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| Students employ a production schedule they co-created with the professor. |
Once you've designed the last thing, let your students watch you back up two weeks before that. That's right. Use the semester's first class period to create the calendar with them. Post a finished calendar on Day Two. Why? Because the sweetest words a producer ever heard are "on time" and "under budget." If you pass out stone tablets on Day One, pre-carved with your venerable recipe, you have thrown away an opportunity to teach production scheduling, an essential task of filmmaking (and, indeed, a valuable life skill). Instead, invite your apprentices to a conversation that will...
- create goodwill. As they talk about the semester's topics and projects, students will often indicate what is important to them, what they want to learn. They will mention new things that you have never heard of. Listen. Write their ideas on the board next to your own.
- demonstrate your knowledge and assess theirs. Rarely do students in an intro class plan time for audio editing. Documentary makers forget they need titles and graphics. Even advanced media makers think they can write a decent script in mere hours. Nudging them to include these demonstrates your practical value right off the bat. Let's face it, you need to make every deposit you can into this particular bank, since you will later surely demonstrate your ignorance of some software these digital natives think of as second nature.
- share assessment responsibility with students. If they help to draw up a calendar of deadlines, you can hardly be the black hat later for enforcing them. Sometimes, I even go as far as to assign a kind of personal accountability. If on Day One Joe said he wanted to learn lighting techniques, I may put his name next to lighting in the syllabus. I was going to teach lighting anyway, of course. But to have Joe want it, to have him associated with it gives the rest of the class a playful scapegoat when they encounter difficulties in the lighting unit.
- affirm a draft-and-revise culture. The 30% feedback rule is all the rage on productivity hack sites. It directs folks to seek constructive criticism when they're about 1/3 of the way through a project. The English Department has given similar advice for years: "submit an outline." In the Math Department, it's "show your work." In Media Production, let your students know why you want to approve their storyboards before they start shooting, why they'll get a better editing grade if they show you a rough cut.
Teachers can slice a four-month term any way they please. But a
touch of inclusive transparency and a classroom somewhat open to the
world can increase the pedagogical, human value of something no more
magical than a calendar.
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