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

One way of setting the table (quick) is for our selves, another way (flowers) is for a loved one, another is for the routine (place settings) family meal, another way (spectacle) is for guests, and another way (random) for parties. Each form reveals an intention and provides insight into felt relationships between all the things and processes, the person who makes the placements, and the responses of the people at the meal.

The description or definition of a type of relationship between objects/processes is in itself a new class of relationship between those same objects/processes. This is a form of relationship that is derived from the participant/observer. This form and the evolution of the form may be understood as learning.
Another example:

First: I have students bring three or four objects from home to paint in primary colors including white and black. The purpose is to develop a pair of tondo (round) paintings from a still life.

Second: I put a blank canvas on the model stand, 6 feet by 4 feet, and have students place the painted objects (12) one after another in turns until there are twelve objects on the surface.

This step has three parts, the first is to move one object of the twelve into a better configuration with the rest. Taking turns the students then move two of the objects to sweeten the relationships between all the objects. They are then instructed to move two objects and subtract one from the surface if desired. Another person with their turn can bring back an object someone else has removed. The configuration of ten to twelve objects is now complete. It is a 3D configuration or sculptural setting.

Third: The next step is to draw lines of force between the objects on the surface of the canvas. Each person using a charcoal goes in turn. Two turns are used to draw these relationships with any kind of line that serves.

Fourth: Then we remove all the objects. What remains is a drawing on canvas that is unique in itself. The drawing refers to the objects that were once on the canvas but is now an object in its own right.

Fifth: Have each person place a dot where they believe the center of the drawing is. Then to place four marks on the perimeter that would be where the circle would be if it were to be painted on a tondo form.

Sixth: After these points are set down we replace the objects that had been removed. They are placed in a new way, keeping in mind the sculptural relationship between the objects and the drawing in charcoal that is on the canvas.

Seventh: After the colored objects have been placed and shifted for better relationship in a similar way to the first cycle of placements a final piece of drawing is done. Each person has a chance to draw a complete circle around the objects in any way they choose. This completes the process of building a still life.

Eighth: Realize the objective of painting two tondo forms from two vantage points 180 degrees from each other. Zoom in if need be and paint a detail of the still life or zoom out to get everything on the model stand.

The process is reviewed and discussed with the students in order to help them understand the flexibility of change and how the relationships between objects can be described by the lines which in turn establish a new order of relationships.

The conclusion is in effect that: to describe or define a relationship between objects will probably require a new arrangement of relationships between those same objects.

You can see how the drawing elements show a relationship from a former placement between the objects as the lines would normally touch the objects. Now the objects are placed a second time and the drawing exists as a separate entity equal in its influence to any of the objects.

This is something we all do when we set the table for a meal.
In this exercise the drawing or lines are comparable to words as descriptions of relationships. The description or definition of a type of relationship between objects/processes is in itself a new class of relationship between those same objects/processes. This is a form of relationship that is derived from the participant/observer. Over time this form reveals an evolution of relationships. This evolution may be understood as a form of learning.

On Nov. 7th, I presented a ten minute version of the relationship between individual and group learning and how important that can be in the workplace. To do this, I used a presentation model from the Instructional Skills Workshop.

http://www.iswnetwork.ca/

I used the learning circle in the first two minutes to illustrate the objectives. Action, Reflection, Learning, Planning in light of guidance is amplified in the relationship between the individual and the group/team.
Connecting Vocabularies - Cycles of the Mind

For a project I used the penny exercise used in illustrating the differences between a waterfall, a lean, and an agile method of moving pennies. A good way to illustrate the power of a “flat” organization in dealing with this type of problem.

http://www.agileadvice.com/archives/2006/08/waterfall_lean.html

http://www.agileadvice.com/archives/2005/12/penny_queueing.html

At the end of the ninth minute I asked how the Lean and the Agile methods could be used in a real work situation by the participants, in their own work place. This proved to be difficult for all the participants but one who had been to a longer presentation on Agile methods.

What I learned was that most of the participants needed the example provided by the penny exercise but even more they needed some further examples to help them bridge what they had learned to their own work. Only then would they have any answers to my two questions.

There was further discussion around how ISW methods could be brought to the attention of the faculty as a potential method for professional development.

Beauty may be understood and experienced as the highest form of order. Go and look at a stream of water beginning to freeze -ice forming- sun shinning on both ice surfaces and the deeps. Clouds reflected on the surface movements and stones waiting for snow.

In the broadest sense we live and move in a matrix of names and attributes.  Our efforts to acquire insight into the realities that we perceive generate a multitude of names of specific things and their attributes. The attributes of these things are typically discussed in terms of relationships, as gradually we recognize a connectedness between these things and the various degrees of interdependence that pertain to them. As the physicist David Boehm has observed; clouds are known as nouns but are better understood as verbs that are constantly changing manifestations of the evaporation cycle and temperature differentials.

Change is natural and tends towards either integration or disintegration. The balance between integration and disintegration is dynamic and can be thought of as an axiom of existence.  A metaphor of this balance is the cycle of the seasons: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. The seasons occur because of the tilt of the earth’s axis relative to the sun, and as the cycle repeats itself the surface of the planet is modified annually and over the millennia. Change is natural.

On any one-day we normally don’t pay too much attention to how the cycle of seasons is making a change to the planet, rather we think about how the weather will influence our personal plans. However, if you grow crops more attention is given to weather patterns and how they might influence a harvest. Or, if you are a sailor weather patterns are also given due consideration for charting a course across an ocean. You do the best you can with weather, as it is often a bit unpredictable. The metaphor attempts to show how change is predictable on a large scale (seasons) for the whole planet and not predictable at small scale (daily) for the individual human being.

The cycle of seasons developed an effort in many cultures to predict weather patterns and events related to movements of the sun, moon, and stars. The ability to predict when to plant a crop and when to expect migrations of animals lay at the foundation for secure food production.  Secure food production is a hinge point for developing a civilization.  Civilizations rise and fall. The current anxieties developing around the evidence of climate change will not doubt precipitate changes in the individual and collective lives of people on the planet. How will these changes create a new awareness of our relationships to each other and to the planet as a whole ecology?  Among other things we will require a reformation of educational strategies to cope with the magnitudes of change.

There is a requirement for educational processes to be reconsidered.  Establishing a set of relationships that are integrative rather than disintegrative will require a good deal of experimentation and a more profound insight into what it is that enables human beings to create beauty. Beauty is indicated here because for human beings not everything has a material cause, and not every material cause has a material effect. Art and science, the private life of the individual and religion each contribute to the achievement of beauty. There is an implicit and explicit set of relationships between these features of our individual and collective lives. How do we educate for all of these relationships in a good way?

A feature of Agile methodology that is most important is the relationship of the individual to the group or team as a means of learning, and learning fast.  In education it seems critical that we adopt strategies that enable us to learn in groups, which provide learning based on short cycles and processes that can be modified to suit requirements. Agile methods can contribute a great deal to these strategies.

The comments above are only a small part of what the discourse needs to address.

On the matter of development of education and its relationship to consciousness see:

Bateson, Gregory: Steps to an Ecology of Mind
Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

Paul Hanley: to participate in an ongoing discussion about the future of agriculture both locally and globally and to read the latest postings on sustainability strategies. www.thespiritofagriculture.com