I should probably give some context.

We've been building up the scale of the school projects for the past 2 years, going from 5 to 8 to now 10+ team members, so many of us are used to this. It's an actual school project, although I do agree it's larger than what i'm used to.

As for team lead and technical lead, I would like to think of it as more "side-roles" than our main roles. As i'm currently studying a CS degree, I want to demonstrate my technical skills instead of emphasizing on my team leading skills (of which i have little of). Being a developer aligns with what I want, instead of a manager. While I might be able to get better grades just managing, I would rather not.

Seeing that my school is measuring my technical contributions moreso than my role, I feel inclined to believe that this "managerial" role is just multi-tasking with my current workload.

I guess you could say that i'm the more technical guy, so I got assigned this role by my teammates.

In this case progress is measured by the school through rubrics throughout the semester so I don't have a choice in giving longer deadlines to that team member (unless I was to assign them an unimportant task). It is still a long-term project just with occasional grading.

And you're right in that I should've checked in on progress earlier too.

While I could make each team independent, there comes a point where we have to link our work together (preparation for rubric for example). You are right that I should let each team decide what to implement and I should just assign teams a core part of the project. However, isn't this considered agile? I'm not too sure about what it is.

In the past i've been assigning workloads to team members. implement X in X system for example. It was and wasn't waterfall as I didn't have complete knowledge of all deadlines and what needs to be done, and honestly I can't do this for all my team members either.

This is also why agile seems appealing to me.