Lesson: Breaking Down Projects
Lesson Pages
Note
The Canvas calendar is an auto-populating calendar that provides students and instructors with a customized view of events and assignments for all their courses and groups (if those courses and groups use the Canvas calendar). Individuals can assign a color to each course or group and the calendar will use it to display events and assignments so that the applicable course or group can be distinguished at a glance. If desired, the Canvas calendar can also be set to automatically synch with Outlook, Google Calendar, or iCal, so that all life events can be viewed in one place.
This module will not cover the basics of the Canvas Calendar, so if you are not familiar with how it works in general, please check out this excellent crash course video tutorial from Canvas LMS entitled '528 - Calendar Overview'. Links to an external site.
Sizing Up the Barrier
Many university courses entail large projects that extend over several weeks or months and result in a culminating grade. These projects are designed to enable students to demonstrate the ability to apply what they are learning through an authentic, practical task. Examples may include laboratory experiments, research papers, art or design/development projects, or theses/dissertations. Student success on major, long-range projects is integral to overall university success and the artifacts produced can often be used for their job search portfolios. However, as many instructors will attest, some students struggle with motivation to complete large, involved projects when the end goal is far away. These students tend to procrastinate and wait to until too close to the final deadline to attempt the multiple, building stages involved in long-range projects, ultimately submitting work that does not reflect their true capabilities.
Long range projects assess students' capabilities in whatever the project entailed, but also (perhaps unintentionally) assess students' ability to self-manage and organize according to a deadline. The ability to manage one's time in accordance to a specified deadline is certainly an important skill for professionals to have mastered. However, college years are for learning professional skills, so it is worthwhile to intentionally (and explicitly) teach and support students in the development of time-management skills. This can be done through both teaching and assessing their content knowledge and skills. It is also important to realize that the online learning environment requires more executive functioning (see "Key Term" below) in students than is usually required for in-person courses.
To better conceptualize the barrier as identified for this module, please consider the following scenario.
Scenario
In his education course, "Dr. Que" assigns students to create lesson plans using the skills and concepts taught in the course. Wishing for the students to utilize the full wealth of learning, Dr. Que introduces the assignments early in each term, even though they aren't due until the final week of classes. Throughout the semester, he encourages students to make progress on the final course deliverable and facilitates discussions on how to apply course topics to the development of the lesson plans. Despite these efforts, Dr. Que notices a fairly consistent trend: some students are self-motivated and possess the organizational skills required to work on their projects all term, while others do not focus and engage in the task until the time pressure becomes sufficiently distressing.
Dr. Que is unsatisfied with simply allowing his more self-directed students to achieve the course aims while others struggle and turn in work well below their potential. He also doesn't want to "hand hold" as he is preparing professional educators who need to be able to organize themselves in the near future.
He is looking for a solution that will enable him to develop his student's executive functioning while simultaneously improving the quality of work his students complete for this long-range project.
Key Term: Executive Functioning
Please watch this two-minute video titled "Executive Functioning in Online Learning Environments," which explores this aspect of the barrier.
Dealing with managing long-term projects independently is just one manifestation of the increased need for executive functions in the online environment. One way to support students with the development of organization and self-monitoring progress when it comes to major projects is to break large projects down into smaller benchmarks (sometimes referred to as a task analysis or task decomposition Links to an external site. ).
Methods
There are at least two broad ways to use Canvas calendar to support executive functioning for students facing long-term projects: instructor-developed benchmarks and instructor-encouraged student-developed benchmarks; both have a time and place.
Method One: Instructor-Developed Benchmarks
There are a number of situations in which instructors may wish to conduct the task analysis and benchmark deadlines him or herself. Instructor-developed benchmarks allow instructors to directly check on student progress. For example, the instructors may determine that their students lack the necessary maturity to self-manage; as a result they may feel that certain natural benchmarks are necessary for all students at certain fixed time points. Alternatively, instructors may wish to personally provide feedback, and thus need to provide benchmarks to students in order to manage the submissions according to their own calendars. Whatever the case, the process for creating instructor-developed checkpoints is the same:
- Identify the task to be analyzed.
- Break this down into between 4 and 8 benchmarks. These benchmarks should be specified in terms of objectives and, between them, should cover the whole area of interest. [Note: you may choose to make these via outline format or flowchart; whichever makes more sense to you].
- Decide upon the level of detail into which to decompose. Making a conscious decision at this stage will ensure that all the subtask decompositions are treated consistently. It may be decided that the decomposition should continue until flows are more easily represented as a task flow diagram.
- Present the analysis to someone else who has not been involved in the decomposition but who knows the tasks well enough to check for consistency.
- Determine appropriate due-dates and make each checkpoint an assignment either in Canvas Assignments or directly in the Canvas Calendar.
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Be overt in explaining your decision to your students so as to model the task analysis process for their future use.
Example: Outline-based Task Analysis
Product: UDL Lesson Plan
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Identify and consider class constellation
- Choose a subject area and grade level for the lesson
- Choose 3 students with exceptionalities from the provided list
- Research the implications of the students chosen
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Determine standards and objectives (goals) for the lesson being taught
- Draw standards from TN State standards for the subject and grade taught
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State objective as a more focused approach toward the standard being addressed.
- Use active verbs to state what the students will be able to do at the conclusion of the lesson.
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Identify a concrete way of assessing the degree to which learners met the goals of the lesson
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Choose an appropriate summative assessment, particularly, but also
- Ensure that the summative assessment clearly matches the objective!
- Identify 1-2 formative assessments to use during the teaching/learning process.
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Choose an appropriate summative assessment, particularly, but also
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Identify likely barriers related to students in the class constellation achieving the stated goals and also barriers for students expressing their achievement in the assessment form identified.
- Review the literature regarding the students with exceptionalities, particularly, but also be cognizant of the variability that all of the students will bring (e.g. learning styles, interests, background knowledge, culture…).
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Develop lesson content and methods that address the barriers and enhance learning.
- Specifically identify what research-based methods you will use to teach the content.
- Determine what materials you will need to use such methods and content approaches.
- Develop closing activities.
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Identify any additional accommodations or modifications that may be needed for learners.
- Again, refer to the literature related to any students with disabilities or other exceptionalities. Determine whether the approaches you have already taken are sufficient to meet these students’ needs or if further accommodation or modification unique to individual students is warranted. Justify.
*Each of the seven benchmarks would be assigned independently, in order.
Example: Flowchart-based Task Analysis
Method Two: Student-Developed Benchmarks
Another option is to enable students to develop their own benchmarks. This approach is helpful when students are more mature or further along in a course sequence in which the task analysis method was already modeled. It may also be useful if students are working on dynamic projects that do not necessarily have the same benchmarks (e.g. art projects, different types of research projects, etc.).
With this method, the process is the same with the notable exception that the instructor assigns the task analysis and deadline creation to the students. The students complete their own task analysis (perhaps with guidelines such as "between 4-8 benchmarks, at least one week apart, the first beginning no later than October 10"), and add their deadlines to their own personal calendar.
Instructors can then conduct periodic checks via Canvas surveys, individual student meetings, or partial submissions.
Instructors using these methods may also find assigning students duties in terms of providing peer feedback to be a powerful and helpful tool in the creative process.
Summary
In this lesson, participants had the opportunity to reflect on the barrier caused by differences in student skill related to executive functioning (such as planning, strategizing, and organizing when completing long-term projects). To address this barrier, participants learned how to intentionally break tasks down into benchmarks and/or support their students in so doing, and then learned ways to integrate such assigned benchmarks into Canvas assignments and calendar. Teaching executive functioning, rather than assuming students have learned such skills elsewhere, may improve academic outcomes in one's own class, while also helping to develop students for their future as professionals.