4 Helping students manage their time effectively
Project work requires students to work in an independent way over an extended period. Unless they are used to it, your students will not be very good at managing their time or their work. You may find that by the end of the project, the groups in your class may not have completed their projects or have rushed some parts. Here are some ideas for helping students to manage their time so that they have a better chance of finishing on time and producing good quality work.
You need to decide how long you are going to give your students to complete the project. Your students should know this at the beginning of the project. One of the very first things you should ask your student groups to do is to produce a project plan. The plan should explain how, lesson by lesson, they intend to divide up the project work. It should also explain which team member is responsible for which part of the project.
Use the plan as a working document to record progress of the project. Have a plan wall in your classroom where all the team plans are displayed. Teams can mark off the work they have done in every lesson. Having the plans where everyone can see them can be very motivating for the students.
In every lesson, check that you know how each team is progressing. These can be brief to check their progress against their plan and to discuss problems or concerns.
Case Study 2: Teacher Samsana uses a project wall to manage her class’s project
Teacher Samsana continues with her project and reflects on how useful a project wall was to help her manage her large class’s learning.
I knew from past experience when I have tried to do projects before, the whole thing gets very messy and noisy, and I spend a lot of time rushing around telling students what to do next and to hurry up. I used to get headaches after project lessons. I felt that I was working harder than many of my students!
This time I used a project wall to help me manage the sources of energy project. Running the class project was still hard work, but this time I felt like I was in control. I decided to allow two weeks for the project, as this was the time we usually spend on a chapter. We used the class time and the homework time.
Having organised my students into groups of four, I asked each group to nominate a ‘manager’. At the start of each lesson, the teams went to the project wall and looked at their plan. Then they got on with whatever their plan for that lesson said they had to do. At the start of every lesson I held a quick five-minute meeting with all the team managers and found out what each group was intending to do that lesson. This gave me an overview. Based on this I decided which teams I was going to check up on in detail that lesson. Some of the more organised groups only got two or three meetings with me over the lifetime of the project. The less organised groups got more progress meetings, so I could keep them on track better.
I felt that the situation was much more under control doing it this way. I did have to give my students extra time at the end, but the quality of the projects was better than before. Every group managed to hand in a good piece of project work, so I will definitely use this idea again.
3 Forming and managing project teams