Scrumptious Systems: What is Scrum? And how can it help your school?
Last month, the Simplicity team carried on the tradition, established by our bold and fearless reader Rebecca Gosla, of reading a book together each month. While in December we reveled in Madeline Miller’s refreshing take on classical myths in The Song of Achilles, we mixed it up in January with Jeff Sutherland’s Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. We wanted to learn more about how a project management methodology widely adopted in the software world would fare when applied to other fields – and if the promise of his book’s title could still hold for education.
Christiana Diving In!
What was the book about? And what even is Scrum?
Sutherland begins Scrum by identifying a mismatch between the contemporary need for flexibility and dynamism and the way most organizations work. He refers to the conventional project management style as the waterfall method (think Gantt charts), where each phase of a project is carefully planned out, with one phase leading (or waterfalling) seamlessly into the next. Drawing upon his wealth of experience in the military and in the tech world, Sutherland demonstrates that this simply does not work–and often at great expense. Scrum offers a way out of this management quagmire, empowering us to work smarter than our predecessors by prioritizing work more efficiently and incorporating feedback cycles strategically.
Sample Gantt Chart (Product Plan)
MVPs, Sprints, and Standups
The core of Sutherland’s Scrum philosophy is the conviction that, in any given product, a mere 20% of functionality delivers a whopping 80% of what makes it valuable. He calls this the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). In order to get to an MVP, rapid feedback is essential. In contrast to the waterfall methodology, where feedback is only built into the project lifecycle towards the very end, Scrum threads it throughout the development process, allowing for frequent feedback and revisions to the MVP to build a better and better product. .
To make this philosophy actionable, Sutherland introduces something called a sprint, a one- to four-week period where a team works towards producing something on which they can receive feedback from non-team members. Together, team members create a list of everything that needs to be done in order to create the product (the product backlog) and prioritize all the tasks. What needs to get done first gets moved to the “To Do” section of a Scrum Board, which documents the team’s progress on the tasks allotted for the sprint.
Scrum in Action! (Agile but Pragmatic)
Every day of a sprint, team members have a brief (~15 minute) meeting called a daily stand up (Sutherland encourages teams to actually stand up in order to incentivize focus and efficiency), during which each team member shares what they’ve done since yesterday’s stand-up, what they’re doing before tomorrow’s stand-up, and if they are stuck on any task. This simple meeting cuts down the communication snafus that slow productivity through increased focus and transparency. By having all members of a team “swarm” a problem, productivity is able to accelerate – until all of a sudden you’re doing more work in less time than you ever imagined.
What Scrum Has to Offer to Educators
Bringing Scrum into the world of education, where so few of us have the luxury of complete focus on a single project, isn’t straightforward. Yet that doesn't mean that opportunities for applying pieces of the framework don’t exist. Below, I’ve gone ahead and pulled together a list of the key ways we saw the worlds of Scrum and education coming together:
Formative assessments as Scrum seedlings: People have been doing bits and pieces of Scrum for a very long time. When thinking about how this applied to education, the first thing that came up was formative assessments and their use in modifying daily lesson plans. When viewed from this perspective, units become sprints, where we ideally take the data that we get from assessment results as feedback and use it to improve how we teach and how students learn.
Using Scrum for self-paced learning: In the closing chapters, Sutherland mentions Dutch teacher Willy Wijnands’ use of eduScrum. Wijnands has students work together in teams to master the content together for a week-long sprint, intervening only when they are stuck. With eduScrum, students are more engaged with the material and end up learning faster than they would have in a traditional setting. Check out Wijnands’ website for resources on how to bring Scrum to your classroom!
Students Meet Scrum (eduScrum)
Remembering our common purpose: With its emphasis on doing only that work that truly delivers value, Scrum is all about keeping your eyes on the prize, the product or the problem that inspired you to choose your profession in the first place. Bringing Scrum into education is one way of keeping us tuned into the why of our vocation even as we slog through the parts of education that are less than glamorous.
Daily stand ups for administrators: Simplicity CEO, Christiana Gupta shared in our discussion how when she was working in a high school, the school leader would have a daily meeting with all administrators. They’d set priorities for the day and agree what issues could be backlogged, identify which students needed extra support, and flag any big issues they anticipated. This simple meeting helped clear a clarity of focus and transcendent sense of purpose that helped make the group one of the highest functioning teams Christiana had been on. For those of us who work in education, incorporating daily stand ups can keep your administrative team focused on clear priorities and allow them to better navigate the fires they encounter every day.
If you’re an educator who is on the hunt for new ideas about productivity and collaboration, Scrum would be a rewarding read. While it would be challenging to adopt Sutherland’s framework wholesale, his explanation of the mindset shift that Scrum requires is something all educators could benefit from reading.
If you’re interested in joining our monthly book club, you can sign up each month here. We’ll be reading R.F. Kuang’s bestseller Babel this February!
