"Post Mortem" for a Lightweight

This week’s topic concerns a look at what went wrong with a project undertaken in the past.  It is termed a “Post Mortem” in the field of project management and is a useful analysis after-the-fact in order to learn from the commissions or omissions that occurred in developing a product for a client.  My reservation and caveat to readers is that the projects that teachers undertake aren’t “organized” in the manner or with the depth of management that compares with the caliber or type of management performed in instructional design projects.

     We may recall reading in our primary text that there are basically three types of organizations used with projects requiring the level of management sought for this week’s discussion – central, functional, and matrix (Portny et al, 2008).  As a teacher I’m engaged in management involving the finding or producing content, pacing and scheduling, and assessing performance.  The project, however, is more of a one-person operation; the management skills mentioned previously are evident but don’t carry the same impact as a project involving multi-departmental operations or organizations with an interdependent hierarchy.

     The activities that perhaps compare only marginally with the level of management of a multi-dimensional project as we’ll experience in our management course are usually in the form of committee work.  With that distinction being understood, and perhaps limiting my ability to see a project in the same way, I’ll mention a research group that was formed at a former school.  The principal was very much interested in teachers following “best practices” and especially in conducting mini-research projects to validate some of these best practices.

     The group I was in specifically was formed to investigate reading practices for high schools.  The group consisted of 7 teachers who would meet during the lunch period to discuss considerations in setting up a mini-experiment.  Working from the book Teaching What Matters Most, we decided to establish a classroom experiment utilizing what we named Rigorous Monday.  Each Monday for 4 weeks in a row we’d devote time in our classes to putting the students through four reading techniques related to improving comprehension.  We’d monitor each technique and report our results after the 4-week time frame for the experiment. 

     We reviewed and finally selected four pieces of reading material to use in the experiment.  The articles were varied and not specific to any teacher’s subject area.  The idea was to utilize readings outside of the subject areas.  We did not develop a specific order for the articles and so we could not report our results until the end of the 4-week time frame.

      When we finally did convene to discuss our respective results, the information proved to be only anecdotal with no statistical data to support the conclusions.  Unfortunately, teachers more than other professionals tend to draw conclusions based on general observations without any type of data to support those conclusions.  Consequently, the findings of the experiment tend to be broad generalizations.  Can this effectively be termed a good example of research?

     Perhaps we should have concretized our procedures by putting them in writing before beginning and made sure that everyone understood and could agree to follow the written explanation of our procedures.

      Perhaps we should have insisted that we each used the same reading material each week instead of allowing the members of the research group to sequence the articles to their own preference.  Requiring everyone to use one sequence for the reading materials would have allowed us to meet each week to bring our findings and discuss as we went along through the experiment.

     Perhaps we should have agreed upon a written survey to be used after exposure to each reading strategy.  In that way we’d be able to gather concrete data on the students’ reaction to the technique used.  Also it would have allowed for greater consistency in the data among the seven of us who conducted the experiment.

     Perhaps a longer period of time should have been allowed to prepare and/or review the report before submitting it to the principal.  Six teachers were satisfied with the anecdotal approach as a viable method for experimentation and research.  I wasn’t satisfied and voiced diplomatically my disappointment.  Consequently I prepared a separate report using the data from the survey I utilized.

     As projects go, the results seemed to have been sufficient for the principal.  We heard nothing back from either the main report showing the groups findings or my report.  One might say that the dominant weakness in the functioning of the group was communication and accountability.  Because all information until the final report was oral rather than written, and because the frequency of communication on the research experiment was limited, there was too much opportunity for each teacher to run the experiment his/her own way.  Allen and Hardin in their article “Developing Instructional Technology Products Using Effective Project Management Practices” the importance of communication (2008).  “Communicating effectively is probably the greatest challenge that people encounter during any project so it is imperative that instructional designers model and establish good communication techniques and patterns at the onset of a project” (2008, 79).

     Perhaps we should have had a mock practice of each reading technique before allowing teachers to take the task to the classroom.  Perhaps the procedures needed to have been written with more detail.  We didn’t seem to have a “meeting of the mind” even though we did read and discuss the appropriate chapters from Teaching What Matters Most.  However, it can be said that teachers are famous for “fabricating” what they may not really understand – (b.s).

     Often the success of an undertaking is as much the relationship of the individuals in an endeavor as it is unique talents, or money, or political support.  The seven of us knew and respected each other having worked together at the school for a number of years.  Our commitment to the endeavor, however, perhaps was not established.  If we had developed the relationship to include a true commitment to verifying the reading techniques as best practices, we might have done more.  In a short article from Project Smart Michael Young states, “Ideally you develop a strong working relationship with a client….  You become a partner with the client” (Young, 2011).  Perhaps our interest in this research experiment was more a matter of appeasing the principal and providing a modicum of effort.  Perhaps we should have performed the experiment for ourselves, making each other our partner and the client.  This is where the true value of collaboration comes into play.  It’s not just the sharing of information, but it’s also developing that relationship. 

 References:

Allen, S., and Hardin, P. C.  (2008).  Developing instructional technology products using effective
project management practices.  Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 19(2), 72-97. 

Portny, S.E., Mantel, S.J., Meredith, J.R., Shafer, S.M. and Sutton, M.M.  (2008).  Project
management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects.  Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley &
Sons, Inc.

Strong, R.W., Silver, H.F., and Perini, M.J.  (2001).  Teaching what matters most: Standards and
strategies for raising student achievement.  Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and
Curriculum Development.

Young, M.  (2011).  Stakeholder Management: Building relationships in project management. 
Retrieved from http://www.projectsmart.co.uk/stakeholder-management.html