I learned my lesson about letting my students come up with their own ideas

Now I assign projects and let them focus on applying skills and being creative in their approach

Last year a few of my students decided to change their final projects at the last minute because they couldn’t find solid data to support their research, interviews, ideas. This was a backward approach from the outset that I should’ve caught early and advised against.

This year, I’ll give much more clear instructions about the approach I suggest and the workflow I advise. While previously, I had them develop story ideas for a few weeks while they learned about how to use spreadsheets and analyze data, the tried and true way to go about research and reporting is to examine datasets and then derive story ideas directly from what they discover by performing data analysis.

It’s one of those things that I thought I already knew but didn’t fully understand until I ran into that same problem with multiple students. So I’ll screen datasets first and work with them on finding the story in the numbers. That, in itself, is a lesson to focus on.