Teach Middle East Magazine Jan - Mar 2020 Issue 2 Volume 7 | Page 17
Sharing Good Practice
of thinking (mindsets) that prioritise
collaboration, interdisciplinary teams,
and fast, iterative cycles of inquiry,
action and reflection.
Perhaps this is starting to sound a little
more relevant!
Now think back to your last school
strategic planning process. Hours, days
and weeks spent planning endlessly,
drafting copious documents and
wordsmithing final edits. Then, for
the next five years, you went into the
implementation phase, only to realise
within a year or two, that the world
(and its young people) had developed
in unpredictable ways that made
you wish you could change course in
response.
This was precisely the frustration that
a group of software engineers felt in
the 1980s and ‘90s about the way that
project planning had always been
done in industry (with siloed teams
on Gantt charts). It inspired them to
develop a framework called Scrum
(and later an ‘Agile Manifesto’), in order
to help teams work more effectively,
to plan and to develop creative and
innovative products more quickly and
more efficiently by responding to the
changing needs of users and clients.
The actual way of working is very
simple, involving very little inputs (just
flipchart paper and post-it notes!). But
the impacts on teams and leadership
roles are huge.
As one of the originators of Scrum, Jeff
Sutherland says in his TEDx talk, that
what we need to do is to ‘make work
visible, give the team the responsibility
to fix the problem and they self-
organise how to make it happen… [M]
anagement needs to let go... and to get
out of the way so the teams can figure
out what to do.’ From his experience
in the military, IT systems engineering,
robotics and banking, Sutherland saw
repeatedly how much more effective,
productive and enjoyable using Scrum
was, for teams, as well as for individuals.
This is similar to what Christina Riesen
from, We Are Play Lab in Zurich,
Switzerland, calls ‘radical collaboration’.
And there is clearly a lot that we can
learn from this experience in schools to
help us challenge superficial versions
of innovative initiatives added in, to
spice up ‘business as usual’.
Certainly, for our teacher teams, we
could consider how relevant this way
of working might be for collaborative
planning in or across disciplines, or
for a school improvement process or
accreditation planning.
Just as excitingly, Scrum has been
shown to be superbly useful and
engaging for students to use as a
framework to support self-organising
teams in classrooms, or for other
collaborative projects, such as the PYP
Exhibition or the DP CAS Project.
Willy Wijnands, a passionate chemistry
and physics teacher at Ashram College
in the Netherlands, saw the value
of this approach in 2011 and started
eduScrum. Since then, he has used
Scrum as a way of working in his own
classroom, as well as training teachers
all around the world to do the same.
Teachers and young people who have
used eduScrum to structure and self-
organise their learning process in
collaborative teams are frequently
amazed by the results. Students report
gains in self-confidence, productivity,
self-regulated learning skills like
planning and negotiation, and overall
enjoyment of the learning process.
Furthermore,
students’
learning
outcomes (and subsequent test scores)
have also seen significant increases
after extended use of eduScrum.
So opening a door onto Scrum in
software development and other
industries, can help us to realise
that the tools and mindsets helping
companies to innovate and remain
competitive and relevant in a fast-
paced world, may also be perfect for
helping us to support our students’ in
their preparation to thrive in such a
world.
If you are interested in getting involved
in the first eduScrum training in the
Middle East in Spring 2020, run by
Willy himself, please get in touch.
You can also find out more about
eduScrum at www.eduScrum.nl. Also,
Leysin American School’s Spotlight
Magazine on ‘Pulling Agile into
Education’ is a great place to look for
further insights on Agile in schools
(w w w.las.ch/learning/educational-
research).
Tim Logan is a consultant and principal supporting schools in the UAE to
use accreditation to drive innovation and school transformation. He is also
a doctoral student at the University of Bath studying the role of evaluative
tools in 'measuring' schools' impact on 21st-century skill development.
LinkedIn: tlogan-futurelearningdesign Email: [email protected]
Class Time
Term 2 Jan - Mar 2020
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