Thursday, August 15, 2013

A More Perfect Quarter

I am always a very optimistic person. I'm convinced that each quarter is going to be better than the last and, in many cases, my optimism is justified.  But, inevitably, there are always lots of things that don't go quite as well as I might have wished.

This quarter, for example, my desire to gamify my class just didn't happen. It ended up being too hard to do in the time I had to do it. The tools are not yet ready for easy implementation. I could have done it, but it would have taken a lot of time, not just at the beginning, but all quarter long. I knew if I was spending time on that, I wouldn't be spending time doing other stuff that needed to be done, like updating my readings (which also didn't happen, and I can't even blame the games!)

Yesterday, I read an excellent article on ProfHacker, one of my favorite blogs, about planning for the upcoming quarter using a thought experiment of thinking through what the perfect quarter would look like and the steps you need to take now for it to look that way.

I love this idea because, as you might guess, I like to plan. But, I'm also perfectly capable of planning away the time that I should actually be doing something useful.  Now is the perfect time to have some fall quarter thought experiments and plan for a more perfect fall.

Do you have any tips for fall quarter planning?  Share them in the comments.

Reference:
Time Travel to Plan Your Semester by Natalie Houston, Aug 13, 2013 on ProfHacker

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