A 14-year-old high school freshman, who’s my son’s basketball coach until team practice resumes, recently illustrated the power of project management to turn grades around.

As we all know, remote schooling has been difficult for both children and parents this year. As he and I talked about how school was going, he shared that like many students his grades were dropping too.

He said that part of the problem was keeping track of all his assignments from different teachers. This piqued my interest as a project manager, and asked him if I could run a few ideas by him to organize the work. He kindly agreed and I offered him the following two suggestions.

1) Compile Assignments in One Place

Take all of your school assignments and write them down in one place, like a notebook, sticky note, whiteboard, or chalkboard. The list should include what the task is and when it’s due.

You can refer to the list whenever you need to and don’t have to worry about missing something. Plus, there’s the satisfaction of checking off a task when it’s done.

Another option is a Kanban board, which is a large table of all the work on a posterboard or whiteboard. A Kanban board shows project workflow from left to right in columns across the top with headings like “To Do”, “Doing”, “Need Help” and “Done”. Write all of your tasks down on sticky notes and move them from left to right across the board as you make progress.

2) Schedule Check-in Meetings

Parents and kids can have a weekly check-in meeting about how things are going in school.

During the check-in, discuss the following three simple questions, and consider using the analogy of a rose. The fully bloomed rose flower represents something positive; the thorn represents something uncomfortable and negative; and the flower bud represents the future – a flower that’s about to bloom.

These are the three questions (credit to Bruce Feiler) to ask:

1) What worked well this week – the rose flower?

2) What did not work well this week/what do I need help with – the thorn?

3) What will I work on next week – the flower bud?

My son’s coach thought this check-in meeting would be helpful. I assumed that all teenagers wanted to be left alone, but he actually welcomed his mom’s involvement.

Project Management Works!

At the next basketball practice two weeks later, I asked him how school was going. He said he was keeping up with all his assignments and feeling good about it!

He’s using a notebook to write down and track assignments and having meetings with his Mom twice a week. She reviews his grades from that week and talks with him about how things are going.

He implemented the new processes at the beginning of the school semester. This helped him feel like he was getting a fresh start and could see positive progress from the beginning.

He was happy about it and the processes didn’t seem to be too much of a burden. It was encouraging for me to see how two small changes made such a positive impact on his schoolwork.

Attending school remotely is challenging for many kids. However, I hope these simple project management techniques may help them turn things around.

More detail on how to create these homework systems is available as a download on my resource page as the “QuickStart Guide for Organizing Schoolwork and Chores.” I also review additional techniques here.

Good luck and let me know how it goes!

Hilary Kinney is the author of Project Management for Parents, a timeless book that provides resources for busy parents to streamline life at home. She is a certified Professional Project Manager with 17 years of experience at a Fortune 500 company.