March 09 2007

E-Coaching Tip 38: Four "Best Practices" During Project Times

Alternate Tip on Making Your Students' Knowledge Visible -- Three Questions for Your Students

Spring is almost here -- (My family and friends in MN are digging out their spring jackets now that the temp is hitting 40°!) -- and students are generally working hard on papers, projects and team projects.

Last week's tip focused on pruning and reflection of key concepts. The goal of this pruning and reflection is to help ensure that your learners are being successful at creating "knowledge nodes" that will be part of their knowledge construction supporting the performance goals of the course:

This is a time for you to be sure to stay in close touch with your students. There will definitely be a few in particular who need additional hand-holding, support and encouragement at this time while others may be quite independent.

Thus this is a good time to stop and check yourself on four "best practices" to guide you and your students through project and teamwork.

Four Best Practices During Course Project Times

1. Help Learners with Getting Unstuck on Projects or "Eating that Frog"

The most difficult part of many learning online tasks is getting started. Large projects may be multi-phased; include doing collaborative work with other busy people; and finding thinking, planning and reflecting times. For busy professionals who often get their learning work done in short 15-30 minute focused segments -- podcast listening while jogging or waiting for children or in-between appointments, this can be a challenge!

So this best practices focuses on skills such as time management, planning and project techniques and ways of coaching and encouraging students during this times.

A technique that has been popularized of late is getting the students to be explicit about answering the question, "What is your next step? And then what is the next step after that? Often students find that their next step is something they can do "while" doing other things and that one of their next steps is arranging for a special Learning Time or a resource or arranging a meeting.

Another technique for getting started is reflected in the title of a book by Brian Tracy, called Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time! The old saying behind this book is, "If you eat a live frog first thing each morning you'll have the satisfaction of knowing it's probably the worst thing you'll do all day." I'm not certain I agree with that, but certainly finding a way to get started on a complex task is a good thing to do first thing in the morning if you can: or putting it on the top of your list for whenever your "Learning Time" arrives.

What can you do to help your students "eat their frogs?" Here are a couple of ideas:

• Have you asked your students to be explicit about sharing their questions, difficulties and successes with their ongoing papers and projects? And being explicit about what is their next step?
• Have you solicited information about how their teams are working and with what task the group may be having difficulty. This is a good time to reinforce the feeling of a learning community and have the teams share templates and process tools.
• Have you reminded the students about the resources, tools, processes and rubrics that you developed to guide them through the tasks? As learners share what helps them get "unstuck" you can also expand that set of resources for future students.

2. Encourage Learners to Customize and Personalize their Projects

We have talked about the three types of content in a course: (a) prepackaged authoritative content (books, resources, tools); (b) director-mentor faculty content that guides and supports learners through the course, and (c) performance content that is generated by the learners during the process of learning.

At this point in the course when learners are working on projects, it is an ideal time to personalize and customize the "performance content" so that it is maximally useful and of most interest to the learner. Encouraging learners to select and do learning tasks that is of most interest and use to them reduces the level of anxiety about how much time they are doing "learning" if they can clearly see the benefits of the learning task more long term and for their career.

What can you do to help this personalization process? Coaching students to be wise about their selection of their project and team work may mean open discussion on boards, and potentially semi-public open conversation about this topic.

How to define projects and papers to be maximally useful can be an excellent community brainstorming activity. Once students have identified a project that meets these characteristics, it can be useful to have the students to post/share in a discussion forum why they have made the selection and how they feel it will be useful to them. This can have the ripple effect of reminding the other learners in the community about potential applications that they may not have thought about.

3. Ask Learners to Post Progress Reports or Updates

This best practice is closely linked to the technique of having the learners identify exactly what their next step is. As they complete that "next step" -- when students successfully clarify project requirements and create a task list, find key or seminal resource or expert or complete one of the steps in an assignment, sharing that success very explicitly is a way to build community.

As students also share their completed steps and identify their next steps, other students will often praise, encourage and suggest, building a stronger network of learners.

4. Communicate Your Availability and Your Schedule

Be sure to continue your use of the Announcement tool and Horizon-Wimba to let students know your schedule and to schedule open question and answer times. Students may be so overwhelmed that they may not even be able to frame questions with ease, but setting a time and a place to "talk some ideas through" might work for them. Setting times and places where you will be more or less available is comforting even if learners do not make use of them. Also, be sure to be "present" on the discussion board. Students do want to hear your expert perspective while exploring the perspectives of the other students.

This is a good time to keep linking core concepts to current topics, happenings. For example, a short article in the Chronicle (March 9 2007) asked, "Did You Learn Anything?" The author is James M. Lang, the author of a book called Life on the Tenure Track: Lessons from the First Year. (Note: If you have access to the chronicle archive, it is available at http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i27/27c00101.htm)

Lang encourages/reminds us of the assessment technique of the " Minute Paper." This technique -- initially developed for the lecture environment by Cross and Angelo (1993) is easily adapted to the online class. It basically asks two questions: What was the most important thing you learned during this lecture (week?) What important question remains unanswered? Another question that is worth asking might focus on what question do they have about the content yet to come.

Don't forget to share your experiences as well.

References

Revised November 8, 2008
Copyright Judith V. Boettcher, 1997-2008