Teaching Project Management
Lesson planning toward effective collaboration
Targeted Course Outcomes
Develop strategies to facilitate communication across communities and cultures
Identify useful time management strategies that work with your personal learning style
Goal
Students will self-identify and leverage their affinities in a collaborative setting and get familiar with tools and strategies for project management through in-class activities and the use of a Notion task manager
My role
Teaching intern
Deliverables
Lesson plan, slides, discussion prompts, Notion template and instructions
Context
In Spring 2024, I served as a teaching intern for WRA331: Writing in the Public Interest in the department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures (WRAC) at Michigan State University. The course focuses on developing rhetorical practices that apply to nonprofit communication work. As a teaching intern, I supported the course by assisting with planning on a weekly basis, planning and teaching multiple lessons myself, mentoring and providing feedback for students, and participating in conversations around what would improve the course in the future.
For their second project in the course, students were asked to work in teams to develop a number of communications templates for a nonprofit of their choice. As a way of kicking off the first group project in the course, I planned a lesson to help ground students in their own affinities and approach collaborative work with strong communication, shared expectations, and organized project management. The lesson included individual and group reflection on team roles, introducing the Notion project management tool I developed for the course, and team documentation of shared expectations for the project.
Lesson Plan
Process:
Identify priorities: I knew students needed to leave knowing, at minimum, who their team for the project would be, who would be taking on which roles on the team, and what their shared expectations for the projects were. They also needed to understand the basic functions of the Notion task management template.
Scaffold: I started with a high-level discussion around students’ past experiences with group work. Then, I had them use the Belbin Team Roles resource as a guide for individual reflection on their affinities in collaborative work. After assigning their teams, I had them discuss the affinities they had reflected on and decide as a group who their project manager would be. Then, they spent time filling out their team collaboration agreement and scheduling time to finish it outside of class. Finally, we went over the task management functions in Notion and the project managers took time to enter the first few tasks for the project and ask questions.
Feedback: I received feedback on this lesson from both my faculty mentor and my co-instructor. I applied that feedback by breaking down the group discussion prompts in a way that was more manageable for students (i.e. setting aside time for one question before moving on to the next, rather than giving all the discussion prompts at once). Also, in the high-level group discussion, I made sure to ask students about their good group work experiences before their not-so-good ones, so that we could focus the lessons on what students should do rather than what they shouldn’t do.
Project Management Tool
Process:
Design: I designed a basic task management template for the students in Notion. I chose Notion for its flexibility, intuitive interface, and because its free personal accounts allow students to collaborate in the same work space. Because I wanted to encourage students to play with the flexible functionality in ways that suit their personal task management style, I kept the template very simple, including a task sheet for each project with the assignee, status, and deadlines for each task. I also included instructions on how to perform important actions in Notion, such as sharing the task manager with their team and duplicating the template for future projects, and linked to Notion’s help page.
Tutorial: I gave a brief tutorial on how to use Notion on one of the first days of the course, explaining and demonstrating the basic functionalities described in the template. We had the students use the task manager for their first project, even though they were working individually, so that they would get more comfortable with keeping track of their tasks in this way. For the second project, I did a review demonstration of sharing the task manager with the whole team and with both of the instructors so that we could see how they used it. I encouraged the students to decide in their teams who was responsible for inputting tasks and updating the status, and how they would break down tasks for the project. I also encouraged them to explore functionalities not built into the template in case they found any that were useful to them.
Outcome & Impact
Overall, this lesson on project management and collaboration prepared students to do classwork in a way that parallels professional working teams. In their culminating presentations for this project, it was evident that most students divided tasks according to the affinities they established at the beginning of the project, and that their group decisions around division of labor mitigated the inequity that they expressed often experiencing in undergraduate group projects. Throughout their working sessions, we saw the project managers for each group embodying their roles by liaising with us as instructors to ask questions, playing with the functionality of Notion for their group task management pages, and reflecting on new areas of growth that they weren’t aware of before.
Lessons Learned
Expand each lesson to learn more.
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After introducing Notion as a project management tool, it took some time for students to understand how to use it effectively, and we faced a variation in the level of buy-in from students. Some students expressed that it improved their time management significantly, but others were frustrated by it and felt that it was more difficult than helpful.
Seeing the mixed reactions and levels of comfort with Notion, I would introduce new tools and systems differently in the future. I would do more direct demonstration and provide specific tutorials that relate directly to how they would need to use the tool. I would also show more examples of real-world applications of the tool that show the extent of Notion’s functionality.
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The documentation of shared team expectations was an important outcome of this lesson, especially in its implications for the workplace collaboration we were trying to mirror with this exercise. However, students were not as detailed or specific as we had hoped in documenting their shared expectations. In both classroom and workplace settings, establishing clear roles and expectations for projects is extremely important to the success of a working team. In the future, I want to make a clearer connection between this documentation and mitigating the problems that students and coworkers alike experience in professional collaboration.