EduScrum—Sending School back to School
A small introduction to eduScrum, learning, and how we could do so much better for our children
This article began in late spring, when I decided my office was getting too stifling, and went out for a walk. That isn’t remarkable in an of itself, but on that day, I chose to take the path less traveled and passed a school on my way to my favourite coffee shop. Hearing the bells triggered some sort of suppressed post traumatic stress response, and I remembered my own school days with all the unknown unknowns, the factors that go into learning and the intense pressure to deliver (which I always *ahem* bravely resisted). With a quiet smirk on my face, I noticed three students sitting on front of the school gate, hidden from the panopticon of the teaching staff, desperately trying to find an efficient way to copy several pages of homework from one single source into three different workbooks.
“Wow,” I thought, “knowledge transfer is actually pretty complex.”
I was already working as a Scrum master back then, and I began playing around with the idea of considering “Knowledge” a product in a complex environment. It would be fun, I thought, to consider the teacher a product owner, and to give frequent feedback about the progress students make. When I came back home, I found that as always, a lot of people had been way smarter than me, way earlier than I, and chuckled at the options. Agile learning, Scrum at School, eduScrum and many others.
For a while, that was it. A funny thought, a fuzzy feeling. But then, another set of circumstances came together, and I got offered a job to teach Scrum at a University close to my home town. After a brief flurry of excited messages, my client and I quickly agreed that instead of just teaching Scrum, why not use it to teach instead, and have our students learn by doing? With the decision made, I set out to compare a few of the myriad available agile education frameworks, and I came out with one favorite, eduScrum. With my time for research limited, I knew I wanted to use this framework, but I couldn’t quite say why. It should have been good enough for me, but that nagging feeling of “why” kept gnawing at the back of my head.
A few weeks back, when I told Sjoerd that I would be using Scrum to teach a language course for programmers, we begun a small discussion about various methods of agile education, and how they are technically “not Scrum.”
And then it hit me. Some frameworks are basically Kanban for learning, but EduScrum, reviewed by Jeff Sutherland in its newest (2017) iteration, keeps close to the scrum values and changes the framework when needed while keeping itself slim by not adding too much complexity.
How does Eduscrum work?
EduScrum is, as you might guess from the name, based on Scrum. The story goes that eduScrum founder and inventor Willy Wijnands once was struck by how his students are sitting in his class like they are in a movie theater. As he believes that learning should be an active endeavor the thought bothered him a lot. Luckily for us, one of his close relatives works with Scrum and introduced him to the framework. All that was left was to adapt it.
EduScrum and Scrum — differences and similarities
EduScrum keeps several of Scrum’s core features, like the pillars of Transparency, Inspection and Adaptation, renames some roles(Development Team -> Student Team) and redefines others drastically. Without going into too much detail, the Product owner has a lot more explicit responsibility than in regular Scrum, such as Monitoring an improving the quality of educational results. In return, the ScrumMaster carries less responsibility and is mostly there to make “the Flip” available to the Product owner.
The Flip is an additional eduScrum Artifact that is prescribed in eduScrum. The eduScrum Guide has several requirements which (in the examples I have seen) usually combine into a Flipchart containing Kanban Board, a Definition of Done, a Definition of “Fun” (or, for us Germans: rules and requirements for working well together), a burndown chart and other visualization tools that the students deem necessary. This is different from regular Scrum, where a Kanban board and a Burndown chart are often used, but not required by the Scrum guide.
Overall, eduScrum is more prescriptive in its practices and roles than Scrum is, which is explained by the fact that in school and other educational environments, we cannot expect everyone to know about the benefits of e.g. an incremental approach to complex problems or the visualization of work. As such, eduScrum insists on the usage of these tools at the beginning, so that the students can learn about their benefits.
Despite these additional prescriptions, eduScrum remains a lightweight tool that increases transparency and motivation for everyone involved. However, just like Scrum, eduScrum does not bend itself around impediments, but instead makes them transparent. And therein lies the problem.
The Limits of eduScrum
In virtually all countries, education is regulated by laws older than most students. They are immutable, and specify requirements that need to be met in order to gain a certain certification. …Requirements that EduScrum intrinsically resists.
Most of our educational system has been devised for the era of the industrial revolution, and makes very little sense in the 21st century. There are several examples, such as forced hard task switches every X minutes (History->Math->English->Chemistry->PE), the composition of teams (classes) on arbitrary factors such as age or gender, and the prohibition of team work during critical tasks (“cheating in exams.”)
Exams are actually a good “exam”ple, if you pardon the pun. EduScrum recognizes that in any society, no achievement is ever just an individual effort, and that we benefit from making visible how every problem we solve is the result of a group of people coming together. However as previously mentioned, most countries still require each Student to receive a personal grade based not on their ability to work in a team, but on their own personal success in a formalized test that prohibits teamwork.
This is a larger problem, of course, and not one that eduScrum will solve. While eduScrum is great for learning, it does not recognize or explain how progress can be rated in our traditional systems, nor does it give suggestions on how to implement itself in an environment that (sometimes violently) resists change. (In that regard, it is painfully similar to regular Scrum, as anyone who has ever tried a grassroots Scrum initiative can attest.)
In practice, exams, papers and other traditional grading methods will always feel “duct-taped to the process” when using eduScrum. Students will be taught the benefits of teamwork for the majority of a semester, but then get separated and graded individually, potentially tainting a large portion of crucial learning.
In my opinion, eduScrum is als not applicable at all ages or learning stages. Basic requirements, like the fundamentals of algebra, or grammar and spelling of a new language, the “tools of the trade” need to be taught just as the basics of programming need to be taught before using Scrum in IT.
As these foundations have to be understood equally well by all students, there isn’t much to discover, which makes an agile learning approach superfluous.
Lastly, having several eduScrum “classes” at the same time is ill advised, because the amount of task-switching involved will quickly overwhelm any benefits that might be gained form an agile approach to education.
Then again, why do we think the amount of task switching our students go through day is okay right now? This problem, like many other glaring issues of the industrial-era school system, is not yet well understood in mainstream educational politics. Even if they were, problems this intrinsic to the process will require drastic changes to the system.
But why not change a system that no longer serves us, especially after its failings become visible? Why not design school years as projects? Why not allow students to have a real impact on their surroundings? Why not gather their feedback for us adults, and make the echo of their actions visible to them? Why not take a good hard look at what students really need? Why not start delivering value as early as possible?
Despite everything, I believe eduScrum can help us with that.
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