Using the GAME Plan Process with Students

Without determining a plan to meet your goals, goals become hard to attain. The GAME plan is just that, a plan that allows each student to make decisions about how they are going to obtain their goals, which also includes an important step in evaluating progress and revising your plan. This I feel is often where students have the most difficulty and is something that we need to teach our students. In my experiences as an associate, I have seen all too often that students don't know what to do when they are struggling to meet goals. They don't understand, and we fail to teach them, that they can reflect and revise both their plan and their goals.

I see the IEPs that I will be using for my students as a form of a GAME plan. Here we (the teachers and parents) establish the goals, the standards by which we will measure growth towards the goal, the actions needed to accomplish the goals, and evaluate/revise the goal. As for my students using the GAME plan themselves, this will be very difficult. For most of my students, understanding what it is and why we do it will be a difficult task and will need to be set up in a very structured way. I am not sure yet how I will use this with my students and how it would look in my classroom, aside from the IEPs that I will use.