ORLANDO, Fla. — An innovator talk as part of this year’s ISTE+ASCD annual conference explored the process of creating the student-led SDG Warriors podcast, which includes conversations with scientists, explorers and changemakers, focused on addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Student lead Simar Mohanty and educator and mentor Kamal Preet shared how the collaborative project, created across multiple locations and time zones, offers students tangible lessons for the workforce, building leadership, problem-solving and project management skills.
Many of the project’s challenges – from scheduling to communication and workflow – mirror those students will see in the workplace. A standard operating procedure document created at the start of the project was designed to guide them, Preet shared, but things didn’t always go as planned.
Being the student team lead, Mohanty said she is the one to see problems first “before they become big enough to name,” like who is replying to messages or who is consistently joining meetings late.
“Those signals taught me more about managing people and project management than anything I’ve ever encountered,” Mohanty said.
Coordinating team meetings across time zones required a focus on equity, Preet said. “Efficiency says find the time that works for the most people. Equity says to ask who is consistently holding the inconvenient slot and rotate it…” she said.
Mohanty put this into practice using World Time Buddy, a free scheduling tool for viewing different time zones side by side. This helped solve the problems she had been seeing with uneven participation.
The group also tracked the project using Google Sheets because it is a tool that everyone already knew, Mohanty said. This allowed them to keep track of deadlines, statuses, notes and more with “zero friction,” a must for an all-volunteer student team.
As an unexpected plus, this approach also made the workload visible to everyone at once, enabling team members to offer help to their peers without being nudged or reminded, fostering transparency and empathy, Preet said.
“The real skill being built here is proactive coordination, seeing the shared resource under pressure and self-organizing around it without being directed.”
Mohanty shared some things she’d tell a younger version of herself just starting the project, stressing that the challenges faced along the way are what builds the most valuable professional skills.
“The chaos is the credential – you’re earning it right now.”
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