I’m 6 months into my job as faculty at the Centre for Digital. My primary objective is to train graduate students in scrum project management for their industry projects. It’s been a great experience guiding a very smart cohort as I get to observe their personal transformation based on the content we teach them and how.
A way of reflecting with the student teams is through the mid-term peer feedback. It’s a regular practise in our program that students give each other face-to-face feedback in order for them to grow beyond the context of the project.
As a bonus, the students get to give me feedback which allows me to get a reality check if the students are receiving the right type of mentorship from me. Here is a set of feedback from one of the teams:
The exercise we use is called “The Learning Matrix” – which invites feedback on “what works”, “what needs to change”, “ideas how to change” and “thank you’s”.
I’m glad they find my role valuable and that they now have the foundation they need in order to run the project by themselves.
My teaching style involves being very active and hands-on in the early weeks of the team projects. Now that the teams have established an effective rhythm to continuously improve and know how to strategize their sprints, I get to step back and focus on co-teaching at the summer MDM camp for teens.
The rest of the term will reveal if grad-students have mastered the management tools and style to produce results that will delight their clients.
