How To Execute/Conduct the Work of a Project Plan

Student Executing his project Plan

Executing the project plan or conducting the work of an investigation can include a wide range of activities, such as gathering necessary equipment, assembling apparatus and materials, following through on procedures, and making observations.

How can you help students conduct the work

  • Gathering necessary equipment: if the project requires equipment, make sure that students have a list of equipment they need for their project
  • Assembling apparatus and materials: if the project requires apparatus or materials, follow up and track student progress as they try to assemble apparatus or any object they need to build themselves

Following through on procedure: any project has procedures that students are coming up with as their solution and those procedures require constant monitoring and making sure that the procedures are leading to the expected results. If they don’t, students need to correct course and sometimes go back to the drawing board to design procedures that do. Reflection is part of following through on procedures because those will tell students whether they are on the right track.

How To Do It

  • Make sure that students select a team leader that can follow up on student progress and make sure that tasks are completed.
  • Team leaders should be replaced every week with another team member to make sure that every team member has a chance to practice leadership skills
  • Students in the team should use the project designs and plans to lay out tasks that will be shared by all team members
  • Students should perform their tasks and meet weekly with the entire team to make sure to direct all their efforts towards the project’s goals
  • Make sure to get feedback from the team and from outside sources
  • Make sure that team members take feedback into account when executing their plans, even if that means that the team needs to go back to the drawing board
  • Understand that execution is an iterative process and that going back to the drawing board could be a reality that needs to be repeated several times

How To Follow Through On a Project

Making sure that the project is advancing in the right direction involves team meetings and discussions about the fulfillment of tasks whether the project is directed towards the right goal. These meetings can be done with or without AI. Up until the advent of AI, student meeting conversations were usually lost. AI changed all that and there are AI transcription apps that can turn voice into text, letting students browse it later. This can help students be more present in their meetings and, at the same time, be able to thoroughly analyze the transcription later. One such transcription app is Fireflies, which can transcribe all student meetings, tracking the conversation topics along the way. It has its own bot called Fred that can handle summarizing the meeting’s contents, generating text, and searching through the history to meet students’ queries.