Living Backwards

At the end of each semester an audience of 300 gathers for the Media Showcase.

Having calibrated your level of expectation, what assessment evidence is appropriate?  As in earlier posts, I'm going to offer my syllabus calendar for Intro to Video Production as an example, annotating it here with my reasoning.

Students in my orbit have often heard me tell them to "live backwards."  It's a mantra meant to express an understanding that the afternoon plan for a picnic motivates a morning of sandwich-making.  Similarly, a film's premiere motivates a back-timing of tasks from editing to scriptwriting.  This seems self-evident.  Yet many, many students wait until the last week of the semester to ask:  "Is the final cumulative?" or "How high must I score to pass?"  These underachievers are (and I use the term pejoratively) "forward-thinking."

Thus, the first thing to plan in your semester is the last thing.  In the case of my Intro class, this anchor is the Media Showcase.  Showcase is the night when final projects from every production class are screened for the public.  The audience usually numbers about 300.  Freshman intro films are screened first.  Advanced senior projects are last.

Because the Showcase exists as an event outside any one of the classes, it renders moot the issue of late work.  Either your team's project is ready in time to be included in the show reel or it isn't.  There is no magic wand the professor can wave to reschedule the Showcase.  A semester in advance, the college food service has been contracted to provide cookies and punch for the lobby's after-show reception.  No appeal, no sickness, no basketball tournament, no group dysfunction can change that.

The Academy does a poor job of acknowledging realities outside itself.  A classroom is too frequently a closed system, a terrarium in which the professor is god.  If no congress exists between coursework and the world beyond, then any standards of performance, any calendar of deadlines is arbitrarily imposed on vassals by their lord.  

So you don't have a Media Showcase.  No problem.  Ask the editor from a local TV station to sit on the final presentations in your Intermediate Editing class.  Require students in your Documentary class to show proof their film has been submitted to two film festivals.  Schedule the students from an Acting class to perform their final monologues to be shot by students in your Multi-Cam TV Production class.  Involve someone -- anyone -- from outside your class to assist in the assessment of the final project.  Now your students are obliged to value the time and expertise of someone their professor cannot control.  I promise you, this erases the problem of late work.  It measurably increases the quality of work.

Previously:  Goals for Production Schedules
Next:  Scheduling as Pedagogy