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Culminating Course Projects that Don’t Overwhelm

A college student early in the semester:
“This is such a large project. How am I ever going to get it done?”

A course instructor at the end of the semester:
“There are so many projects. How am I ever going to get them all graded?”

College students need opportunities to apply key principles and solve authentic problems related to academic content. Often, this takes the form of a culminating course project near the end of the semester. But when such projects are not carefully planned, both students and instructor can become overwhelmed. Students may procrastinate, submit sloppy work, or plagiarize; instructors may resort to grading holistically (“This one’s an A”) or avoid assigning major projects altogether.

Course instructors can design culminating course projects that challenge and don’t overwhelm by using three instructional strategies:

  • Chunking involves teaching one manageable section of content and then asking students to immediately apply it by completing a succinct, directly-related task.
  • Frequent feedback involves guiding in-progress student work by providing specific information that describes how closely the work accomplishes its intended purpose.
  • Opportunities for revision allow students a chance to tweak, polish, or completely re-do their work based on the in-progress feedback they receive before the final version is due.

I use these strategies to guide junior-year teacher candidates through the semester-long process of designing a five-day instructional unit plan. Beginning the second week of the semester, students complete weekly assignments that progressively “build” their instructional unit. The first assignment requires them to identify a topic, theme, and essential question; the second assignment requires them to describe the students they will be teaching; the third assignment requires them to identify learning standards and write SMART learning objectives for their unit. By Week 5, they are selecting instructional materials. By Week 10, they are writing lesson plans and designing assessments.

Each time a “chunk” of the instructional unit plan is submitted, I review it and assign a holistic score of 1 (fully completed, even if revision is needed), .5 (partially completed), or 0 (significantly incomplete or not submitted). I also offer narrative feedback with specific suggestions for revision. In this way, I am able to provide timely, individualized instruction for each student in addition to the whole class instruction provided during class time; and students can make necessary revisions before moving on to the next assignment.

Near the end of the semester, teacher candidates submit their entire instructional unit plan, which consists of all previously-submitted assignments, revised and polished. Although the final project is 20-25 pages in length, I have already seen each section once, and students have had an opportunity to make revisions based on the feedback I provided. Because the final version of the instructional unit plan is a second draft, it is much easier for me to grade, and students are much more likely to excel!

Resources

To follow up on any of these ideas, please contact me at fglazer@nyit.edu. This Weekly Teaching Note was adapted from a contribution to the Teaching and Learning Writing Consortium hosted at Western Kentucky University.

Contributor:
Jana Hunzicker, Ed.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Teacher Education
Associate Dean, College of Education and Health Sciences
Bradley University