[teaching] Agendas for Managing Students

I don’t care what anyone says, managing people is difficult work. More specifically, being a good manager, one that is respected (although not necessarily liked, at least all the time) is even tougher. In our case there is even more of a challenge. We’re not managing employees. We’re managing students. The goal of being an undergraduate student here is to learn, apprentice style, skills like coding, software architecture, team communication, and all the tools of the trade.

The difficulty is that the goal is not merely, ‘finish the code.’ I’m happy if the students finish the code. I also need to be happy when they don’t finish the code, but manage to learn a whole hell of a lot in the struggle. I’ll speak more about this balancing act some other time. For now I just wanted to share my approach to meetings.

In an effort to try a more distributed ’start up’ feel environment this year, we’re only having face to face meetings once a week. I think that generally this is a good idea. Fewer meetings are better. At the same time, this leaves only one opportunity to set the stage for the next week and fish out any concerns that weren’t important enough (or were too important) to discuss over email or skype.

During the rest of the week the students are working over svn with trac. This allows me to see what’s going on, help out if I can, and also helps the students coordinate themselves. This also means that there is a communication system built into the structure, through tickets. Tickets allow students to set goals, they allow me to set goals, and they offer good feedback on achieving progress. Every day I update my working copy and test to see how things are going.

I’m working on this too, but when I address tickets I don’t actually fix them. If I happen across a fix or decide to fix one, I’ll post the answer in the ticket. This means the student still needs to put the code it. I try not to make it a copy / paste solution. The goal is that even if the student didn’t come up with the answer they understand enough to see where it is coming from and I try to do this rarely and only if I think a ticket is particularly challenging or incredibly trivial.

The goal of the agenda is to start off positively, by talking about what has been accomplished and what students are learning, and then move into the logistical demands of the position. Here’s the general template for our meetings:

Everyone: Describe what you accomplished in words.

Everyone: Ask three questions (to anyone) that if answered will help you work better, fix problems, explain things.
Everyone else: Try to answer!

Everyone: Do you feel like you are learning something. What are you learning?

Manager: Deliver any administrative updates, talk about any sponsor meetings, papers, conferences, etc. that you are working on.

Manager: Upcoming deadlines or goals, how we can meet them, what is required of us.

Manager: Introduce any new objectives or projects (freedom of what you work on).
Everyone: Introduce any new project ideas, experiment ideas, etc.

Everyone: Demonstrate what you accomplished with code and designs.

The real agenda for our meeting tomorrow (with my bit filled in, I don’t know what the students will say):

Students: Describe what you accomplished in words.
Me: I’ve been working on some of the more challenging tickets (like the things that are broken in wordpress 2.1). I’ve also been cleaning up the extraneous mousetracking code. In addition to this I’ve been doing some light fixes on the recycledjournal so we can be pretty happy with it before we add some content, do design critiques, and get some user feedback. I’m also going to add tickets for this to the system, although I’m not going to commit the code for you to work on yet (as soon as the theme is ‘done’ I will).

Me: I only have one question, communication. How can we be better communicators? Want to avoid the problems with communication. Don’t be afraid to say you haven’t done something or accomplished as much as you said you would. Will I be happy? Well not exactly, but I’ll be happier that you told me than you didn’t.
Students: Ask three questions (to anyone) that if answered will help you work better, fix problems, explain things.
Everyone: Try to answer!

Students: Do you feel like you are learning something. What are you learning?
Me: I’m still trying to get a good communication system, with enough goals and objectives to keep you motivated and working. This is the first time I’ve tried such a distributed system, and I’m not sure how it is going. At this point its wait and see, I feel very positive about your progress but I still have some concerns. I’m also learning how to be less controlling and demanding ;)

Me: I’ll be presenting some of this material to a sponsor in march. CHI conference in end of April (we can’t really pay, but we might be able to pick up registration if you got your travel). It’s worth going, if not this year consider planning for it next year. Policy on conferences: generally we can pay if you have something to show (paper, demo, invited talk, etc.) but it also depends on the quality of the conference (note: good conference are generally not the ones held in the most exotic locations)

Me: Need to set a deadline for theme release. Bad news: it needs to be soon, like early next week. This means you need to put it some work today and this weekend to get it done. Let me know what tickets you don’t want (assign them to me) I will fill theme (and fast), but I want you to have the chance to approach the problem. Good news: After release we get to do some different things, like marketing, user testing, more detailed design critiques, etc. It’s a nice break from coding.

Me: I don’t have any major new projects, outside of the recycled journal (but we talked about that last week).
Students: Introduce any new project ideas, experiment ideas, etc.

Me: Demonstrate what I’ve accomplished
Students: Demonstrate what you accomplished with code and designs.

Everyone: Free talk

Hopefully this offers some insight into how I plan these meetings. I’ll spend some more time in the future discussing the differences between this kind of management and the kind of management you see in the ‘real world’

Of course they may very well read this. Do I care? Not really. First off it suggests they are motivated enough to follow the blogging here, which is a good sign. It also emphasizes one of my big beliefs, which is transparency in communication.