Friday, 9 February 2018

Education - Agile Leadership , Servant Leadership, Agile Education and Lean Education

Week 10 Agile Leadership , Servant Leadership, Agile Education and Lean Education
We started with the provocation - “Can the notions of servant and leader co-exist, can someone who puts the needs of others before their own also gain respect as a leader?”. We may not necessary believe this is possible but Greenleaf suggests this is possible.

Greenleaf, R. K. (1970) suggests servant leadership starts with the desire to serve and secondary to this is to leading, as opposed to leading first, it’s not about power or acquisition. A servant ensures that the needs of others are meet first. However, does this result in the people served becoming healthier, wiser, freer, or more independent etc? Greenleaf suggests we have new views of power and authority and we can relate to people in more supportive ways.

If we look at it from a teaching perspective the servant teacher tries to remove barriers to students learning and helps them to find their passions and motivations to learn leading them to discover their own destiny.

I then checked out this video about Lean Education and came up with these key points:
  • Lean is manufacturing approach which came about in the 20th century
  • Then applied in 21st century to software development (post agile) 
  • Can be applied to educational context
  • Book ‘The Machine that Changed the World’ by Womak J, Jones D, and Roos D, (1990) explains how Toyota moved from mass production to lean production.
  • There were many benefits, cut waste, improved quality and variety of products
  • The next book ‘Lean Thinking’ looked at how these methods could be applied to other industries.
  • Lean is a slow and complicated long process and when applying this to the educational context it doesn’t make sense if we look at cutting waste etc as we are an ‘intellectual’ business not a physical ‘product’ as such. So must view education from a different lense about quality and value.
Womak says education is a process involving designing of knowledge, making learning experiences and use these experiences to continue learning, essentially design, make and use. Can we make these three processes lean?Value in education can be tricky to define, educators tend to do what they already know, and learners tend to expect something similar to what they have previously experienced.

A Lean approach looks at the value stream and constantly questions does this curriculum/approach/activity add value for the learner? It also looks at waste that can be eliminated. Move away from batch and ‘pushed’ content to the learner in time frame decided by the organisation and move towards the learner ‘pulling’ from the system what they need.

The value chain involves all stakeholders and may span organisations. Lean approach in education might involved personalised self paced learning, life long enrolment, no set time/place, blended learning modes, and instant feedback. The focus should be on thinking and problem solving, this should be visible and rigorous.

Agile is about creating a culture of learning - www.agilemanifesto.org. There are four values that are involved. A slightly different version of these values was adapted by Steve Peha to make them more relevant for educational organisations:
  • Individual and interactions over processes and tools
  • Meaningful learning over measurement of learning
  • Stakeholder collaboration over constant negotiation
  • Responding to change over following a plan
Agile teams are self organising teams so we moved onto the next activity which involved forming some small teams. The objective of the team was to get as many pingpong balls to pass through the hands of each team member in 2 minutes Boris Gloger’s Ball Point game (Gloger, 2008). Each team were ask to estimate the number first, then have a go, then repeat this process 4 times. There were 4 rules:
  • As each ball is passed between team members, it must have air time
  • Every team member must touch each ball for it to count
  • No ball to your direct neighbour on either side, you must pass to your front
  • Every ball must end where it started. For each ball that does, the team scores 1 point (make sure you count your points)
Our team had a lot of fun, we started with a W formation passing the balls in a zig zag. Then we thought about doing more than one at a time so went with handfuls. Then the idea of coming close together and dropping the balls down like a waterfall marble run. So in each iteration we came up with better and better ideas. After small quick iterations or Sprints we learnt and applied new ideas with great success we did at least 4 times better by the end of our quick 2min sprints.

The idea of the 4 iterations has come from Mike Rother’s Kata in the Classroom (Rother, 2015). Kata is a term used in martial arts. It is a way of practicing and refining techniques. The Improvement Kata is a repeating four-step routine for continuous improvement: Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA).

After reporting back we had done very well and worked well as a team. One other team basically stopped after a couple of goes and thought that was the best they could do and were happy - do we often tend to stop when we think solutions are good enough or do we keep trying? Agile is about a mindset of continual improvement. Being an agile leader involves Scrums which are a lightweight process framework for agile development which involves a series of sprints that each deliver something useful.

We then moved on to looking at Kanban (visual cards in japanese) & Trello a great online organisational tool that I’ve used before. Basically a kanban is a bunch of visual cards orgainised into three categories/lists - to do, doing and done lists with a set number of maximum cards to limit the amount of things to manage.

In a classroom this could be based on the learning backlog - what do we need to learn, things we are learning, things we have learnt. User stories should be short and actually able to be achieved. A story that is too big is called an Epic and needs to be broken down into smaller stories. These user story needs can then be written down as things to be done and organised via a form of Kanban.

References
Greenleaf, R. K. (1970). The Servant as Leader, The Robert K. Greenleaf Center, Indianapolis, IN.

Gloger, B. (2008). Ball Point Game: A game to feel what Scrum is. Retrieved from https://kanemar.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/theballpointgame.pdf

Peha, S. (2011). Agile Schools: How Technology Saves Education (Just Not the Way We Thought it Would). InfoQ. Retrieved from https://www.infoq.com/articles/agile-schools-education





No comments:

Post a Comment

Week 32 - Reflective Practice

Week 32 - Reflective Practice The last mission to wrap up my personal 32 week journey is to reflect and critically evaluate one key chang...