1 Teaching and learning First Words

1.9
Supervising projects

Introduction

Projects can provide students with the opportunity to undertake a sustained piece of work which is of their own devising and doing. Often the only piece of work from their course which a student values and wants to keep is their project report.
Projects can also allow students to develop valuable skills of cooperation and to experience the pleasures and frustrations of working with others. Friendships developed during projects can last long after the course is over. A project can be the part of the course which is the most intense, the most relevant to later study or employment, the most greatly enjoyed.
The quality of project supervision has a major effect on how far projects achieve the educational and personal learning which is possible.

What will this "first word" do?

It will:

Your role in the project

What will be your role in the project? Will you take full responsibility for the whole project? Will you supervise some or all of the students? Will you assess projects? It’s important to get answers to such questions at a very early stage.

Planning a project

If your supervision extends to planning a student project, try this checklist (based on 'Supervising Projects' by David Jaques and published by Brookes's former Educational Methods Unit).
A worthwhile project should:
  1. have a useful end-product or comprise a problem which is worth solving (this should increase student commitment)
  2. involve discovery by the student(s) (rather than simple recycling of their current knowledge)
  3. be in some measure unpredictable in process and outcome (to increase the opportunities for learning and creativity)
  4. involve integration and presentation of skills and knowledge (integration and presentation being value skills to develop)
  5. offer flexibility in terms of both direction and pacing of work (to cope with the unpredictability mentioned above)
  6. instruct the student in her / his own abilities (so that they learn about themselves as well as about the subject of the project)
  7. display the student’s abilities on a broad spectrum (so that they can develop and demonstrate a wide range of abilities).

The project brief

Whether you or someone else wrote the brief, it should, together with the course document, explain:

Group projects

Group projects allow students to develop the skills and discover the challenges of working together, and to tackle bigger projects than they could alone. Your work as a supervisor of a group project will probably be concerned as much with the ways members of the group work together as with technical issues around the project. You donÕt have to be an expert on group process to supervise group projects, although it helps if you have worked on a project or two as a member of a group. You do need to be able (and willing!) to ask questions about the ways the group is working; to suggest different ways in which the group might organise itself; to help members to solve their own problems about group operation rather than try to solve them yourself.

Supervision meetings

Group or individual? In a group project it makes sense to have supervision meetings with the whole project group. (This, and the saving in time which it brings, is another argument in favour of group projects!) If students are undertaking solo projects but in related areas, group supervision can still make sense, as students can learn from you and each other about project processes and problems as well as about the content of the project. However, some student may feel uncomfortable about this, or consider it a waste of time.

The agenda Half an hour can flash by in enjoyable, even relevant, conversation; but have the students' needs for support, guidance, problem clarification or solving, been met? And what about your needs to monitor their progress, or anticipate future difficulties or resource requirements?

Good use of your and their time needs an agenda and timescale for the meeting. This should be agreed at the start -- you and they should both bring agenda items. Then you should stick to it, or, if necessary, diverge explicitly and with everyone's consent.

Listen well Students won’t always tell you what's bothering them most about the project. Listen carefully. Ask questions to try to tease out hidden issues. Check your hunches. Check that you've heard accurately what they're saying.

Action planning Near the end of the meeting, agree clear action plans. The plan should say who will do what and by when. (Make sure most of the action points are for the student(s), not for you!) You could note these action points and write them up for the students, or you could write them on a flip-chart and they could copy them all down it is. Much better if a student makes the action notes and gives you a copy.

Review the meeting At the end, check that the meeting was useful; that the students got out of it more or less what they wanted (apart, of course, from the money for that research visit to Florida); that the way the meeting was conducted was appropriate; get their views on how the next meeting should differ.

A project supervision agreement?

You can formalise many aspects of project supervision in a supervision agreement. Negotiating one of these is a great way to clarify expectations; writing them down and using them is a great way to agree these expectations and then ensure that they are met.

A supervision agreement might specify:

Project problems

The most common problem in any project is of course to fall behind schedule. At the start you can help the students to construct realistic project schedules, and to anticipate the most likely sources of difficulty and have a contingency plan.
On the way through the project you can help them to revise their work plan, and to find ways around as well as through problems.

Group projects bring great scope for additional problems. Participants can't agree. They don't do what they say they'll do, or do it on schedule, or do it the way they were tasked to do it. They go off at what everyone else feels to be tangents. They lose vital information. They disappear.

The main approach to solving such group problems is to help the group to plan for them; to help individuals develop and use communications systems (email, again, can be very useful here); and perhaps above all to help them to talk about the way they are functioning as a group or team, and talk about group problems just as willingly as they talk about technical problems.

Monitoring project progress

Meetings are a good if expensive way to monitor students progress, although meeting can do lots of other useful things as well.
How about a weekly or fortnightly project report, in paper or by email, from the students to you? Keep it short. It might include (as well, of course, as project title / identities of participants):

This will give you and them a good idea of their progress. It will also help them write their project report as well as monitor their progress.

Concluding comments

Students (and tutors and assessors) tend to focus on the technical goals of the project. This is understandable -- the students are probably studying some subject other than ‘self-management’ or 'group process', and the technical challenges of the project will be everyone's main concern. This "first word" has suggested some ways in which you can help students undertaking projects to look at the process, especially for group projects. Some time well spent on project process greatly increases the chance of a project meeting its technical goals.

Last modified: Friday, 06-Jan-12 17:39:24 GMT