The Agile Professor - Creating an Agile Learning Environment for Classrooms and Schools

What about tomorrow morning? Continue with the project? Keep at it? How?

The Creation - the whole thing - continues being created…stars being born, sub-atomic events dithering in and out of existence, and us working away at whatever we do. Besides cash, there is the innate joy of making something, fashioning a thing or a relationship that moves things along just a notch or two. The payoff is there, in the joy. The act of creating is joyful, ask a composer, a poet, an artist, or just ask a Nobel prize winner.

What comes before the act of creation may be a long period of difficult processes, often without either a highly defined problem or an end point to provide a focus. In the middle is the muddle that has a hidden order waiting to make itself clear. The requirement for realizing what lies in waiting is a structural change in the way we view the muddle. This structural change lies at the heart of how the creative process becomes an integrating or unifying experience. Further, it is considered artful when it induces a similar experience in others.

Here is an activity you can try with your colleagues, students, children or agency art directors. The purpose of this experiment is to underline the creative power of a group. Try to have at least six people working together in a group.

Provide each person with six stickies and have them draw up a story-board that shows a simple set of actions. Make it clear they can tell any story but suggest that it could be as simple as brushing hair or peeling an orange to get them started. They have five minutes to sketch out the actions and use all six of the stickies.

When the five minutes are over have each person hold up the story-board they created but have them resist saying anything about it. Then advise that each person will have the benefit of the group working with them to give more dimension to their story, without knowing what any of the stories are.

Identify the first person who will put their story on the line. Have them describe what is in the first frame/panel of their story-board and then in one minute have each of the other five people write down what they imagine the scene to look like, including an action of the characters, setting, costumes, make-up, lighting, camera position, and sound. Have these each read aloud after the one minute is up. Ideas and details start clicking and a lively discussion emerges. Keep this discussion to about a minute. Then do the same one minute response to the next stickie frame/panel. More ideas and details come out that connect to the first frame, in the form of a reflection on what was noted previously. The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth frames/panels are handled the same way with a one minute write down of what is imagined by each person in the group followed by a brief observation of connections back and forth across each of the panels/frames. By the end of the process the coherence and excitement of an integrated story-board are very intense.

Each person then hands over their written comments to the person whose story-board was reviewed. The process continues with each of the six having a turn with the group focused on their story. After that they draw up a new story-board and shoot it.

In essence this is an Agile process. It is composed of;

One true metric = a good story

A product owner with a backlog = six frames/panels of a story

Team work in iterations for each story = five one minute iterations as views on frames written by team members

Reflection meetings = integration of ideas across the whole set of six frames/panels

Meeting with the product owner = important feedback for the team/group

The process is as natural as a conversation and as effective as thoughtfulness, humor, and helpfulness can make any group/team activity be.

It is important to note that the structure of the creative process shifts back and forth between the individual and the group/team. In doing so it provides a concrete example of a creative process that advances learning, trust, thought, imagination, and further action. There is a joy in the process as the product owner lights up with new thoughts and ideas triggered by the gifts received from the other members of the group/team.

For deeper/denser reading on these matters I would suggest the following:

The Hidden Order of Art by Anton Ehrenzweig

The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by Lewis Hyde

One of the Agile Axioms: We are creators.

It takes a certain effort to contemplate mystery and bring an idea into the realm of thought. When this happens it may be considered a form of inspiration. It takes further effort to bring an idea from the world of thought into the realm of words. Texts and discourses may take years to produce and refine. More effort is needed to move from words into manifesting an action or an object that is derived from those words. Experience with materials joined to ideas in such a way as to inspire and assist others by the results is the domain of artists and scientists.

The linked sequence outlined above, of an idea coming to the realm of thought, then to words, then to action is essentially the creative process. It is not obvious, it is not easy, and you cannot force it. Then how on earth do you get it?

Creativity in individuals is ultimately reflected into the community in a variety of forms, and as cultures composed of many communities evolve over time there is an effect on individual creativity that is progressive and transforming. The collective result is that civilization advances or in other words without creativity it does not.

Today at lunch, eating curried noodles, we talked at length about factors that influence the capacities of our students. Learning habits and skill sets acquired in public school over twelve years are only one part of what each student has to work with when they come into our art program. Other factors are related to peer group pressures, media portraits of life, family experiences, teacher training, government funding for schools, and training designed specifically to meet and pass tests. Because our art program is taught at the university level students are not always prepared for the demands of the course work. Our hope is that we can become focused on using our observations to become more astute in refining our methods to teach creativity.

The Agile strategies of using iterations (cycles, sprints), reflection meetings, a queue of work (backlog), one true metric, and group work to move a project forward are valuable notions for dealing with the following questions:

• How do we break down learning habits that are formed mainly in terms of following specific steps, as in following a recipe, to get a predetermined result?
• Imitation is one way of learning but what happens when there is no longer anyone to imitate?
• How do we help students design their own problem sets and carry forward a variety of plans to tackle those problems?
• How do we prepare them to take risks and have no fear of failure?
• When they have successes how do they continue learning in an environment that is changing everything around us all so rapidly?
• In the moment of success or failure how do they maintain their dignity?

Our discussion ended with a reference to Marie Montessori who was able to develop a learning environment based on her observations of how children with learning disabilities were learning in terms of herself (they loved her), each other, the classroom setting, and with their senses. When her methods were applied to normal children they took off like rockets.

Like her, we also need to document what we are learning about teaching creativity but not with young children, rather at the level of these young adults. Their potential for change is close at hand…their dignity gives rise to the destiny of our community.

 

We are Creators

Reality is Perceived

Change is Natural

October 18th, 2007

Last night Sky and I talked about how a stand-up meeting can work with thirty students. Work with five or six students in a group for about five minutes. Work with five or six groups one group at a time. This way each group only misses five or six minutes of class time during their meeting. Everyone else stays at work. Ask each student what they are doing to advance their work and how you can help if they need help. If a discussion seems needed carry it out with the student sometime after the stand-up meeting. Otherwise schedule help sessions on the spot.

There are a few good articles already out there about using agile methods in an educational context. This is a summary of some the can be found quickly.

First, on Agile Advice:

Agile Classroom Management - using Agile to teach Agile!

Learning Vocabularies - more examples of a cyclical approach to learning.

Learning Circle - Interview with Garry Berteig

Groups do Better at Problem Solving than Individuals - link to a research paper.

Connecting Vocabularies - Cycles of the Mind - examples of a cyclical approach to learning.

Scrum Saves the Day for Media Student - an example of the use of agile methods for a group project in an academic setting.

Amplifying Learning through Fostering Critical Reflection

Agile, the Adult Educator and Ethical Considerations

Transformative Learning and Agile

Using Agile Work Practices to Develop a Seminar

A Student Documentary Film Project - story of a class project using agile methods

And then all the rest:

Experiences with Agile Teaching in Project-Based Courses [pdf] (poster format)

Agile Education Methodologies (blog, Dec. 2006 - Sean Keesler)

Educational Technology (a presentation and a one-pager on agile education)

Agile Education and Pragmatic Schooling (a discussion thread about agile, programming and homeschooling - use “Next in Thread” to continue reading the discussion)

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If you know of other examples online, please let us know in the comments so that we can add to this list! Thanks!

October, second week, 2007.

At a faculty meeting I outlined how a stand-up meeting can be a useful way to have students begin a class with a greater degree of focus. The method I suggested was to stand in a circle with a group of about six students and ask them two questions: “What did you do since the last class that develops the project we are working on, and if there are problems, what can I do to help overcome them?”. This can be done without much fuss and in about five minutes another group can be handled in the same manner. At the end of the class period a second stand-up meeting with the same groups is scheduled and the questions now are; ” What are you going to do to advance your work on the project?” and “What can I do to help?”

The faculty thought this was a worthwhile idea and agreed to try it out.

I found that my students responded easily to this simple format and that they got to work faster than usual and sustained focus through the six hours we were together. At the end of the class stand-up meeting, one student asked for help, we agreed on a time to meet, and completed a task in half an hour that would have been difficult for her to do alone in a couple of hours.

THE STORY

I had spent the Thanksgiving week-end driving to Fort McMurray, AB in a vehicle we had bought in Denver, CO. Several times on the trip I had thought about how a stand-up meeting might just possibly be the thing to help students stay more focused on their work. At the same time it would give me a more specific way to help them in a strategic way, rather than just from moment to moment during class times.

Our weekly faculty meeting was held in the print making studio during lunch. The discussion around student activities, engagement, and completed work, prompted me to outline what I had been thinking about over the week-end. After I finished outlining the reasons for the stand-up meeting the delight in the voice of Robin, our printmaker, was a real confirmation of how useful this tactic would be. I went on to attribute the idea to Scrum/Agile methods, and suggested that in addition we create an “information radiator” that would be for our faculty team. At first this would be our assignments, course outline and class logs, in other words our documentation of activities that we bring to the studio course work. Again, after sorting through the benefits to ourselves and to the students we agreed to do this.

My Tuesday afternoon class is in sculpture, and I began this one with a stand-up meeting. The students responded with a bit of a surprise but took to the procedure very easily. Each of them indicated what they had been doing since the last class and none of them had hit any real obstacles that required my help. As we completed the six hours of sculpture class that evening - it goes from 2PM-5PM and 7PM-10PM- one of the students asked for help. This was in terms of fixing a pair of wooden blocks, that had to be formed, to the interior of a metal mesh armature she was constructing. She is building a figure that will have a crank to make wind and sound effects emerge from the torso. I was able to show her how to construct a template and map it to the wood we would use as blocks. Also this involved showing her how to use a skill saw, change blades, clamp the material and cut it out. When she finished using the air staple gun to fasten the blocks to the mesh and stood the figure up - she just beamed!

This is normally a stubborn student who will balk at suggestions and decline advice from any of the faculty members. I think the stand-up meeting gave her the opportunity she needed to ask for help in a new way. Learning habits prevent students from asking for help in certain classroom situations and I think that engaging them in the stand-up meeting puts the responsibility for learning and action squarely into the students hands. The resulting sense of self determination is subtle but very much a sweet moment for young adults.