This has been something I have written about before in my Trickey Thoughts blog, yes I am unashamedly self-promoting. It was fascinating when I reached out to the community on Facebook around this and software developers and people from large companies were really excited to see schools interested in this way of working. If you want to see how I used it in the classroom, the blog is here. It was great to have a refresher on Agile with Phil Baskerville, it left us questioning how do we put it into practice within the classroom? Many of these conversations started buzzing around the staffroom and continued with me chatting to my sister in law. This part of the blog is going to be a bit of dreamscaping. Imagine a blank canvas on which we could paint a different picture of our education system outside this industrialised model we have inherited. If we were to use some of the Agile methodologies what would it look like? Let us look at Scrum as outlined in the picture above. In this system we would call the product backlog the NZ curriculum. The team would be your group of students - these could possibly be students we mentor. This team would look at the things they have to do in a week, prioritise and plan a two-week sprint. What could this sprint involve? It could involve setting up specific lessons to cover knowledge deficits, it could be using a design thinking process with the aim to produce something or write and produce a play first studying a classic text. The possibilities are endless in essence. Daily Scrum meetings would ensure students know what tasks need to be completed with the use of Kanban boards etc (a 'to-do, doing, done' list). After the 2 weeks, we would have a potentially assessable product with the teacher tailoring assessment to the tasks. We would reflect and celebrate what has been completed what can be improved. Students would be truly empowered to follow their passions. A team would hopefully learn the benefits of brain breaks and could schedule sports into their team time. What if teams were selected around specific Vocational pathways with some fluidity around these movements? Integration and the break down of silos would be easily done. The Amnesty group, for example, could go about organising action and this could be tied into an assessment with them writing for a true purpose. I know that some of our teachers have seen this working in other schools and there are of course pitfalls along the way, but with an agile mindset, these can be addressed and learnt from. ~Duncan Trickey
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Kia ora tātou this is a brief overview of my Mind lab journey. Though it has been a lot of work I would actively encourage participation in the course. An agile solution to a Trickey problem? My mind bubbles when I think about all the potential inquiries and tangents that I could explore due to my Mindlab journey. An issue in my practice is often I look for the new and exciting and embrace it without fully understanding what it is. The idea of failing fast is not always the best practice for the classroom. I really enjoy talking about changes in my practice with others and me and colleagues are in a constant cycle of reflection. Two inquiries that I am thinking about looking at are: “How can Agile Methodology be applied to the classroom to effectively increase students self-management?” Or “How can gamification be effectively used to increase skill mastery in Mathematics?” These topics may be helpful for my community of practice (COP). #Bafflegitimize is a cross-curricular professional learning group that I belong to in my school. Our domain of interest is increasing student engagement in the classroom. We have regular meetups in a work setting, informally and digitally. When we meet we spend time talking about what we notice in our classroom common problems we have experienced with our learners and what we new strategies we have tried. It can be difficult to meet due to some members being part-time and the busy nature of our work but we are a tight and non-judgemental team with the best in mind for our learners. I am often viewed as the one who seems to be trying out something new and the group would label me as “future-focused”. I do not know if the community of practice would be so receptive to these inquiries. Due to the changing nature of our workplace words like “agile” and “gamified” can often be seen as fad like. Like everything else, this too will pass. We have used Kahoot, Quizlet and other learning games but they have their limitations and students can quickly tune out. Learning sometimes has to have the necessary academic rigour is also a critique that has been levelled at these concepts. I also know that my COP is willing to attempt the new and would love to see how they could possibly develop the practice in their classroom. Being a cross-curricular group will it work in subjects like Dance, Spanish, ESOL, PE and Economics? It actually surprised me when I started looking at the idea of the Agile classroom that there is so much research out there. The beautifully entitled paper referenced at the bottom talks about the friction between cyclical and transformative change and this echoes deep within my COP. We struggle to let go of old systems and feel there is a value in them. I think another important thing for my COP to understand is that the Agile methodology is not about technology but it has humans at the core of its method. Imagine how much improvement we could make within our weekly retrospectives both as a team and our students. As for gamification, we could see more of a need for this in mastering Maths skills. It is very interesting to read about the use and success of the Math Land project on students with Emotional and Behavioural issues. Though from the research it does seem to lend itself to skill mastery well would it result in the deep learning we may require from our students? So I guess it is time to think about which pathway I will venture down and how many of #bafflegitimize will travel with me. Personally, I am very excited by this journey into the unknown and know where ever I am heading student engagement is the aim. ~Duncan Trickey References
https://www.worldgovernmentsummit.org/api/publications/document?id=2b0d6ac4-e97c-6578-b2f8-ff0000a7ddb6 Explorations into becoming new, radical, and quite possibly dangerously progressive within an Aotearoa New Zealand contextDunham, Nicola; Owen, Hazel; Heta-Lensen, Yo https://medium.com/laboratoria/the-agile-classroom-embracing-an-agile-mindset-in-education-ae0f19e801f3 https://www.infoq.com/articles/agile-schools-education Bozarth, J. (2017). Nuts and Bolts: Communities of Practice. Retrieved from https://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/2400/nuts-and-bolts-communities-of-practice Cambridge, D., Kaplan, S. & Suter, V. (2005). Community of practice design guide: A Step-by-Step Guide for Designing & Cultivating. Retrieved from https://net.educa use.edu/ir/library/pdf/NLI0531.pd… In the classroom one of the most difficult times for our students is pre-examination. This often seems to be even more difficult in the Maths classroom. The number of emails from parents as we go towards Exam time increases and students generally worry more. One way I changed my practice was to use Classcraft in the classroom. This is a role-playing based online game. I felt that if I could foster the idea that the students were on a quest to defeat the exam together, we would see better results. This idea lets me rethink the roles of me and my learners. I was no longer the teacher but the game master and my students each had a personalised digital avatar to adventure with. I spent vast amounts of my youth chasing Snotlings and pretending to be a werewolf so this change felt really exciting for me. The girls in class were excited as well and loved to personalise their own avatars giving them roles and powers. I was excited about the class and really enjoyed setting up different adventures based around defeating the end of year exam. It worked very well for some of my more cautious learners; those that often relied on the teacher's knowledge. Instead, they now worked more collaboratively to tackle the problems and did not rely on me. The engagement in class increased and students began writing up problems on the board and their teams would work together to teach each other content, trying to tackle the more difficult questions. If I further analyse this change in my practice, it was clear to me the students had to develop a new view of our roles in the classroom. There are a number of theories on why gamifying learning works well. Curtiss Murphy talks about motivation as one of the biggest factors in improving learning, and by increasing the motivation for students to work and succeed as a team, I had unlocked more agency in my learners. The experience in my classroom also seemed to echo Jane McGonigal's concepts of “social fabric”, “Blissful Productivity” and “Epic meaning”. We were no longer students in the classroom, we were a band of warriors slaying the Demon of Algebra. How else could I have developed this idea for my students? Could the whole exam have been a gamified experience instead of a standard test? The results in the exam were an improvement from the previous year, but not for every student. Could an examination be more gameful? In what way? Imagine an exam were every student went in with the same motivation I had seen in the game? Rather than an independent closed book exercise, we were thrown into some fantasy realm where we could use the skills we had been equipped with to solve problems. What effect would this have on our learners? ![]() What further action am I going to take with the knowledge about the motivation my learners have experienced in the classroom due to this change in my practice though? That is a really wicked problem and I have tried to develop different gameful ways of delivering content but none with as much success as Class Craft. Would the novelty eventually wear off if all the Maths content was delivered this way? Gamification is a wonderful and creative way to approach learning but would it be sustainable in my practice? If it is to be, I would have to call for a more collaborative approach. Who knows what kind of awesome adventure me and a colleague could develop for our learners!? References:
Kapp, Karl M.. The Gamification of Learning and Instruction : Game-Based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education, Center for Creative Leadership, 2012 Curtiss Murphy, Why Games Work and the Science of Learning, Alion Science and Technology https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/schooling/109306 Finlay, L. (2009). Reflecting on reflective practice. PBPL. Retrieved from http://www.open. ac.uk/opencetl/sites/www.open.ac.uk.opencetl/files/files/ecms/web-content/Finlay-(2008)-Reflecting-on-reflective-practice-PBPL-paper-52.pdf ~Duncan Trickey ![]() A beautiful hot day out at Karitane only moments away from an Epic water fight, my mind stumbles back to the school. It is the Zucchini you see served up on the BBQ. Proudly I say our students grew that at school! It is only a Zucchini but in a way, I saw it as the fruits of our labour; we certainly would gather more nutrition from it than a raft of Credits or an end of year exam. I have spent a massive amount of time reflecting on the end of year project based learning programme for year 9’s. There were some real highlights and lowlights. The student feedback was positive the teacher feedback not as positive (and that's me putting my usual positive spin on things). In my deep reflection, I clearly underestimated the actual size of this “Change initiative”. I hummed, harred and admittedly slurred a little as I caught up with my whānua in Scotland over Christmas talking about the undertaking. The judging day was a real highlight of the term, the effort that some of the girls had put in was fantastic. The joy some of these girls brought to the sick elderly and possibly bewildered, just made the heart sing. What of the others though? What about those who didn’t rise to the challenge in the most appropriate way? Some of my research on Project Based Learning pointed me towards the idea of these projects bringing Social equity. Students could thrive in these settings. For me that is an idea so intoxicating I couldn’t just put the idea away. So what were the next steps? The Future Focused Learning Committee was granted a book to read on the conditions we write about it in the Siren. Look out for that article when I finally finish the book! A lot of the Project Based Learning literature repeats this mantra around “embracing the chaos”, words like “messy” and “fail” are ping ponged across the pages or through the pages or radio waves. As part of my own PLG I have been trying to look at how I can increase student agency, how can we light a fire under the learning to bring purpose? Reading the first few pages of the book I had it. Project Global Inform was an initiative set up by the authors of ‘Launch’. The wicked problem we have in Social Studies is we look at Human rights and weep but don’t make any real impact. Project Global Inform was a global project, mostly around North America, with students tackling the problems of human rights, informing people through social media and then raising money, resources or political awareness to make a difference. This reminded me of the amazing middle school educator Craig MacDonald-Brown who spoke at Ulearn (link below). My ever-patient Head of the department had to put up with me on a soapbox for the first month of the term saying I was no longer going to teach about Genocide I was going to end it. She told me to plan it out and go for it. I did a kind of lazy remix of some of the sources that are included with the book I am not reviewing at the moment and hacked at the core assessment and turned them into my slightly Frankenstein core assessment. After teaching the kids about the United Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) we used this as a framework for looking at various humanitarian issues. I then showed them about what was happening in Myanmar and the ongoing genocide there. We empathised, we wept, we got angry, then I said to them it is our duty to act and fix human rights issues. So my year 10 were sent forth, I wanted them to end genocide. They, though, needed to find a project that sang to them. One group looked at gender equity, specifically looking at the price of shampoo and beauty products. They planned to create a podcast informing people about it but despite support, the group never really got the project off the ground. Another group ended up in discussions with a South African NGO who were working to educate about the huge levels of sexual violence in SA. The process was organic and frustrating, at the time we felt that the world seemed so intangible, the student doesn’t always understand why the Minister of Health won’t reply hourly to their emails. Hashtags and Social media accounts were created to raise awareness and quickly were connected to social networks of people interested in what the girls were doing. Was it a success?Not always... it felt difficult at times. Were the girls engaged and stakeholders in their own learning? Yes. The biggest shock to me was that after all the hard work, to-ing and fro-ing, surveys, social media accounts, head scratching and confusion, one of the girls’ favourite things was producing the human rights boards to see and share everyone's learning. I was surprised, as these had been the very things I had been raging against to start with. From this start, I have continued my learning journey failing fast on a number of projects with the students. My Year 9 plan to create a tool to inform and educate students about digital citizenship fell flat. Some students did produce work that covered our curriculum but others fell well short of the mark. The Economics girls did a fantastic job of pitching several charity ideas to a team of judges, and they are currently enjoying using the design thinking process to create the perfect holiday for their client while developing a budget. I am starting to count a few more successes than fails. It is all hard work and we often underestimate how much heavy lifting there is in the thinking. Being creative and thinking deeply about solving a problem is really hard. When you are invested in the problem it becomes even more difficult.
So really in the end what have I learned? Well firstly, I am a proper failure. Let us never doubt this; I have been talking about Genocide for the past 16 years and it persists in this world. In a technology driven world, it will be up to the humans to solve these issues and we as teachers have an important role to play in ensuring the correct framework exists to help the students navigate through these projects. Just because something is difficult, doesn’t mean you should give up on it. Also, my biggest reflection on these projects is that they need to be student-led. Though I may have an idea of what I want to be fixed or the students to work on, student agency only really comes through the girls being truly invested in the work. To do this well you need to understand a design process, possibly the ‘Launch’ process or other design thinking templates. Also, the students, just like ourselves, will want to take shortcuts in these processes. Don’t! The more you work with the frameworks, the more you see the pain points in the process. Have I got it right yet, hell no, but I am getting closer and I long for the day that my students code an algorithm that make cars run on smiles and students enjoy equity in educational outcomes. ~Duncan Trickey “Tasha is just out of poets’ school, |
When the world was too much |
(2) “Not Actually Being in Dumfries” by Hugh MacMillan from Not Actually Being in Dumfires, Luath Press Ltd, 2015
(3) A Scots term for someone from Dumfries
(4) Summer in Dumfries, by Hugh MacMillan from Not Actually Being in Dumfires, Luath Press Ltd, 2015
(5) May Revision, by Hugh MacMillan from Not Actually Being in Dumfires, Luath Press Ltd, 2015
(6) Bad News about Suicide by Drowning, by Hugh MacMillan from Not Actually Being in Dumfires, Luath Press Ltd, 2015
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