Reflections on Forethought

I think I did a really good job of my forethought phase. I had been churning over the ideas for the course for a while and once I found the wealth of resources available to me it simply came down to innovating, personalizing and creating something that would be unique and helpful to prospective students. Looking back, I would not have been able to create this goal for this course in the way that I did without the help of my colleagues and friends who offered me the avenues to do it as well as an endless source of feedback.

As far as the actual act of goal setting goes, it is a really helpful strategy that is beneficial to maintaining motivation. Generally I would find daunting tasks like designing a course to be overwhelming, but because I was able to break down the work into proximal goals it felt manageable and fun. Something many of my students enjoy is a comparison to video games, in that experience points are gained and used to level up and skill sets become broader. This same mentality can be applied to difficult distal goals. Without proper perspective they can seem like a Sisyphean task, but with reward strategies and proximal goals, it can seem like there is an active progress tracker on the boulder.

The general obstacles I found were mostly self inflicted. Poor time management, lack of innovative time allotment and poor communication between my colleagues and I mired the beginning of the endeavour. Luckily I was able to use the safety nets in place to rebound and continue the work.