Agile Education Methodologies?
I am not a teacher. I am a Systems Analyst/Project Manager for a technical research group in the School of Education. Admittedly, I am new to Project Management and am receiving formal education through Syracuse University's School of Information Studies which was recently voted as not too shabby. I can't help but let ideas from my job and continuing education bleed into the domain that I am trying to support: that of educating students.
Professors in the classes I have taken seem rather biased toward the waterfall model of the software development lifecycle. This methodology involves a series of phases that pretty much fall one after the other. Plan, analysis, design, implement and maintain. A Project Manager's job is to oversee the process. A lot of this involves ensuring that monitoring and measurement practices are in place so that the project manager is able to identify areas where the project is starting to fall behind schedule. In this view of project management, the schedule is king. Time is money and slipping schedules are high stakes problems. The PM's job is to get the project back on schedule...on time, under budget and high quality. If you fail at that, you fail as a PM.
I work on the Sakai project. Nothing is further from the waterfall model than the Sakai development process. No one "manages" the project. Rather, it is a loosely coordinated group of schools that each choose to contribute at varying levels. The Project Coordinator for the overall project tries to keep tabs on what all of the sub-projects are doing and cajoles them into self reporting to keep everyone else up to date on their plans.
It seems to me that most schools that are building tools for Sakai use an "agile" methodology. Agile software development involves small project teams that work closely with the client. Project Management doesn't focus as heavily on THE SCHEDULE, but view software development more as a game that frequently stops and reevaluates what the next MOVE should be to maximize value to the CLIENT. It may mean that the project should now be terminated, that it should change direction or that value is in fact being realized and the project should continue. Advocates for Agile processes believe that the frequent reevaluation of the project allows the team to be more responsive to business needs, competitors moves and new technologies that could be brought to bear on the problem. New goals and outcomes may need to be established, new tasks that were never on the radar at the onset of the project may need to be assigned, etc. Everything is on the table.
Our faculty mention that they want the students that graduate from the teacher preparation programs at Syracuse University to be proficient in:
- Assessment of Student Learning
- Understands and uses various ways to assess the learning of individuals and groups
- Assesses learning before, during, and after instruction
- Makes effective use of assessment data to plan for and adapt instruction for individuals with different needs and abilities
- Makes effective use of assessment data to plan instruction for groups and whole classes
This idea that teachers need to be able to adapt their teaching as they go in response to results seems similar to the agile idea of stopping and reevaluating in agile processes. One thing that I don't hear a lot about in education is the idea that teachers could change the goals of the class. In an ideal world, wouldn't it make some sense to allow teachers and programs to shift and adjust its goals in response to student needs and the changing environment? When you consider a traditional classroom, it relies heavily on texts and materials that often lag behind the current state of the field. When new ideas emerge and really change the field, changing the goals and curriculum to address and educate students in a more timely manner may make sense in some cases. More likely, teacher assumptions about student knowledge may not be accurate. Rather than "forge on" with the class your head in the sand, merely to make sure you "cover the material", it may make sense to adjust the curriculum to maximize value of the class for the student.
I envision the Goal Aware tools effort to be able to support this "iterative development" of class curriculum.