Examples of Agile in Education
Paul Magnuson
Nicola Cosgrove
February 2020
We’ve been talking about and experimenting with agile in education since 2014-2015. In
Summer 2016 we wrote the first sample lesson for this publication, intending to collect examples
from other teachers interested in agile education. We didn’t get submissions like we hoped for,
so the project rested forgotten somewhere in the back of Google drive.
Almost forgotten. We’ve found the folder and the files and are dusting them off. This time we’re
pursuing this project more, well, agiley. We’ll write this short article for our research center’s
website. And then we’ll share it with you, a teacher interested in agility, who is perhaps
experimenting with kanban, scrum, or an agile mindset. And then we’ll iterate.
One of the earliest to apply agility in school, John Miller (Agile Classrooms) began
experimenting with scrum in 2009. In 2011, Steve Peha shared a presentation at Yahoo called
Agile Schools - How Technology Saves Education (Peha, 2011). In the presentation he rather
correctly pointed out how initiatives like No Child Left Behind have failed in the US, and how
agility, applied to education, may be a much more productive route.
In 2012, Willy Wijnands of Ashram College in the Netherlands, along with his colleagues, began
translating scrum into eduScrum. Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of scrum and proponent for its
application beyond the software world, referenced eduScrum in his book, Scrum: The Art of
Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time.
It’s Sutherland’s mention of eduScrum that brought us in contact with both John Miller and Willy
Wijnands in October 2014. Since that time both John and Willy have been on our campus more
than once and we have, on separate occasions, visited Willy at Ashram College in December
2018 and June 2019. During those years, from 2014 until now, we’ve experimented with scrum,
kanban, an agile toolkit for teachers, and agility in general in middle school, high school, and
university classes, as well as in faculty meetings and for long term projects like curriculum
review and school accreditation. We’ve also trained and published about agility.
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Writing and talking about agility in education is rewarding, if only because it feels so right. Over
time, though, we realized that we could share and teach better if we had a collection of solid
examples of what you might call agility in education. Perhaps because our own focus was
largely on the agile mindset, and not a fixed process, explaining exactly what we meant when
we said agile this, agile that, wasn’t always easy. We also may have felt a bit uncomfortable in
our own clothes at some points when colleagues mentioned that “they did agile” or when agility
was mistaken simply for flexibility, and so on.
At any rate, we determined that a set of short classroom examples from a variety of contexts
would support the conversation around agility very well. We created a few prototypes in
Summer 2016, following some promising exercises in a graduate class, and then asked others
to share their examples.
The additional examples didn’t come and instead of scaling down the project, which would have
led to its completion, at least in an MVP type of way, we let the project drop. Beware the big
plan! Luckily, a push by the Scrum Alliance in Fall 2019 to create a specific certification for
educators (the Agile Certified Educator) rekindled our interest, and now, with the proper scope
for a first iteration, we are underway again.
Below we present two sample lessons, following a simple template, to show what we are
interesting in collecting from others for a larger publication: instances of teaching and learning,
at the classroom level, that are informed by the agile mindset and have the goal of creating a
learning environment infused with values related to agility: self-determination, small bets,
feedback, learning through iterative work, and so on.
If you are interested in contributing lessons to this collection, please see the template in the
appendix and write to us at [email protected] and [email protected].
Peer Review of Academic Papers
Agile concepts
● Kanban board
● Timeboxing
● Iterations
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Learning & Teaching
In a week-long summer graduate course, four students wrote an academic paper of
approximately 15 pages on a change process that they could implement in their own school
setting.
The paper had a number of required sections, including abstract, introduction, background,
problem statement, literature review, change framework, conclusion, references, and
appendices. Students shared their papers, as a Google doc, with each other and the instructor
to facilitate peer review.
The students each created a personal kanban board with four columns:
To write Writing Ready for peer Just reviewed
review
On Monday the students made a sticky note for each section of their paper and placed them in
the “To write” column.
By Wednesday the students were ready to begin the process of critique and revision. This was
their process:
1. Students updated their personal kanban boards. It was easy to see at a glance that all
students now had some sections of their paper in the “Ready for peer review” column.
2. We agreed on a time-box of forty minutes. Students and the instructor, as peer
reviewers, selected a section (a sticky note, which they initialed) to critique.
3. When a review of a particular section was finished, the reviewer moved the sticky note
to the “Just reviewed” column and chose a new section, either from the same or a
different scrum board.
4. Nearly all sections had been critiqued and reviewed when the time-box expired. Using a
thumbs up, thumbs down (Roman) vote, students either decided to finish the remaining
few sections or leave them for the evening outside of class time.
5. On Thursday, students reset their kanban boards, according to their progress from the
evening before, and we redid the process.
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Source
From a course taught for Endicott College, Prague, 2016
Questions: Paul Magnuson, [email protected], Twitter: @zebmagnuson
Reviewing and tracking work completed
Agile concepts
● Kanban board
● Iterations
● Collaborative planning
Learning & Teaching
Students in a middle school class had been working closely on using a kanban board in class
and had good control over it and how it worked for them. They enjoyed making the plans for
each lesson, which led me to introduce an end-of-lesson planning sheet. After each class, we
left five minutes for planning time, which meant that students could suggest what they wanted to
work on next class, based on what they had actually completed. When necessary, students
made decisions regarding who would lead on certain activities. This was then noted on our
sheet and posted on the kanban board.
The end-of-lesson planning sheet consisted of the following columns:
Date/Lesson What will we work on next Who will lead/what will we
class? need
Lesson 3 ● Warm-up ● Student A
● Shot practice ● Teacher
● Film shots ● We need our phones
● Start tournament ● Student B
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● Students were able to use the end-of-lesson planning sheet to help remind themselves,
when they entered the class, what had to be set-up or ready to go.
● If the teacher or a student was absent, work could be easily seen and tracked by anyone
on their return.
● Students had ownership of what they learned, how they learned it, and in what order.
● Collaboration with the teacher allowed for changes in the curriculum, and the time spent
and the depth of activities were appropriate for the students.
● The sheet provided exactly what had been worked on, which served as a curriculum
map for the teacher, as well as a visible learning journey for the students.
Source
From a middle school course at Leysin American School, Leysin, 2019
Questions: Nic Cosgrove, [email protected]. Twitter: @agileinthealps
References
(2011). YUI Theater — Steve Peha: "Agile Schools - How Technology Saves
Education," Retrieved February 18, 2020, from
https://yuiblog.com/blog/2011/11/29/video-agileschools/.
Miller, J. (n.d). Agile Classrooms. Retrieved February 18, 2020, from
https://www.agileclassrooms.com/.
Sutherland, J. (2015). Scrum: the art of doing twice the work in half the time. London:
Rh Business Books.
Wijnands, W. (n.d.). eduScrum® - Collaboration That Gives You Wings. Retrieved from
https://eduscrum.nl/en.
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Appendix
A template for contributing agile-infused lessons.
Title (Google doc “Heading 1”)
Agile concepts (Google doc “Heading 2”)
● Agile concept or tool
● Agile concept or tool
● etc
Learning & Teaching
In approximately 250 words, what was the lesson? Illustrate the concepts from agility.
Source
From [course], [place], [date]
Questions: [name], [email], [Twitter etc]
