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

Symbiotic Learning between the team and the individual.

After being with Mishkin for a three day Scrum training I saw the possibility of using the backlog as a model for a review of coursework. As the instructor or product owner of the course I bring to the class a backlog of requirements. When the class acts as a team they can be seen as participating in a series of sprints that make up a project. The project is the completed course.

This is an outline of steps taken to try out that possibility.

The first step was to arrange seating around a table long enough for each person to be seated comfortably with writing materials. This is comparable to a collocated team.

The second step was to outline the purpose of the session as the learning part modeled by the Learning Circle. The Learning Circle presents a sequence of Action, Reflection, Learning, and Planning carried out in terms of guidance.

http://www.agileadvice.com/archives/2006/04/connecting_voca.html

The Action part of the Learning Circle can be compared to the sprint activities and the Reflection part of the learning circle is comparable to the demo and retrospective in the sprint.

The third step was to have the team list each of the main elements that were worked on in the class through the semester. There were ten Media Activities, ten Movies analyzed, and six Handouts. Each of these elements could be compared to a sprint.

The fourth step was to have each person spend between one and two minutes to write what he or she had learned from the first of these elements. After finishing the writing in this time-boxed manner these thoughts were shared with the group. This simple process was used for each of the twenty-six elements that composed the main features of the course work in the semester.

The fifth step was to remind the individuals to take notes and to recognize the learning that is acquired through having the team focus however briefly on the whole of the course in terms of each of the main elements. This is to indicate the symbiotic relationship between the individual and the team.

There was excellent feedback from students after this exercise.

It may be that after a demo and a retrospective the team would benefit from such an activity as outlined above in order to make what was learned more evident to each individual, including the product owner and Scrum Master. This kind of review of each of the pieces of a backlog would take some time when applied in terms of either a finished sprint of a completed project. The results would be of benefit to the team as they advance into the next sprint or whole project with increased understanding of each other and the work.

NEXT: a mapping of the Learning Circle and a sprint/project.