Week #4 of CeDO565 Leadership and Planning

This week, we continued to investigate the effect of change on ourselves as well as the people we work with.  During Tuesday's class, we started a simulation game where our goal is to set up a school change plan and convince as many people as we can to go with the change and make it happen.  We are given "three years" to do this (which is actually 3 hours).  After the end of year one, our group did ok.  We got a few of the people of the game moved over to the 2nd stage of change, which is preparation for change.   However, for a years worth of work, this was very hard.  Our group felt that we should have moved people further than that in one year, but we had no such luck.  I am looking forward to what the next year does for us, but I am expecting many challenges as this game isn't very easy.  I guess it is supposed to mimic real life change!   In addition to this game, I just finished an individual assignment which I picked a time when I had to make a change.  I picked the way I am currently running my Civics class.  In the past I had the students use books and take notes from power points I made.  Now the students are using Moodle and looking for there own information and then coming to me with it. This is a huge change, but it is working great so far and I feel it is a huge benefit to the students as they are learning much more than they would from hearing me lecture on a daily basis and take notes.  I do still do quite a bit of talking, but it is when students have questions on what they have found or if I see that they are working on something that I want the whole class to be aware of and investigate.  I look forward to seeing the many more change based activities we will be working on for the remainder of this class as they are interesting and make me think!