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| Agile In Education Compass - designed by Stuart Young (Radtac) |
My brother Marco is a primary school teacher in Italy.
From this
perspective we share a common interest, since I am a trainer and I am
interested in how people learn.
I’ve been actually interested in that for more
than 25 years: as a Scout leader it has been very clear for me that educating boys and girls is giving them the
opportunity to learn and become the best they can be.
It is not
by chance that the verb “to educate” comes from the Latin “ex ducere”, which
literally means “to lead out” what a person already potentially is.
Last year
we happened to talk about how to create a learning experience for primary
school kids which would encompass the following:
- Being more adaptable to a kid’s specific learning needs
- Being a meaningful experience involving feelings and physical emotions
- Fostering self-development and co-education
- Training skills which are crucial in the 21st century and the school is traditionally not that good at teaching, e.g.
- self-organization
- leadership
- ability to plan
- imagination
- self-reflection
- dealing with uncertainties and the unknown
On the
other side, I was aware of the many experiences in the field of Agile in
Education, which are summarized on the website agileineducation.org and conceptualized through the Agile Education compass created by a
group of Agile educators at the Scrum Gathering in Orlando in April 2016.
So the
proposal was kind of natural: why not trying a learning experience based on
Agile values and principles? Learning and using the Scrum framework looked to
me the simplest and most straightforward option to help the kids practice
agility at school.
The very
first step was actually to educate Marco in Scrum: I led him through an
introductory session to the Agile manifesto, Scrum and its foundation,
including Empirical Process Control.
This was
enough in catching him up in the idea: the confidence in his older brother did
the rest in accumulating enough enthusiasm and motivation to get going with the
whole experiment J
Basically
we wanted to have a first-hand validation that applying Scrum in a primary
school class is doable, kids enjoy it, they can learn faster and practice
skills they normally do not in a traditional classroom environment.
Below I
will describe the whole concept we adopted, how we structured it, a report of
the different phases and some final results we achieved (I will actually split the whole story over a couple of posts to make each post reasonably short).
Selecting the project
The first
problem to solve was to pick a learning project which was suitable for the
experiment.
It should
have been challenging enough to get a meaningful result out of it.
At the same
time it should have been concrete enough, so that the kids could actually
produce something tangible (iteratively and incrementally) and see the outcome
of their work.
There is no Scrum team without a productJ.
The class
consisted of 19 kids: considering the recommended size of a Scrum team between
3-9 people, the selected learning project should have been suitable to work in
multi-team environment. Multiple Scrum teams had to work in parallel on the
same product and get success by collaborating and integrating their work,
hopefully at each and every iteration.
The natural
choice emerged to be an interdisciplinary geography project, including learning
objectives in arts (mainly image), math (mainly statistics) and humanities.
Students in
the 5th grade are supposed to study the whole Italy and specifically
each of the different 20 regions which form the country. This looked very
promising for creating a backlog of multiple items, which many teams could work
on at the same time: each Product Backlog Item would have been
one of the 20 regions.
Kick-off
The whole
experiment started in the first week of November 2016.
In a previous meeting, Marco had informed all parents about the trial which would have involved their children during the year. He explained them the idea and the rationale and all of them showed curiosity and agreed to move on, based also on the trust they had in the teacher.
The kids were also prepared. They were informed that this year they would have studied geography in a different way: they got full of enthusiasm but also expectations.
In a previous meeting, Marco had informed all parents about the trial which would have involved their children during the year. He explained them the idea and the rationale and all of them showed curiosity and agreed to move on, based also on the trust they had in the teacher.
The kids were also prepared. They were informed that this year they would have studied geography in a different way: they got full of enthusiasm but also expectations.
Whenever I kick-off
one or multiple Scrum teams, I basically help them learn three things:
- Know about the Process
- Know about the Product
- Know about each other
- Deliver an introductory training on Agile and Scrum to all students
- Create and kick-start the different teams
- Getting the teams acquainted with the backlog
- Hold the first Sprint Planning
Marco introduced the day and then we had a 2-hours interactive training so that the kids could understand:
- What is the most suitable approach to solving complex problems, like learning something new
- The Agile values and principles'
- The Scrum roles, events and artifacts
It was just amazing
how they immediately grasped this and made all sense to them.
At the end
of the 2 hours they could explain what a Product Owner or a Sprint is.
After a
short break we moved to their actual classroom where my brother had prepared
all the necessary supply I had
instructed him to buy to facilitate the day and the team work.
So we started
presenting the backlog. To make the final product visual, Marco prepared a
big blank map of Italy, just reporting the borders of the different regions
(see the draft picture below).
Each
backlog item (i.e. representing each of the 20 Italian regions) had to fulfill the
following Acceptance Criteria.
- A construction paper shape of the region must be prepared:
- Borders must conform to the map
- High and low grounds are represented
- Hydrography is represented
- Cities are positioned properly and regional/provincial capitals highlighted
- Different sectors of local economy are represented
- Peculiarities of the region are highlighted
- A report on the whole region must be prepared and shared by the team with the whole class
In that way
the kids had something concrete to produce and an underlying architecture which
made integration easy. At the same time the different teams could work
independently.
Then we
moved to form the Scrum teams: with a class of 19 kids we decided to split them
in three teams. The teacher would have the role of Product Owner and I
would formally act as a Scrum Master for all teams.
However I
knew that I could not be present so I instructed my brother that he
should work as a facilitator as well and take actually care of the
Scrum Mastering part, while I would have coached and consulted him remotely along the
way.
During the
preparation phase we evaluated whether it would be a good idea to
let the kids self-organize in three teams by following a certain number of
constraints, but we discarded the option. Marco did not feel too
comfortable and he wanted to make sure that the groups had enough diversity
from many perspectives, including different learning styles and proficiency at
school, which probably the kids would have not been able to take into the right
consideration themselves.
So we
proceeded with the splitting: the first empirical evidence was that they did
not look surprised at all about how their teacher split them up and no one
complained. This might mean either that the split made sense to them or they
simply did not care or did not dare to speak out about their teacher’s
decision. Having interacted with the kids and having seen the teacher-students relationship
in the class, the first option looked more plausible to me.
Then we
gave time to the different teams to select a team name and logo and enjoy some
practical activity to create their task boards, pick a corner in the classroom
space, hang the whiteboard on the wall and craft their own team space.
The next
step was to stipulate an agreement on our routines.
When it
comes to decide the Sprint length and day/time for the different events, we had
some constraints:
- Marco works only 4 days a week in that class (school week in Italy is 6 days)
- We wanted the kids to work on the project mainly at school, not at home, so that we could observe and facilitate team dynamics
- I had mainly Friday and Saturday available to join them remotely over Skype
The
agreement came pretty constrained:
- Sprint length: 3 weeks
- Sprint Planning: Saturday mornings
- Sprint Review and Retrospective: Friday after lunch
- Daily Scrum: 8.45 in the morning (but 4 times a week, when my brother was in the class)
The
different teams worked on drafting their own team ground rules on a flip-chart,
which they then hung in their team space.
Last step
before moving to Sprint Planning was to draft the first version of Definition
of Done, which I renamed with the slogan “We will have done a good job, if…” to
translate in a more suitable language for 5th graders J
Here below is a picture of how one of the
team’s corner looked like at the time they were building it the first day.
We had
finally everything ready to get going with the first Sprint Planning.
My brother explained
the first few backlog items on top of the backlog, re-read and clarified the
Acceptance Criteria. He mentioned more than once that each team could pull any
backlog item they wanted in the order they were presented, but if they felt
that one item was too much to get done in 3 weeks, he was available to discuss
possible ways to split the work in smaller chunks.
No team actually considered this as necessary and on the other side no team believed they could take more than one
region into the Sprint. The whole class collaborated to agree which team pulled
which of the top 3 items in the backlog.
The teams
moved to decide on how the chosen work would get done.
I instructed them to split
the Backlog items in smaller tasks and the kids even started pulling tasks.
Each
student designed a magnet with his/her own avatar and put it close to a
post-it.
We encouraged pair working from the very beginning.
The day
ended with a celebration.
The kids
were extremely happy and enthusiast. Some of the comments I got from them included:
- “Will you stay with us for the whole school year?”
- “I usually have troubles in following, but today I understood everything”
- “We love you!” (This obviously moved me to tears!)
It looked
like we were on a good track and had managed to create the right foundations
for the experiment to give the expected results.
Side note:
the day after, I met the mother of one of the kids, which is a dear friend and
an ex-school mate of mine.
She stopped me and asked: “What the heck did you do
at school yesterday? My son came back so enthusiast like I have never seen him
before after a school day!”
I was in a
hurry: I simply smiled, hugged her and left. This event triggered the idea to involve the
parents as much as possible moving forward in the experience.
Stay tuned for the continuation of the story in a coming post!
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