Best Project Management Strategies?

Our next live event, March 4, focuses on "Keeping Your Project on the Rails."

What's hard about project management?
Do you have specific tools or strategies to help students manage their own project work?
What happens if projects start to get too big? What if teams don't work well together?
What would you like to discuss when it comes to keeping projects on track?

Please add comments/questions here or feel free to start a new discussion.
Ideas and suggestions welcome!

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Connie Weber on February 27, 2010 at 9:40am

Hello Everyone,

Just loving this discussion, so happy to be amongst colleagues who are working along similar lines, trading information, sharing perspectives! Thanks, everyone, for keeping this going. Looking forward to a whole lot of reflection together.

One thing that's jumping to mind for me is that there's specific project management, and there's also the whole curriculum framework of the class--or maybe better stated, the learning culture, what it's about, how it acts.

I find some projects don't have exact clear endpoints but are rather ongoing explorations, maybe with milestones along the way or culminations through projects--but not always.

Has much discussion gone on yet about Linda Darling-Hammond's 2008 book Powerful Learning? What she has to offer seems so pertinent to the conversation. There's a whole constellation of things to talk about: inquiry, in general, project-based learning, and problem-based learning. Problem-based learning may be the trickiest of all to manage because the goals can undergo considerable shift right during the investigation. And it may be amorphous in beginnings and endings.

So anyway, since I do a lot of problem-based learning with the students, I like to have a big overview for the class learning environment by having guiding, generative questions.

I probably should add in this context that I have the luxury of working in an independent school that allows a fair amount of freedom for teachers to design the courses of study, a big luxury in today's times, and oh, do I appreciate it! I have an upper-elementary homeroom class of 16 students Additionally, my class is completely networked through an ELGG platform so we have 24/7 connection to the class learning community. All that sets up pretty ideal conditions for learning.

I've designed my class learning around Throughlines, using the Teaching for Understanding framework from Harvard Project Zero.
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This year's throughlines:

How is Life on Earth Interconnected?

What Changes Has Life Undergone on Earth? Are Life Forms Still Changing? How and Why?

What are Similarities and Differences Between Humans and Animals?

What does it mean to say animals live within ecological systems? What does it mean to say an animal has a niche?

Do Humans Have a Responsibility as Stewards on the Earth? What does the Responsibility Entail?

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So the year involves doing a kind of learning dance around those big questions (questions the students helped devise).

Well that's enough said--just wanted to give some background on where I'm coming from. Sure like reading what others are doing along with the context they're operating in, which makes such a big difference.

I hope to hear from people who make PBLs work under really challenging conditions. I see it as such a powerful model for engagement in learning yet can sense how difficult the style of learning may be to get going with students who haven't been given experience in managing their own learning, and also when rigid time-structuring is part of the picture.

From this wonderful group on CR2.0: PBL~Better with Practice, hopefully we'll be sharing a variety of ways to keep an inquiry environment strong. Thank you so much for the great idea--we can be doing with teacher-colleagues some of what we ask our students to do with each other. Fun! Important!

Permalink Reply by Derrall Garrison on March 4, 2010 at 11:40am

I find the hardest part for me is building a project in which the trajectory or the path the students want to take in their learning is predictable enough that I can give them the proper tools and guidance they need to complete it. As much as possible I try to become the unseen participant in the groups so I can intervene when need be, but I'm not controlling the direction and focus of the groups. I usually use the Big6 model but ask students to take an active role in defining what the information problem is they are trying to solve. If students seem to be struggling to stay focused on what they've chosen to do I usually refer back and ask for clarification as to sub parts of the Big6 process. For example this year students (5th graders) really have been having fun with Scratch, but many of the boys wanted to just experiment and play with the programming before they had a clear idea of what their group had decided to solve and learn about. I try to give deadlines which are flexible enough that groups that find they need more time to accomplish their goals can do so. All the previous comments are so relevant to the walking a tight-rope feel of many of my projects with students, and it is the unpredictable aspect and unique solutions that students create that I so love to watch and learn from.