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 17