{"id":67,"date":"2011-03-16T01:10:34","date_gmt":"2011-03-16T01:10:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.agilityfeat.com\/?p=67"},"modified":"2011-03-16T01:10:34","modified_gmt":"2011-03-16T01:10:34","slug":"scrum-in-schools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/34.200.113.64\/en\/blog\/2011\/03\/scrum-in-schools\/","title":{"rendered":"Scrum in Schools"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Agile<\/a>Tonight at the AgileCville user group meeting, we discussed Scrum in Schools.\u00a0 This was a roundtable discussion of group members, and it was very interesting.\u00a0 Paul Erb kicked off the discussion for us.\u00a0 Paul is an Agile Cville regular, as well as the business manager at Tandem Friends School<\/a> in Charlottesville.\u00a0 Paul considers agile more of a social mechanism then strictly a software development process, and so his core question is \u00abwhat if schools were agile?\u00bb<\/p>\n

At least half the attendees had done some form of teaching.\u00a0 Delia is a former English school teacher turned web designer, John teaches personal finance in addition to being a software consultant, Larry uses agile practices with student groups he helps teach, and then others in the group (such as myself) have taught courses here and there.\u00a0 I hadn’t really thought about it before, but I was impressed with the number of education-minded techies there, and I know Paul was pleased with the level of interest the topic generated.<\/p>\n

Paul started out with a few slides that kicked off our discussion, and that led into a free form discussion for over an hour.\u00a0 I liked Paul’s slide showing how he would structure the school day.\u00a0 Essentially he would setup half the day for \u00abtraditional\u00bb teacher lectures, and half the day where students would participate in scrums and work on specific problems or self driven activities to reinforce the learning.\u00a0 The lecture part of the day would still be agile however, since feedback from the previous day’s scrums would be incorporated into what topics the students needed extra instruction on.<\/p>\n

Paul’s emphasis was largely on how scrum would help facilitate \u00abproblem based learning\u00bb.\u00a0 Most people learn better when they are applying concepts to solve a problem, then just memorizing those concepts.\u00a0 These problems could be real problems supplied by businesses, or the attendees also discussed possibly having a backlog of student generated ideas that scrums could choose from.<\/p>\n

Grades and standardized tests should be de-emphasized, and \u00abthe definition of done\u00bb becomes more important, just like the real world.\u00a0 Students keep iterating on a problem until they get it \u00abright\u00bb, or complete the problem.<\/p>\n

One thing Paul said that I particularly liked was \u00abThere is one 21st century skill:\u00a0 collaboration.\u00bb\u00a0 By incorporating agile practices into education and teaching students how to collaborate and problem solve better than traditional education does, we would be empowering them to become much more effective in their careers.<\/p>\n

The group discussion was informal, but very interesting.\u00a0 A few possible best practices emerged:<\/p>\n