Lean was originally an approach the car manufacturing company, Toyota, and has since been adopted by software developers and now education. A lean approach aims to reduce the waste, up skill workers, improve the quality and provide more variety.
BUT how do these idea apply to education? As educators we are not growing something tangible, learning is an abstract process. Why would a book about a supply chain be useful?
The Agile Manifesto for Teaching and Learning
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Meaningful learning over measurement of learning
Stakeholder collaboration over constant negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
Here are two of the Lean and Agile Education approaches we looked at in this week's session that stuck with me. I am going to use SCRUM and a KANBAN board to manage the change initiative, design thinking.
SCRUM is an Agile process. It values the team over individual effort. SCRUM works in a lifecycle of checks, called sprints and at the end the aim is to produce something useful (could be learning). The SCRUM MASTER is a servant leader, recording the teams discussions and reporting back in a one minute stand up meeting at the end of each sprint.
KANBAN breaks tasks down into small steps, is simple and efficient. At the beginning the kids needs to write simple user stores (ties in with the empathy stage of design thinking) and a success criteria (how will they know when their task has been achieved). The user stories usually breaks down an epic story into much smaller steps, short and doable in a short set of time. It is represented visually by a board (digital or paper). It is best kept simple, using headings like, to do, can do and done. There is a limit to how many tasks can be in each column. In order for a card to be moved into the "done" column the team has to agree (against the success criteria) that it is done. Enables pull and flow as kids can choose what they work on when.
TRELLO is an online KANBAN board.
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