Thursday, January 19, 2012

Communicating Effectively

Amazing how the same piece of information changes drastically in the way it is perceived through different modalities, isn't it?  When someone gets a message via email or text, it lacks a personal touch.  The reader is unable to gauge tone, intent, or emotion because the mode of communication is simply flat.  The phone, and leaving a voicemail, is a little bit better because your tone of voice can convey a certain amount of your emotion and tone.  However, depending upon the person's mood, the voicemail may be perceived as quite different in tone than you intend it to.  The best way to communicate whenever possible is face to face conversation.  When the recipient can see your facial expressions, matching them with your tone of voice and the information being delivered, the true intent and tone come through.  Obviously, the best way to communicate is face to face, that way your true intent can be read.  This would also be the way to communicate to your team members as a project manager, that way your true intent is apparent as well as making a personal connection with your team members.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Projects...my whole life is a project

In thinking back about the projects I have been a part of in my career, I can think of many projects.  The harder part is finding one that was not successful!  I tend to be a bit of a bulldog about things, and will keep plugging away, fighting until the bitter end to succeed.  That's part of what makes me a really good teacher.  That's probably also what would make me a terrible project manager.  I tend to work fast and hard, doing my project to the exclusion of all else.  That certainly is not going to work if I take a position as project manager. 

Okay, projects that weren't successful...I can't think of many.  There was the ill fated portable word wall project, so I shall focus on that.  I had done some research about the use of world walls in elementary classrooms.  Lacking some space, the idea of portable word walls certainly caught my eye.  I spoke to several of my colleagues about it, and we all agreed that in theory it was a great idea.  However, none of us were very experienced teachers, and some of the finer points of word wall use eluded us.  Particularly since the district we taught in was so hyper-focused on the buzzword of the year and we had tons of activities based on that which we were expected to attend and use in our classrooms.  There should probably be a serious course in time management and creative ways to fit in all of the foolish whims of a school district when we are trained as teachers, but I digress.  We planned (in theory) how these were going to work, decided upon a fairly common thread, prepared various materials (spent hours on that in fact), and figured out how we were going to introduce these to our classes.  It started out great!  The kids were excited to have their own portable stations to record interesting words to share with the class, the stations were working wonderfully, everything seemed to be going according to plan.  That worked for a couple of weeks, and we all found ourselves having too much on our plates to spend the countless hours preparing the materials for the word walls, too much "school stuff" intruded upon our use of these great tools, and they all sort of fell by the wayside. 

In retrospect, we obviously didn't plan ahead very well, and should have considered the time it took to make the initial materials when deciding to go into this project.  We didn't budget our time very well, or do nearly enough research to discover how other teachers used these tools in their classrooms.  We certainly should have assigned someone (or at the very least taken turns) to create the materials having to do with the lessons of the week, and even planning the materials we were going to need based on the week's lessons would have been a job better served by having some one person in charge of it.  We didn't realize all of this when we jumped into the project, and without direction the project soon failed.  From a project manager's point of view, so many of these pitfalls could have been avoided just by some more careful planning, and following the ADDIE process in developing the project to its fruition. 

I haven't taken on any more major projects lately, well, except for the study skills class I am currently offering to my online students.  However, I have years worth of background in this subject, and a ton of resources at my fingertips.  Not only that, I am also the only teacher on my "team", so I can take on whatever role suits my needs!

Noelle