High Impact - Our Agile Classroom

This could easily be subtitled: How Agile saved my ass… and my sanity.

Primary schools by their very nature are whirlwinds of creative chaos! Tornadoes of painting, crafting, coding, building, drama, singing and dancing to name just a few all crammed into busy timetables! During the year various initiatives are dreamed up or bandwagons are hopped upon and a whole heap of work can land on our plates, with a short time frame in which to manage it all. This is where agile working transformed my entire outlook on teaching.

During an already hectic term, in the midst of assessments and my semester long PBL project (and a new baby shaving my sleep time and ability to stay behind after work to prepare!), our school decided it wanted to get involved in Book Week. Each class would have to create an exhibition piece by the end of the week based on a country on a randomly allocated continent… ordinarily, this would be an awesome opportunity to really get our teeth stuck into material, but the timing in this instance was less than desirable to me. I needed a way to turn out an exhibition piece in minimal time, with deep learning, interaction and different perspectives…in order to get my class back on track with our 'Big' projects. What I needed was maximum efficiency!

Here we need to roll back a little time:

The last two years I have been working on developing self-directed groups within my classroom. Children are split into small teams who work together towards a superordinate goal – they learn to plan, organise themselves, track their work together and evaluate their progress. My first investigation into this was through a professional development opportunity I attended with my (awesome) colleague Anne Fischer. She booked us into a session about Eduscrum and the work of Willy Wijnands. This was a model which put in very simple, clumsy words took Scrum, a format based on ‘agile’ practices used by many successful companies worldwide to organise and carry out complex projects, and adapted it successfully for the educational setting. After this inspiring workshop and training with Alisa Stolze, I knew I’d entered into something amazing, with oodles of great potential. I was already convinced of the merits of pushing key competencies and soft skills and here was a fantastic vehicle by which to do this!

The worth of collaborative learning was obvious to me, but I had never thought so much about how to do it (sounds ridiculous I know, but hey, we are all at different places on our journey right?). I threw my kids into randomly decided groups and had them hash out something together. They usually worked ‘alone’ within this group if their friend wasn’t a part of it and came together with their piece at the end OR if their friend was in the group, the work would suffer as a result and we would have less work from a group effort than independent work would provide… both scenarios are poor at best when I think back. This time we selected groups differently. I had my students complete a skills inventory. Children who identified themselves as having leadership qualities were chosen as group leaders and they chose their team based solely on the skills they thought were desirable to have in their team. Without seeing any names they created their working groups!

Students folded names over before choosing teams

Next we needed a way to structure the teams and manage their productivity. We created a group Kanban board (a visual way to break down and track the status of bigger chunks of work) – this required some time and various incarnations ranging from simple to more complicated and it required time to train the children how to use them successfully. After a few months the children were competent using their Kanban boards. They would sit and think about what was required of them, they would break this down into tasks, assign the tasks to group members and track the progress of these tasks during the allotted time frame. This was the game changer for me, when I was suddenly aware that my teams were working, without my direction on a complex problem completely successfully. My role was no longer the ‘sage on the stage’ but now ‘guide at the side’…I was free to really stretch the thinking of my teams without having to micro-manage them.

An early version of our group Kanban boards

After a little research into other successful agile practices, I started to use retrospectives after a project with my pupils. Once they had finished a period of work together we would sit and review their overall practice as a group. Where had it gone well, what didn’t work so well and how could they do better next time? This was another epiphany moment – children had never had a chance to evaluate their working efficiency and reflect on what had brought them success and what had caused their problematic moments.

Training students to evaluate their team performance

By integrating these and other practices into daily classroom life we became an agile classroom, we had brought order to chaos and learned to all pull together in a focussed way!

Fast forward to Book Week!

I explained to my children the huge challenge that was ahead of them and unfazed they broke off instantly into their ‘Scrum Groups’. They used group leaders to plan the big picture and then divide up activities to their groups. They worked autonomously with their unique Kanban boards to create an amazing set of ‘final products’ which will contribute to our exhibition piece. In one day we managed to:

- Create a triboard display for the allotted table space full of basic facts about Brazil

- Video a dance to Latin American music

- Organise a catwalk of comtemporary Brazilian fashion

- Video a weather report to show Brazil’s climate and start editing

- Create a guided, animated 3D journey through the Amazon using Excel and narrate it

- Construct a Powerpoint on Brazilian architecture

- Script a podcast about Brazilian cuisine and recipes ready to record!

Which brings me to my reason for writing this. Its not about getting people to use agile methods for darker practices - rather showcasing the benefits of having students who can pull together and work in ways you never thought possible!

I am simply amazed at what they have achieved during this task and during the course of the year. What a testament to teamwork and the creativity brought to the table when children are given ‘structured freedom’ to work in a self-directed manner towards a goal with each bringing their own initiative and strengths!

The last year, together with Anne, we have celebrated the success of this way of working and have trained and encouraged others to begin trying this out in their own classrooms. If we can encourage this methodology from lower in school, we can continually develop these skills and remove the training time required for each class until ultimately the dream scenario is achieved - all children are adept at tackling complex projects in a team - a huge step towards our goal of equipping children for a modern society.

I appreciate this blog is a little longer, but I felt it was a great opportunity to share the super results of agile practice in the classroom. In future blogs I intend to go deeper into the processes involved here, such as the application of Kanban boards/learning canvases, reviews and retrospectives for example… If you have any questions, are interested in any of the ideas here or need some assistance – feel free to get in touch!

To learn more about Eduscrum - check out Willy's work here:

http://eduscrum.nl/en/