdle is inaccurately anticipating the relative difficulty of the tasks ahead. Finally, another hurdle that is an insidious obstacle--the very simple human tendency to procrastinate. These are just some of the obstacles that teachers might face as they try to implement long-range projects.
Advanced planning and regular review and updating of plans can help overcome barriers to effective implementation of online projects.
Creating
Milestones
One of the ways of dealing with such problems is the creation of milestones (Polman, 2000) that can help us managing long-range projects. Milestones can be described as “an activity structure that flows logically from one phase to the next, and is punctuated by interim deliverables that map into the artifact structure of the final written report” (Polman, 2000).
Just as your students benefit from milestones, structuring their work toward the final product, teachers, too, can benefit from milestones.
- First determine when major due dates occur and what is expected at each one.
- Next, consider important steps you may need to take to reach each milestone and plan for those. What skills must be addressed to help you and your students be successful, and what preparations will need to be done to be ready in advance of milestone activities?
- Milestones are there to help guide you to the final stage, but you can modify steps and milestones as changes occur in your context.
Time
Management
An calendar can help you track your pacing. Interactive calendars, such as Palm Pilots or online interactive calendars can help make planning easy. One of the benefits of an online interactive calendar is that by making it viewable by all participants in project, feedback, peer and self-assessment are facilitated. helping you to to think ahead, visualize what still needs to be worked on, and getting feedback on ways to pace work and suggest ways to improve your planning guide if necessary.
Teachers can help their students keep track of time in a similar way. Assisting students to think about the time it will take to complete tasks helps them to organize and prioritize tasks. Students should always take time into consideration by mentioning it throughout their project. Their initial proposal should include proposal of time needed for project steps/stages.
Additional
Resource Information
- Writing on Your Palm: Long-range planning tips for using a Palm Pilot that can also be translated into other methods of keeping track of activities and organizing time.
- Project Management: Ideas for assisting students in managing project-based activities.
Becoming
a Coach
|Asking
Good Questions
| Using
Journals in Project-Based Lessons
Assessing
Project-Based Learning|
Making & Managing Long-Range Plans
Using
Interactive Tools
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