Scheduling as Pedagogy

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...

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."

Syllabi: Production Schedules

Some people actually make money from production scheduling.  But first, reasonable goals.

An earlier post dealt with creating calendars for knowledge-based Media Studies courses, the pace and division of which are arbitrarily determined by the whim and interest of professors.  Media Production classes are importantly different.  Professors in these are apt to offer project-based skills training.  They are attempting to make of their students practiced, competent, or masterful editors and scriptwriters.  The adjectives are important and should mirror the Course Objectives section of the syllabus. 

Syllabus Calendars for Media Studies

Media Studies Calendars:  Knowledge-Based, Individual... and Arbitrary

Because a syllabus is shaped by the prevailing mode of instruction, it’s probably wise to divide “Studies” from “Production” in a discussion of calendar creation.

Media Studies courses tend to be knowledge-based.  That knowledge is demonstrated  largely by individual essays, individual tests, and individual speeches.  Despite the occasional group project, the grade of one student infrequently impacts the work of others.  If Mary turns in her paper a week late, it’s no skin off Ethan’s nose.