Week 11

30/5/17

Agile Learning

  • Culture of Learning
  • agilemanifesto.org  - software development

The key ideas of agile are embodied in the 'Agile Manifesto' - http://agilemanifesto.org/
  • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  • Working software over comprehensive documentation
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  • Responding to change over following a plan
Task Work:
  • Individuals and relationships over academic outcomes and achievement
  • Learning experiences/opportunities over planning documentation
  • Learner collaboration over individual learning
  • Responsive teaching over following a plan
Agile is fundamentally about learning, people, and change - three things we struggle also with in education and handle poorly at the present time.

What does the planning process look like at our school? Very broad. Do we need to take our planning from the Graduate Profile?

Agile vs Waterfall
Every project has 3 main components
Scope
Cost
Schedule

KANBAN
VIsual Card-
To Do:                Doing:                      Done
Kanban
One of the ideas that has been taken from Lean Production by agile practitioners is Kanban - which means 'visual card' in Japanese.
For an example of how Kanban boards can be used to help children plan, see Princess Kanban. This is on the agileschool blog, which you may find interesting. More recent materials are now on the Agile Classrooms site.
Trello
Trello is one of the tools that can be used to create Kanban style boards online. It is an easy-to-use, free and visual way to manage your projects and organise anything. Naturally there are other tools too, but this one seems to be the most popular right now, and amongst teachers and their students too. 
User Stories 
In software development and product management user story statements are often written on story cards following the format: As a (role) I want (something) so that (benefit). The idea is to capture what a user does or needs to do as part of his or her job function. It captures the "who", "what" and "why" of a requirement in a simple, concise way, often limited in detail by what can be hand-written on a small piece of paper.
User stories are short simple descriptions of something that you can see when it has been achieved.
They need to be small and focused enough tto be achieved in a short time frame and allow success to be tested.
A story that is too big is known as an 'epic'.
Epics
User stories are short, simple descriptions of something to be achieved. They need to be small and focused enough to be achieved in a short time frame and allow success to be tested. A story that is too big is known as an ‘epic’ and has to be broken down into smaller stories. ‘Introduce BYOD to the school’ is an epic, and ‘Introduce BYOD to one pilot class’ is still too big. However, ‘Send a survey to families from one class asking if they are willing to provide a device for their child to bring to school’ is a smaller, story-sized step.

The Agile Tearn
Agile teams are self-organising teams.
We will explore this idea using a combination of Boris Gloger’s Ball Point game (Gloger, 2008) and Mike Rother’s Kata in the Classroom (Rother, 2015).  Kata is a term from martial arts. The Improvement Kata is a repeating four-step routine for continuous improvement: Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA). The goal of the ball point game is for each team to get as many balls as possible to pass through the hands of every team member in 2 minutes. The game involves both estimation and self-organisation.
Plan - Do - Check - Act
The four  basic requirements of the game are that:
  1. As each ball is passed between team members, it must have air time
  2. Every team member must touch each ball for it to count
  3. No ball to your direct neighbour on either side, you must pass to your front
  4. Every ball must end where it started. For each ball that does, the team scores 1 point (make sure you count your points)
Servant Leadership
The originator of the servant leadership concept (though inspired by a Herman Hesse story) was Robert Greenleaf. “The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?” (Greenleaf, 1970)
A longer extract from this work is in this week's media
Teachers as Servant Leaders
Servant leadership has been applied by a number of authors to teaching. “The teacher as servant leader functions as a trailblazer for those served by removing obstacles that stand in their path. Part of unleashing another’s talents is helping individuals discover latent, unformed interests. Art, music, and science teachers are prime examples of educators whose genius lies in leading students to discover unarticulated interests.” (Bowman, 2005).
Scrum Agile Lifecycle
Being an agile leader includes applying agile processes. Scrum is a very poplar agile software development process, where the product backlog (of user stories) is broken down onto a series of sprints. In each sprint, a priority list of stories (the sprint backlog) is chosen for completion. The sprint last for a certain period of time (e.g. 2 weeks, 30 days etc.). There are daily stand up meetings during the sprint, and at the end of each sprint a working increment of the software is delivered. In other words, it is only a successful sprint if it delivers something useful.
Pair Programming
 - Computational thinking

Stand Up Meetings
- Daily
- yesterday, what are you going to do today?
Test Driven Developments
- Start with the test of something, then pass the test
- write the nest test, pass that, iterate
the tests evolve and change along with what is being tested



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