Week 10

Leadership

Flipped preparation (Required): Read the excerpt from Greenleaf's essay on 'Servant Leadership' and then come to the session with an example of Servant leadership you have seen in practice.

Agile Teams are Self-Organising Teams
Peha’s (2011) version of the 12 principles of the agile manifesto reinterprets the last two as follows:
  • The best ideas and initiatives emerge from self-organizing teams
  • At regular intervals, teams reflect on how to become more effective, then tune and adjust their behavior accordingly
We will explore this idea using a combination of Boris Gloger’s Ball Point game (Gloger, 2008) and Mike Rother’s Kata in the Classroom (Rother, 2015).  Kata is a term from martial arts. The Improvement Kata is a repeating routine for continuous improvement. 
The following diagram of the improvement kata process is adapted from material on the katatogrow.com website.
The goal of the ball point game is for each team to get as many balls as possible to pass through the hands of every team member in 2 minutes. The game involves both estimation and self-organisation. 
- You have four rounds to iterate quickly and improve by trying different strategies.
- You always have 2 minutes in between the iterations to update the scorecard and re-strategise.
The four  basic requirements of the game are that:
  1. As each ball is passed between team members, it must have air time
  2. Every team member must touch each ball for it to count
  3. No ball to your direct neighbour on either side, you must pass to your front
  4. Every ball must end where it started. For each ball that does, the team scores 1 point (make sure you count your points)
Scrum is an Agile Process
Scrum is a lightweight process framework for agile development. It is an iterative process that consists of a series of sprints that each deliver something useful. It enables teams to self-organize and collaborate, and accepts that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined up front.
In Scrum, the product backlog (of user stories) is broken down into a series of sprints. In each sprint, a priority list of stories (the sprint backlog) is chosen for completion. The sprint lasts for a certain period of time (e.g. 2 weeks, 30 days etc.). There are daily stand up meetings during the sprint, and at the end of each sprint a working increment of the software is delivered. In other words, it is only a successful sprint if it delivers something useful.
Agile Leadership Styles
Agile leadership is situational, adaptive, empowering and inspirational. The most important leadership theory applied to agile is that of servant leadership (Highsmith, 2009).
“For the Agile Leader, servanthood is the strategy. Situational actions are the tactic” (Filho, 2011).
The key characteristics of the servant leader include awareness, listening, persuasion, empathy, healing, and coaching. Situational leadership means that the servant leader may act as a democratic leader, a laissez-faire leader, or an autocratic leader in different situations (Koganti, 2014).
Servant Leadership
The originator of the servant leadership concept (though inspired by a Herman Hesse story) was Robert Greenleaf. “The servant­ leader is servant first... It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead.” (Greenleaf, 1970). A longer extract from this work, which was this week's flipped preparation activity, is in this week's media
Teachers as Servant Leaders
Servant leadership has been applied by a number of authors to teaching. “The teacher as servant leader functions as a trailblazer for those served by removing obstacles that stand in their path. Part of unleashing another’s talents is helping individuals discover latent, unformed interests. Art, music, and science teachers are prime examples of educators whose genius lies in leading students to discover unarticulated interests.” (Bowman, 2005).
Ten Characteristics of a Servant Leader
  1. Listening
  2. Empathy
  3. Healing
  4. Awareness
  5. Persuasion
  6. Conceptualization
  7. Foresight
  8. Stewardship
  9. Commitment to Growth of People
  10. Building Community
These characteristics, that come from Northouse (2013), are outlined in a blog post by Penn State (2013).
You may find this Servant Leadership in Teachers tinyurl.com/TMLServantTeacher blogpost a helpful source to create a story card in the Trello board's learning backlog.
References
Digital 

  • Flipped preparation (required): Prepare for the lesson by viewing the video ‘Lean Education’, which discusses how lean concepts from manufacturing and the software industry might be applied to education.  DONE
  • -What was the most challenging idea? 
  • That you are enrolled in a program forever, how does that work financially? How do you work with multiple providers then?
  • -What idea could you most easily include in your practice? 
  • Asking does this give value to the learner? Instead of thinking about the value for the parents, school, staff etc. just think about the value for the learner.
  • Flipped preparation (required): Create an account on Trello and go through the activities on https://trello.com/guide/trello-101 DONE
Agile in Education
A number of authors have looked at ways that ideas from agile software development might translate into schools. For example Steve Peha, a technologist and educator in the US, has worked extensively in applying the lessons of agile and lean to the classroom. He writes “We talk a lot in education about creating a culture of learning in our schools. But we don’t have reliable ways of creating this culture. Agile does” (Peha, 2011).
The Agile Manifesto
The Manifesto for Agile Software Development (Beck et al., 2001) was created in 2001 by a group of software development experts who had been exploring new ways of exercising their craft in the late 1990s. The manifesto provides four values and twelve principles to guide the agile software developer. The four values are: 
  • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  • Working software over comprehensive documentation
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  • Responding to change over following a plan
Peha (2011) provides some interesting ideas on how the agile manifesto can be reinterpreted to apply to schools, and how agile techniques might be used in the classroom. 
An agile/lean glossary
There are a lot of terms used this week, so here is a brief glossary of the main ones
  • Lean - an approach from the Japanese car industry that emphasises efficiency in workflow
  • Agile - approach from software development that emphasises being adaptable to change and communication within teams and with customers
  • Kaizan - a process of continuous improvement (from lean manufacturing)
  • Kaikaku - a process of radical change/improvement (from lean manufacturing)
  • Scrum - an agile software development method that emphasises teamwork
  • Stand Up Meeting - a Scrum technique were daily team stand up meetings are held - each team member reports on what they did yesterday, what they will do today, and any obstacles they are facing
  • Sprint - a cycle of activity during a Scrum process - each sprint is the same length and must result in a specific outcome.
  • Kanban - a story board that tracks progress of story cards from to do, doing and done. 
  • WIP  - 'work in progress' - a limit on how many stories can be in 'doing' on a kanban board at any one time
  • Servant Leadership - a leadership theory that is often applied to leading agile teams
  • Situational Leadership - a leadership theory that adapts its styles according to the needs of followers
  • Kata - a term from martial arts that defines a continually repeated exercise
  • Trello - a software tool that allows you to add multiple columns and cards. It can be adapted for many tasks. including creating a kanban board
  • Pull and Push - In lean manufacturing, 'pull' is preferred to 'push' - in 'pull' the tasks are pulled by the workers when they are ready, not pushed at them
  • Flow - The way that tasks flow through a kanban board when pull and WIP limits are used
Kanban
One of the ideas that has been taken from Lean Production by Agile practitioners is Kanban - which means 'visual card' in Japanese. This enables ‘Pull’ and ‘Flow’ (Anderson, 2010).
For an example of how Kanban boards can be used to help children plan, see Princess Kanban. This is on the agileschool blog, which you may find interesting. More recent materials are now on the Agile Classrooms site.
You can ‘Visualise the workflow’ by having e.g. these four columns on the Kanban board:
Learning backlogThings to be learnt nextThings we are learningThings we have learnt
These boards can be done digitally or just on the wall with super sticky post-its. They can be individual or shared with a team. We’ll work today with one that is shared with the whole class. 
User Stories 
In software development and product management user story statements are often written on story cards following the format: As a (role) I want (something) so that (benefit). The idea is to capture what a user does or needs to do as part of his or her job function. It captures the "who", "what" and "why" of a requirement in a simple, concise way, often limited in detail by what can be hand-written on a small piece of paper. However, there is no requirement that all user stories should be written this way. Our 'learning stories' in the sessions will be written in a more unstructured style as they will be more open ended than software requirements.
Stories will be written on the story cards that move across the Kanban board columns. Each one will be a short, simple description of something to be achieved in a short time frame They need to be small and focused enough to be achieved in a short time frame and allow for success to be tested. 
Epics
A story that is too big is known as an ‘epic’ and has to be broken down into smaller stories. ‘Introduce BYOD to the school’ is an epic, and ‘Introduce BYOD to one pilot class’ is still too big. However, ‘Send a survey to families from one class asking if they are willing to provide a device for their child to bring to school’ is a smaller, story-sized step
3 C's
User stories have three critical aspects. We can call these Card, Conversation, and Confirmation. The card is the trigger for a deeper conversation between stakeholders about the solution and takes place over time and is mostly verbal. The confirmation is an acceptance test - how we know when the story is done. (Jeffries, 2001). A good story card will likely end up with the back covered with results of the conversation(s) and confirmation tests.
Todays’ story cards for the first 2 sprints are developed from a forthcoming book chapter “Agile Education, Lean Learning" (in this week's media). You can use this or any other sources today when learning and problem solving. We hole these User Stories guide you towards Meaningful Learning on how Agile and Lean Approaches could help you in your practice.
Trello
Trello is one of the tools that can be used to create Kanban style boards online. It is an easy-to-use, free and visual way to manage your projects and organise anything. Naturally, there are other tools too, but this one seems to be the most popular right now, and amongst teachers and their students too.
For this week's session, each location will have its own Kanban board (see below for links)
Scrum Masters
For the main activity in the session, each team will have a scrum master. The scrum master is the team’s servant leader, who needs to:
  • make sure that just one or two of your team cards are moved in “Things we are learning” at one time
  • write an acceptance test first in the description of the card - so that you know how to justify confirmation and record the outcome of the confirmation to the description before moving the card to “Things we have learnt”
  • record the team’s main conversations as comments
  • be ready for the stand up meeting on time, to share in 1min:
    • What was the Meaningful Learning on How Agile and Lean Approaches Could Help You In Your Practice? (That’s the goal for all team members!)
    • Was the learning confirmed (acceptance test)? What (same or new User Stories) are you going to work with on the next scrum? Any obstacles?
References
Anderson, D.J. (2010). Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business. Blue Hole Press.
Beck et al. (2001). Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Retrieved from http://agilemanifesto.org/
Jeffries, R. (2001). Essential XP: Card, Conversation, Confirmation. Retrieved from http://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/expcardconversationconfirmation/
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

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