Agile Roles

Agile Concepts

  • Product Owner
  • Scrum Master

Peak Learning Practices

  • Collaboration
  • Transparency

Learning & Teaching

A hole in the schedule permitted the inclusion of an experimental world language class. One of the long term projects was the creation of an iBook, almost half of which was dedicated to student-created activities in language awareness (e.g. are there really dozens of words for snow in languages whose speakers live in snowy areas? Does the unequal representation of male pronouns in a language contribute to making that language’s speakers sexist?). Students researched topics, made videos, created classroom exercises, and in general tried to make interesting classroom activities as if they were linguists and curriculum writers.

After struggling with the course’s organization for several weeks, I joined forces with the IT office and began running the class in two-week sprints, in groups of four or five students, with the eduScrum guide clutched in my fist. Each sprint students selected the outline of a possible language awareness lesson from the backlog (one-pagers with an idea and any details I had thought might be useful). Following a template, they then created the activities for that lesson, for use in unspecified world language classes, for example.

In each student group there was one leader, which I called the ScrumMaster at the time. This person was, however, mostly a group leader, who was generally the student I felt I could rely on to ensure that the work on a language awareness activity over two weeks would actually make progress. To some extent these leaders also served as ScrumMasters, helping their groups through short standups and reviews - some aspects of Scrum that are easily visible.

I imagined that my role of teacher was as a Product Owner. My “customers” were the hypothetical world language teachers who might someday use the language awareness activities in their classes. I was representing their needs in my communication with the ScrumMasters and the review of each group’s work. A summative review - at the end of each sprint - included a presentation of the language awareness activity by the group, to me.

My IT colleagues and I spent plenty of time that year trying to tease out the Scrum roles in an educational setting. Was I as teacher really the Product Owner or actually the ScrumMaster? Or a little of both? Or … neither? To what extent were the students ScrumMasters or was that just forcing a new terminology on an existing model of project-based groupwork?

In hindsight, five years later now, I feel less insecure than I did that first year. I don’t feel confident that these questions are answered (and I encourage everyone adopting Scrum in a classroom context to consider for themselves what the roles mean, who plays them, and what significance they have). Folks who have been pulling agile into education for quite some time still debate what these roles mean and how they are meaningfully applied.

It’s the conversation that drives the thinking forward, perhaps. So … what is the role of a product owner in Scrum used in school? A ScrumMaster? How is it the same and different than in contexts outside of school?

Source

From a high school course introducing linguistics at Leysin American School, 2014-2015 Questions: Paul Magnuson, [email protected], Twitter: @zebmagnuson

Further Resources

  • Delhij, A., van Solingen, R. & Wijnands, W. (2015). The eduScrum Guide.
  • Magnuson, P. (2015). A Year of Language Learning. LASER, Leysin, Switzerland.
  • Magnuson, P. (2014). Teaching with Duolingo. LASER, Leysin, Switzerland.
  • Magnuson, P. & Skelton, E. (2015). Language Awareness: Thinking About Language. Apple Books.
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