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

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

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