AIM Technique
AIM = Accelerated Interactive Metacognition
AIM = Accelerated Interactive Metacognition
Learners need a range of skills to equip them for success in the 21st century. One of the most important skills they need to learn is how to think. I coach kids, regardless of perceived abilities, on how to learn, how to think, and how to apply learned skills and strategies to new learning opportunities for lifetime success.
Accelerated Learning:
- Target specific skills and goals.
- Teach needed content and strategies.
- Promote transferable knowledge with guidelines.
Interactive Learning:
- Guide and facilitate learner-directed dialogue and inquiry.
- Provide playful and creative encoding, practice, and recall activities.
- Engage the learners as empowered activators of their own progress.
Metacognitive Practices: (the ability to think about one’s own thinking processes)
- Teach techniques for maintaining wellness--physiological and emotional, and growing scholarly habits.
- Co-create customized curriculum, guidelines, and tools.
- Collaboratively analyze failures, successes, methods, and learning styles.
I use AIM to continually pursue progress, and focus on the individual’s step-by-step pathway to success. My role is to guide learners in the use of accelerated learning, interactive resources, and reflection, to produce a continuum of personal growth.
Coaching with AIM Promotes:
- Intellectually Responsible Behaviors
- Teach learners to organize and manage materials, projects, and time.
- Guide learners in appreciating their learning opportunities.
- Use positive reinforcement to build necessary student habits.
- A Joyful Learning Experience
- Make learning fun. Use novel means to encode, playful means to practice, and stress-free ways to demonstrate mastery.
- Celebrate every achievement with over-the-top fun: We’ve got a winner! Come on down and take a bow! Wear the champion’s medal all day!
- Creatively tailor tools, learning content, and activities to learners’ interests, passions, and talents.
- Independent Use of Questions, Resources, Skills, and Strategies
- Prompt learners with questions and guide learners in the use of questions.
- Channel student questions and confusion toward resources, and teach learners how to find the answers for themselves.
- Follow inquiry. It’s easy… we have the internet!!!
Here are two definitions for Acceleration --
- the capacity to gain speed within a short time;
- the increase in the rate or speed of something.
AIM offers both types of acceleration.
- Through the creation of highly individualized and robust goals and targets, learners may gain speed within a short time to close gaps, acquire specific content, and gain new skills.
- By embedding the process of these goals and targets with transferable strategy instruction, process guides that promote quick independence, opportunities for critical thinking, and positive experiences like success, learners may increase the rate of their future learning.
I use AIM to guide learners toward achievable successes. Each success accelerates the process, building a foundation of transferable skills for a continuum of growth.
Interactive learning allows for a two way flow of information. It is a conversation with someone, with information, with an experience, even with one’s own mind. This is the true essence of the learning process.
Play is the ideal vehicle for interactive learning. Play is experimentation, problem solving, dialogue. It is goal-oriented, engages the active mind, and makes learning fun!
Interactive learning may include games, play, dialogue…it can be noisy or messy! It ought to also include a still and quiet body, wrestling inside with creative problems. It is necessary to focus learning, but it is a Playful Minds imperative to encourage active thinking at all times.
How it Works
- Bring a playful attitude to all learning tasks.
- Balance the time so that the learner has equal or more talk time, and is active and engaged.
A Playful Attitude
- Remember we do things to have new learning, and fun experiences.
- Always put people first, not the academic or competitive objective.
- Make time for play breaks, mindfulness breaks, and time for humor, inquiry, and discussion.
- Turn learning activities into games!
- Happy Brains Learn Best!
Balance the Time
- Create conversational balance--take turns teaching, modeling, and critiquing work.
- Be responsive to learners--add their ideas and passions quickly to lesson activities.
- Prioritize learning--spend time on motivational and effective methods and practice
Dedicate time to learners--literally use a timer to make sure the learner is working, talking, or thinking for at least half your time together.
Metacognitive Practices
Metacognition is awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes. Metacognitive practices, such as reflection, analysis of success and failure, goal-making, and strategy acquisition, are the most logical path for improving the learning process. I use AIM to guide learners in the use of mindfulness activities, reflection, error analysis, goals, dreams, and powerful intentions to activate their potential.
Apply Metacognitive Practices to the Following:
- Differentiation and support for all types of learners
- Customized tools, content instruction, and engagement activities
- Cooperatively planned targets that provide both skill and content practice
- Socratic method for any level, to stimulate discussion, learning, and inquiry
Promoting Independent use of The AIM Technique:
- Teach generalized transfer of skills and tools
- Provide customized metacognitive practices
- Train learners in the power of questions:
- Self advocacy
- School success
- Self-guidance
- Lifelong inquiry
Learn More About Playful Minds
“Play is the highest form of research.” Albert Einstein. A playful blog for serious learners!
On a mission to create a joyful pathway to knowledge, skills, and critical thinking.