Assigning responsibility
You can teach valuable lessons in responsibility and ownership by letting students and student groups manage their own project conferences. They can plan their own meetings, either online or face to face, assign tasks among them and maintain the task status in the calendar for all to see, and submit deliverables to the appropriate subconference by the required date. Students can't argue that they couldn't attend a meeting or missed some information, because the information or meeting notes are always available in the project conference.
An important decision you need to make at the beginning of a project cycle is responsibility for tasks. You will carry some responsibility, such as deciding what types of projects students will produce during the school year, whether they will work in teams or alone, and how projects will be presented and showcased. However, team leaders and students with individual projects are responsible for the details of a project, such as managing tasks and information, scheduling, and organizing the final product.
 Example: Assigning tasksThe English teacher at Avalon Academy created a chart to decide who would take responsibility for the various project tasks. You can create a similar chart to assign your own tasks.
 He decided that he would work with the students to assign groups and choose topics, that students would be responsible for all further phases of the project, and that he would step in again at the end of the project cycle to grade the projects.
Considering responsibility at the elementary grades The age group of students will help you decide the amount of responsibility you choose to give them. Managing a conference may be too much responsibility for younger students. If you teach an early grade, you may wish to take a bigger role in project management. For example:
• you can create one conference to manage all of the projects yourself
Within that project conference, you could include various subconferences for each of the different deliverables of the project, and a project calendar within the conference to schedule the timeline. Students would check the calendar and submit the appropriate deliverable to the respective conference by the scheduled time.
This is a sample conference that shows how a teacher may manage a project.
 • you can create a conference for each project, and manage them yourself
You could schedule the timeline in the class calendar rather than create a separate project calendar, and request that each student submit their deliverable to the appropriate project conference.
 • you can put together a template of a project and get students to fill it in.
You could have areas for the outline, introduction, body, conclusion, bibliography, graphics, and so on.
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