Professional Development Intro

Classroom Activities

Our examples of classroom activities span from middle school through to adults studying for their Masters in Education. Some examples read like a guide or synopsis of the lesson, some of them are first and foremost a reflection about agile principles that are supported by a classroom activity or unit.

Authors: Paul Magnuson, Nicola Cosgrove

Introduction

We’ve been talking about and experimenting with agile in education since 2014-2015. In Summer 2016 we wrote the first sample lesson for this publication, intending to collect examples from other teachers interested in agile education. We didn’t get submissions like we hoped for, so the project rested forgotten somewhere in the back of Google drive.

Almost forgotten. We reopened the folder and dusted off the files. This time we’re pursuing this project more, well, agiley. We’re contributing the first vignettes and posting them our research center’s website, www.las.ch/laser. And we’re inviting you, a teacher interested in agility, who is perhaps experimenting with kanban, scrum, or an agile mindset, to share your experiences in the same format. And then we’ll iterate.

Overview of Agile in Education

One of the earliest to apply agility in school, John Miller (Agile Classrooms) began experimenting with scrum in 2009. In 2011, Steve Peha shared a presentation at Yahoo called Agile Schools - How Technology Saves Education (Peha, 2011). In the presentation he correctly pointed out how initiatives like No Child Left Behind have failed in the US, and how agility, applied to education, may be a much more productive route.

In 2012, Willy Wijnands of Ashram College in the Netherlands, along with his colleagues, began translating scrum into eduScrum. Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of scrum and proponent for its application beyond the software world, referenced eduScrum in his book, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time.

It’s Sutherland’s mention of eduScrum that brought us in contact with both John Miller and Willy Wijnands in October 2014. Since that time both John and Willy have been on our campus more than once and we have, on separate occasions, visited Willy at Ashram College in December 2018 and June 2019. During those years, from 2014 until now, we’ve experimented with scrum, kanban, an agile toolkit for teachers, and agility in general in middle school, high school, and university classes, as well as in faculty meetings and for long term projects like curriculum review and school accreditation. We’ve also trained and published about agility.

Writing and talking about agility in education is rewarding, if only because it feels so right. Over time, though, we realized that we could share and teach better if we had a collection of solid examples of what you might call agility in education. Perhaps because our own focus was largely on the agile mindset, and not a fixed process, explaining exactly what we meant when we said agile this, agile that, wasn’t always easy. We also may have felt a bit uncomfortable in our own clothes at some points when colleagues mentioned that “they did agile” or when agility was mistaken simply for flexibility, and so on.

At any rate, we determined that a set of short examples from a variety of contexts would support the conversation around agility very well. We created a few prototypes in Summer 2016, following some promising applications in a graduate class, and then asked others to share their examples.

The additional examples didn’t come and instead of scaling down the project, which would have led to its completion, at least in an MVP type of way, we let the project drop. Beware the big plan! Luckily, our involvement in a push by the Scrum Alliance in Fall 2019 to create a specific certification for educators (the Agile Certified Educator) rekindled our interest, and now, with the proper scope for a first iteration, we are underway again.

Here is our first iteration of classroom, schoolwide, and organizational applications of the agile mindset, following a simple template, to share the agile mindset. The template suggests which agile concepts you might find in each vignette, and which of the 10 practices of EDgility (Magnuson, Tihen, Cosgrove and Patton, 2019), our own attempt at describing an agile mindset in education, are illustrated.

If you are interested in contributing lessons to this collection, please see the template in the appendix and write to us at [email protected] and [email protected].

References

Peha, S. (2011). YUI Theater — “Agile Schools - How Technology Saves Education,” Retrieved February 18, 2020, from https://yuiblog.com/blog/2011/11/29/video-agileschools/.

Magnuson, P., Tihen, B. Cosgrove, N, & Patton, D. (2019). (Getting Agile at School. In Agile and Lean Concepts for Teaching and Learning)[https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-13-2751-3_6]. Parsons, D. & MacCallum, K. (Eds.). Singapore: Springer.

Miller, J. (n.d). Agile Classrooms. Retrieved February 18, 2020, from https://www.agileclassrooms.com/.

Sutherland, J. (2015). Scrum: the art of doing twice the work in half the time. London: Rh Business Books.

Wijnands, W. (n.d.). eduScrum® - Collaboration That Gives You Wings. Retrieved from https://eduscrum.nl/en.

Magnuson, P., Cosgrove, N, (Pulling Agile into Education: Examples to Learn by)[https://resources.finalsite.net/images/v1588666031/lasch/g7doekszztnllylegg6d/Pullingagileineducation_Examplestolearnby.pdf]. Leysin American School Educational Research

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