This post is a continuation of my last post on “The last-day-of-class student conference.” That post provides an overview of the project, in which students participate in a student conference modeled after a poster session at an academic conference. This post gets into the details of how to set up the event.

Few teachers have a lot of extra time to invest in event-planning, so I offer my experience here. The colleagues who guided me in shaping the assignment emphasized that planning the conference can quickly get out of hand and helped me minimize time spent nailing down logistical details. Thanks again, Ariana Kalinic and Christie McCullen!

Event planning

• Find a location to host the event early. The campus space that I wanted was booked very early in the quarter, and many other campus spaces required use-fees that I could not provide. Sociology staffer Barbara Laurence helped on this front by suggesting, and securing access to, our department lounge. This turned out perfectly, as it made it easy for people from my department to stop by the event without having to leave the building.
• Provide refreshments! Food makes the space more sociable and sets it apart from a regular classroom experience. My department provides $50 of funds for each class to work with. I chipped in an extra $25 so we could have coffee, tea, and snacks provided by the campus coffee-shop downstairs. Barbara Laurence took care of this for me, too. Thank you Barbara!
• Tell guests to arrive 20 minutes or so after the event begins, to give the students time to set up their posters, as well as time for yourself to make any last announcements.
• Make a plan for displaying posters. I told my students that at least some of them should design their posters to be able to stand on their own. These we put on a table. The rest went on a the walls or on a few easels provided by the department (thanks Barbara!). I brought blue, “paint-safe” tape to use on the walls. Unfortunately, it had very little sticking power. Many of the posters drooped or fell down and needed to be reaffixed during the event, oh well.
• Make a plan for presenting the posters. I originally thought I would divide the students into three or four groups and have each group stand next to their poster during a pre-assigned time. This seemed excessively complicated, however, so I instead followed Christie McCullen’s advice and told everyone to spend half the time at their own poster and the other half circulating. That worked just fine.
• How long will the event last? I had a three hour time slot to work with, but chose to use 1.5 – 2 hours instead (I set an explicit time at which the event would end, but have since forgotten exactly how long it was). There was just enough time to evaluate the work of all 40 student, but the event was was also short enough to sustain the group energy for the duration.

Structuring and evaluating the assignment

• Group work or no group work? I had all my students write their papers separately so I wouldn’t have to deal with complaints about anyone not pulling their weight. But, I let students who wanted to team up on their posters do so. I told them that they would both receive the same grade regardless of who did what on the poster, so they should choose their partners carefully. I also told them they could “divorce” their partners if needed. There were no problems.
• Give explicit guidelines about what is required on the poster, as most of the students will not have made one before. If I had more time, I would have liked to require them to turn in draft posters to be improved upon for the event itself in order to help them learn best practices of visual communication. Instead, I required a proposal and draft for the paper, but not the poster. You can see the assignment prompts at the bottom of this post, or download it here.
• How will you grade the posters? On the advice of my colleagues, I graded all the posters during the event itself so I didn’t have to take home a pile of oversize, falling-apart posters and then return them to students. This plan required me to have brief conversations with each student in front of their poster during the event itself. I created a single spreadsheet with each student’s name and a series of criteria on which to judge their work. I quickly abandoned this approach in the chaos of the event and just gave each student a holistic single grade after I looked at their poster and heard them speak about their work. I worked my way around the room systematically, so students could come stand by their work as they saw me approaching. I also quickly figured out that I only had time for short conversations with each student, and in a few case watched them have conversations with others rather than directly interacting with them myself.