Julia Lane is Writing Services Coordinator at Simon Fraser University
We’d like to invite you to join in the pan-Canadian, collaborative, cross-institutional Procrastination Avoidance Week from March 8-14 2021, coinciding with National Procrastination Week.
Our concept is that we will host a week of shared programming and virtual support, with themes for each day. Our small committee including me and Ruth Silverman of Simon Fraser University, as well as Sandra Smith from the University of the Fraser Valley, have fleshed out this idea and produced this Google Doc that for everyone to participate. Please fill in the google doc by February 16th at midnight Pacific Time if your institution would like to join in the fun. Details are provided below about what we are looking for institutions to contribute. We hope that many institutions from across the country will participate.
We are planning to run the event from Monday, March 8 to Sunday, March 14 from 10 AM – 2 PM Pacific Time so that it won’t be terribly late or terribly early in any of Canada’s time zones, and the Google Doc expresses times in Pacific. The times of the event across the country are:
- Mountain 11 am-3 pm
- Central 12 pm-4pm
- Eastern 1 pm-5 pm
- Atlantic 2 pm-6 pm
- Newfoundland 2:30 pm-6:30 pm
Monday to Friday, we are planning to have at least 4 rooms open throughout the event. These include at least one Program Room in which institutions will offer workshops and activities related to the day’s theme; a quiet supervised Study Hall; a Social Room for students to relax and connect with each other; and a Control Room. Students can go to the Control Room to be directed to the other rooms, see what’s happening in the Programming Room, and be directed to tutoring or other services offered by their particular institution.
Saturday and Sunday, to help students continue to get things done while going easier on participating institutions, we will only have the Study Hall open, and the Study Hall will also house information about institutions’ services that is in the Control Room during the week.
All of the rooms will need to be staffed while they are open. Institutions can choose to staff them with faculty, staff, student employees, or student volunteers, depending on their service model.
In order to participate, we are looking for institutions to contribute the following over the week:
Programming Session(s) that fit the chosen day’s theme
Ideally, we are looking for one or two programs from each institution, those that has gone really well at your institution and that you would like to share more broadly. It is okay to have repeat sessions! We imagine, for example, we will have multiple sessions from different institutions on tools for avoiding procrastination 🙂 If your institution has a program that could “anchor” the theme on a particular day, please let us know!
Supporting staff
We’ll need staffing support to supervise the study hall, social room, and control room (staffed 10-2 Pacific Time) – add columns to sign up for supervision times. Ideally, we would like each institution to offer a shift in each room until we have full coverage.
Please also use the Google Doc linked above with your programming ideas and availability for supervision. The Google Doc has one sign-up table per weekday, another table for Weekend Study Hall coverage, another for institutional services to promote in the Control Room on each day, and finally a table for 2-3 brave souls to sign up to join our organizing committee.
You will notice that there are a number of programming sessions already filled in with no facilitator, including a motivation/ goal-setting session to open the week, 10-minute check-ins to start each day, and a check-out session to end the Friday. Please feel free to sign up to flesh out and lead any of those sessions, in addition to, or instead of, adding your own ideas.
Feel free to add additional rows to the table of institutional services and to the Programming Room sections. If we have more programming than can fit the event’s timing on a particular day, we can add concurrent sessions in additional programming rooms. Conversely, if on a given day we don’t have enough programming offers to fit the four hours, that is fine and we can run with what we have.
After the deadline, the organizing committee will look at the signups, come up with a program for each day, connect with everyone who signed up, and make an effort to solicit volunteers to fill any supervision gaps. We will also be working on the technology, publicity, and add-ons to the week such as social media and/or a way for students to check-in around goals and progress without being in the live sessions. We would particularly welcome colleagues with expertise in these matters to join the organizing committee.
Phew! I think that’s it! I hope that many institutions choose to participate. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please contact me at jhlane@sfu.ca