Producing a daily news show can present difficulty when assessing student output. There are a variety of roles and you need a variety of content for that broadcast. As an instructor, how can you be equitable in your expectations while also providing flexibility for students to pursue the work that interests them the most so they aren’t just pigeon-holed into a given job? Broadcast advisers can take a page from the Scrum process in Agile project management methodology.
Within the Scrum process is what’s called a Sprint. Sprints are 2-4 weeks of backlog that a team takes on in the development of a product with the goal of producing some sort of increment or deliverable by the end. They begin with a day of planning (Monday of Week 1) where the team decides very precisely how much they will take upon themselves. They have until Thursday of the final week to work through the backlog. That Friday is devoted to a retrospective.
They key to Scrum is while the Product Owner will prioritize the backlog of tasks, it’s the Development team that gets to decide how much work they will be able to take on. Tasks are assigned the hours necessary to completion and the team uses its capacity of hours (team members x work hours x Sprint days) to ensure it takes on the correct amount of work for the Sprint.
Using this framework we can devise a system for producing our broadcast. I can take all of our required output (anchoring, control room operations, sports reports, live interviews, pre-recorded content) and assign them points based on how many class periods of work to completion. Each student is required to earn a certain number of points over the course of the Sprint. The planning day is devoted to predetermining who will fulfill which roles or produce which videos for that Sprint. This gives students a chance to voice their desires and switch up roles or projects. The retrospective is a day to watch back some of that work.
I introduced this to my students last year and the structure seemed to click with them. We learned that our Sprints worked best in 3 week increments. If you subtract the first and last day, this gives 13 working days per Sprint. In those 13 working days, students must earn 10 points. I price out the point values of projects and tasks with 1 point = 1 person’s work per 1 class period.
Let’s say on average I expect two advanced level students to complete a commercial in seven class meetings. Then I’m going to assign that project 14 points. If two students produce a commercial they can each claim 7 points towards the required 10. They’ll need to complete other tasks or videos to get the other three points. If a team of four students worked on a commercial, they’ll have to tell me how to divide the 14 points fairly so it reflects their contributions and plan the rest of their Sprint accordingly to get to 10 points.
As an adviser, this allows me to adequately plan our output. If I have a room of 30 students, I know I have 300 points to budget every 3 weeks. After working with my students to assess fair point values, I can list all of our desired output and determine a relatively accurate capacity while also giving my students some agility as they pursue desirable projects and tasks.
Article by: Kevin Patterson
Written By: Kevin Patterson, CJE
